Working with plant limits

[AKgramma]

Being a new grower within the new laws, I am limited to 3 flowering and 3 in veg. How does one get to that point before the plants show sex? Do I have to close my eyes and terminate 2 (I have 8 in veg) without knowing if they are male or female?

Also, when I take clones, this automatically puts me above the limit. I want a perpetual grow, and I think I can get there by eventually cloning a mother. But right now, there are a few too many juveniles, including a number of unrooted clones.

What kind of strategies can I use to stay legal? I live in small place in the city, so having an off-property grow is out of the question.

 

[Weaselcracker]

If you buy feminized seed then you can grow with- well, the obvious results. And then grow one or two plants with four or five clones- should be very workable. As for right now- I suppose the only option is to kill off some of the weaker ones, if you don't want to bend the rules a bit. People talk of buying clones from dispensaries, which is not an option for me, but maybe for you?

 

[AKgramma]

LOL! I don't plan to buy any more seeds, when it becomes fully legal to do so! Plan to breed my own or take clones off a single mother. (depends on how successful my cloning techniques are)

My first mistake was planting all 10 seeds we got from the "Club" (for a "donation). I ended up with a 90% emergence rate. I should have planted only half of them. So now I have to get through having too many at the start. Have already terminated the runt, but everyone else is happily growing and responding well to the training.

Second mistake was taking the clones and forgetting to mark which plant each came from. I was so intent on getting the clones properly planted, it totally slipped my mind. (old mind, full of holes) By the time those root, I'll already have 3 plants under flower. Maybe one or more of them will be males, and I'll be closer to legal. ;-)

BTW, while the new MJ governance committee figures out how to regulate the herb, there is some pressure from the the cannibus community to raise the plant limit for personal home/medical use. So they are still ironing out the rules. What's on the books, however, is pretty restrictive. Just trying to comply till they decide on the regs.

It's an interesting time, for sure!

So, which is better, breeding a pair and storing all the seed till I need it, or just cloning to keep a perpetual grow, a very TINY perpetual grow?

 

[Light Addict]

Also look into re vegging your plants?? maybe this would aid some in keeping things going with less numbers

 

[Weaselcracker]

LOL! I don't plan to buy any more seeds, when it becomes fully legal to do so

I didn't quite understand the first part (??) well- I understood you don't want to buy seeds...
Ok, I do it both ways. A lot of my seeds came from a couple times I was away for a bit and males 'snuck in' and pollinated the girls before I noticed. Ie- I failed to spot a male in time. It's been great having those seeds, but you can expect to find a lot of variation among the plants that grow out of those seeds. It's sort of hit and miss what you get. You can end up with a bunch different phenotypes, and a lot of them won't be as good as the original female- which leads you down the road of wanting to - grow a bunch and clone the best one.
Cloning is the only way (besides revegging) to preserve the exact plant you like best. It's pretty easy generally speaking.

So- cloning and growing from seed are not quite the same thing. I grow seeds for backup purposes in case my clones fail, or I grow seeds that I bought to try new strains. I clone the new strains and once I know which plants I want to keep growing- just grow from clones of my favorites.
I also have a couple plants revegging that I failed to clone originally, flowered, harvested,and liked too much to lose. It takes at least a few weeks for a plant to reveg after flowering, to the point of starting to veg normally again, and then it grows very bushy.
Having a perpetual grow is great. They keep on growing and there's always more coming. You lose that sense of impatience waiting for harvest when you can be harvesting nearly all the time if you want to.

 

[Fuzzy Duck]

Learn the time it takes for said strain or seed stock to show sex

Regular seed stock take about 6 to 10 weeks to show sex & could be slightly longer.

Feminized seed stock take about 5 to 8 weeks on average.


This is all under a normal veg cycle of lighting regime...


A mother plant will display pre flowers if kept & that would include clones taken from her !

Mmm seems a pretty strange law if a plant with pre flowers is classed as flowering tho.



Might have to work with limits tho e.g last few weeks of flowering sow fresh seed etc rince 'n' repeat so ya got an over lap of vegging plants and flowering plants.

Flowering time of strain and expected veg time to pre flowering time per strain needs to be dialed in tho.

 

[AKgramma]

Great options, THANK YOU! The re-vegging idea COULD work after having mainlined, but I will lose the symmetrical structure required for equal colas.

Fuzzy Duck: TY for the timelines! I wasn't aware how much longer it's going to take to preflower, so it looks like I'm stuck with too many plants until the clones root (to test under 12/12), or to wait for the Purple Mazar to preflower. It's going to be a race to see which happens first. I'm just 37 days from seed, having topped them twice and slowly defoliating the stem below the first topping.

I'm taking lots of notes!

 

[Weaselcracker]

I've noticed. it seems to me anyway, that the topping and training slows down the preflowering too. Plants I had been torturing for three months or more didn't show any preflowering till I just let them run for a week or two