Problems 3 Weeks till harvest

Hey any comments would be appreciated. I had one of those large tubs you buy from walmart to store things in and they also come with a lid. It probably would take a little over 3 5 gallon buckets of soil mix to fill tub. I had 5 plants growing in this tub that I vegged for about 10 weeks and then forced flowering by changing light cycle with timer. I am pretty confident I had too many in the same tub however they did excellent and were at 3 feet when I turned them. In the beginning weeks of flower everything went well. I used typical N,P,K nutes when watering and followed schedule on bottles for amounts. 3 weeks before scheduled time to harvest I noticed I was losing leaves after they turned yellow however I still had new growth. well in the end it seemed as if the buds would not mature to the extent you normally see. They were not as dense and seemed stunted. Could this have been due to the roots losing space to grow as tub was not enough space for final growth spurt of roots? This is second batch and they did great compared to my first grow but just wanted some constructive critisism please. Thanks for all your past and future help guys.

it just dosn't seem like a good idea. 1 plant 1 pot

In something that large, you can grow more than one plant. The only reason I would not grow like that is with seeds. If you have to yank a male out later, and it's roots are entwined with female plants, your going to be hating life. You could just chop the male at soil level, but then you have decaying root mass in the soil of the other plants. It's not good.

3 weeks til harvest, it's common for the plant to begin using up nitrogen stored in lower leaves. The plant is using up some serious nutes in the last couple of weeks and she gets most of them from her lower growth. The phenomenon works it's way up the plant to the tips.

It depends on a lot of things, if the soil line is fairly shallow, could cause problems. If there's a lot of bone dry spots in the soil, that will always cause problems, gotta make sure the moisture is evenly distributed. At this point, rought it it, be ready to chop early if they've lost too many leaves, and don't repeat this the next time. As mentioned above, one plant per container.

1 plant 1 pot. work smarter not harder

what kinda lights are you useing? buds fatten a bunch the last couple of weeks.