Grow strategy

[acheron11000]

hey guys!
im on my first grow ever. ive got 3 healthy white widow plants going and one is almost a month old. grown from seeds.
i know im going to take clones off of the plants so i wont have a shortage of supply once i get growing.
my question was, should i flower this three week old plant now that way i have smokable product and make time fly while the rest of my babies are growing? or would this be a waste.
i know theres no way for you guys to tell me how this would impact yield or anyhting i just want to know if you would personally do this or i should just wait to harvest until they are all ready and can produce the highest yields that i can make them.
its a soil grow so its sort of slow if that helps out. also i was thinking of going aeroponics for my second grow. thoughts?

 

[Jimmycricket]

Re: grow strategy.

I would not do that myself I would flower them all together.

Soil does not need to be slow. If done right growth will be very fast.

aeroponics clogs easy and is very temperamental

 

[Fuzzy Duck]

Re: grow strategy.

Putting into flower to early in veg my impact total over all yield, inless you are doing SOG (sea of green) with a lot more plants !

Normally soil veg time is aprox is 6 to 8 weeks on average, LST (low stress training) can help increase yield also & one of more easy methods


If you know the sex of plant prior to flowering, i would take a few cuttings mainly the lower branches which under perform & produce pop corn bud for cloning.

Whilst the plants are flowering, clones will be rooting normally takes 10 to 14 days & then veg em intill flowering space is free or crop harvested... rince 'n' repeat (also known as perpetual growing) takes a few months to set up but roughly can expect a harvest every 2 months depending on flowering time. longer for sativa based genetic plants tho...

 

[GigaGrew]

Re: grow strategy.

hi there and welcome to 420 magazine =)

whilst i agree with my brothers above, reduced veg time does indeed equate to less yield. i propose the argument is a little more complex than that. there are growers here that swear by 12/12 from seed including commercial growers..

to get a true 'right' answer you first need to know the question...and the question is 'why am i growing weed'

if its for kudos with buddies, then the sooner you have flowers to show off the better.
if its entirely for your personal ability to maintain your own smoke, then you want a plant to produce it at the first opportunity.

if commercially minded you can still sud divide your calculation further.
if your on a really tight budget whilst trying to expand a business then you can have all the profit margins in the world, but your business will fold if you do not have enough cash flow, on a tight budget you want production as often as possible to increase working capital even at the expense of some increased theoretical improvement on efficiency that is not overly relavant if your too poor to make it to harvest day.

if however your budget is virtually unlimited or not much of a consideration then the theory is to reinvest, meaning delay flowering as long as possible while you focus on replication, flower none that can be used as a mother until you reach whatever critical level of stocks your business plan deems appropriate to convert it into production. IE make mothers and clones until you have enough plants to produce x ouces a day infinatly.

 

[KarlJay]

I've been working on a perpetual grow all this year. I still haven't got the formula right. The biggest issue for me is space. I've run up to 90 plants at one time and that takes quite a bit of space, not to mention lighting.

I started out trying to get 1 harvest per month. I'm now looking into 1 harvest every other month. Generally I pull clones just before the plants go into flower. Flowering works out to about 9 weeks.

You can control the veg time, you really don't have control over the flower time. You can hold plants in veg if you want, when in flower, they are done when nature says they are done.

You also must have at least 2 light cycles. flower/veg and they can't be mixed.

I'm running into issues of having to keep plants in small containers longer than I should.

Here's the steps:

1. clone (10-20 days)
2. small 18 oz cups (2 weeks or so)
3. 5 gallon grow bags for veg (about 5 to 8 weeks)
4. flowering (about 9 weeks)

The reason for the small 18 oz cups is simply space and lighting. 5 gallon 'tall' plastic bags take less room than the wider bags and this saves space.

I'm still working out the timing and hope to have it figured out soon, the constant issues has been when to take clones. I held back 10 plants last time just for pulling clones and I'm still overgrown for an 18 oz cup and have NO room for nearly 60 5 gallon bags in my veg room.

Where it stands now: I pull clones JUST before the plants go into flower. It turns out that even this seems to be a bit too soon. You can solve this by getting more veg lights and going into 2 or 3 gallon bags.

You really have to look at the space and lighting that you have. I have enough for about 60 full sized plants and so I try and get a steady stream of clones to supply this. Any more than that and I'll probably be having light/space issues.

Note: If this is a personal grow, I'd just grow larger plants and get the most harvest you can, then just store the harvest. You can do this while figuring out the timing. I'm finding that flowering is the controlling cycle, because nature controls that NOT you

You can check out my grow journal and see just how I'm doing thing if you want, the link is in my sig below.

 

[GigaGrew]

@ karljay

sounds like a lot of work to me. personally in your scenario i would have 2 grow rooms, one on constant veg and one on 12/12 flowering.
the veg room would have an appropriate amount of perminant mothers and your cloning stations.
the flower room would recieve your rooted clones, no veg time....job done. adjust the size ratio of each room until it harmonises.

big clones are better too.

edit: whats the reason for the bi monthly harvest btw? i like a daily turn around. i suppose it depends on lifestyle, but i love the idea of waking up in the morning, taking a few cuttings, checking my nutes, pulling a few small flowering plants and trim them, dump the waste in a composter and stick the nugs on a tray air drying (move each tray down the line by 1 slot on each day), jar up the last tray and date it then throw it into storage with the rest of the dried and jar'd nugs that are curing.

im just a bit of a freak tho, i like to micro manage hard. when i play games like xcom all my soldiers have to have identical equipment and training, lol.

 

[GigaGrew]

I'm finding that flowering is the controlling cycle, because nature controls that NOT you .

while this is basically true. there are ways to speed up flowering both old and new, everything from traditional victorian early flowering cloches to modern use of infra red e.t.c, and of course please dont forget strain selection and breeding.

i would cry at having to wait 9 weeks for flower. i generally ave to wait 60 days from dropping a seed to snipping a bud.

 

[shottafire]

One thing I have learned is that you need to follow a calendar. I like to take clones at the middle of the month and my transplants are done at the end/beginning of the month. I just got all backed up and i am trying to recover to my normal schedule every 30 days harvest. its work but its worth it to me.

good luck buddy

 

[Rodrigo]

Whilst everything that has been said is correct, my input is that you should wait for a decent veg time. I know that the first ever grow is the worst because it's the one that takes the longest and you can't wait to smoke your own for the first time, it's quite an experience (it was for me anyway, I actually thanked the girls for being so nice to me and don't causing any problems and growing big and healthy, I also apologized for killing them, true story)

I also run a perpetual grow, harvesting roughly every two months (the flowering phase sets the pace, 8-9 weeks). I did it like this; from seed I waited two months until the plant was about 30cm tall before clipping clones and put into the flowering room, I don't know if 30cm is too short but given the spaces I was working with and given that the plant can, and does, almost triple in size when flowering then it's ok for me (the strain was AK-48) after the first two months when the girls were of size then I took some clones and the mothers went to flower, two months after that (4 months from seed) I was harvesting. It was very hard watching them grow and develop everyday and resist the temptation of clipping a branch or two to 'test' the product, but the wait is well worth it. I learned that if a nug is worth clipping early then it's definitely worth leaving it be to finish.
So by harvest time my clones were 2 months old, ready to be cloned again and the 1st gen clones went to flower. And so on and so forth. Now I get the goodies every two months.

So what I'm saying is that I understand (as most of us probably do) how anxious you must be to get your first cycle done quickly but trust me, wait for the proper time.
I've read that a short veg period affects both yield AND quality, I don't really know because I don't rush it but I trust it is true so I'd rather wait a few more weeks and get some primo weed instead of some 'mediocre' weed.

Now that you're a month into veg, you're just in the moment to make a choice for the future, harvest every 2 months or every month, tough choice, right?
If you want to harvest every month then take some clones today, in a month your mothers will be ready to flower (they'll be 2 months old) and the clones you took will be 1 month old, you clones those and in a month the mothers will be 1 month into flowering, the first gen clones will be 2 months old and should go into flowering, and the second gen clones will be one month old, ready to be cloned again and keep the cycle going so once a month you will have to harvest, put new plants into the flowering, and clone. May sound complicated but it's the same as doing it every two months, think of it as having 2 grow ops together one month apart from one another.

The choice is your, my final advice is again wait, don't rush it.

Good luck!

 

[GigaGrew]

thought i would chuck in a completed journal where the guy doesnt use any veg time =)

1000 Watt 2L Hempy Perpetual SOG

 

[KarlJay]

@Gigabane The once a month was just pulled out of a hat, no real reason.

I do have 2 full size rooms setup for this, but I hold the veg until the plants are in the 4' Plus range because they really didn't grow very much in flower.

For some reason, I'm guessing the strain, they've never come close to 2x the size once put into flower.

Flowering time, I too was surprised that it took as long as it did. Again, I figured it was strain related as I seem to be on target with most other factors (light type, amount of light, distance to plants, nutes, etc...)

However, I am a noob, so I could be wrong and I do know that my temps tend too high but I'm working on that.


I do like the idea of having perm mother plants, I should look into that. I'm pulling 27 clones in each batch and so a few mother plants would stop the problem of not having plants ready to clone from.

 

[GigaGrew]

perminant mothers are a much more efficient way to grow. also a lot of breeder/cloners can find it a huge benefit.
quite often when crossbreeding you may get a plant that expresses the traits you desire, but it may be many generations before you manage to stabilise those traits, using a mother to make clones is a way of infinatly propagating those traits for mass production long before you stabilise due to clones being identical to mom.

also a large mother can give off large clones regularly without really slowing down its growth too much. generally, the bigger the mothers, the bigger the operation you can have =)

"@Gigabane The once a month was just pulled out of a hat, no real reason."
frequency of harvest is entirely the perview of the grower and the strain, you get to choose for example with a 12 week strain to harvest anywhere from once per day to once per season, its 'just a matter of organisation' as sun tzu would say