you must skip a vegetative cycle, meaning your flowering sativa plants won’t be finished for (probably) 12 weeks or more, so you will have a quandary! By skipping a vegetative cycle the next cycle of vegetative plants and clones will be ready when you need them.
While you are waiting for the flowering plants to finish, your vegetative plants will grow too tall and lanky. The clones will quickly root and deteriorate because of overcrowding and lack of proper lighting, causing internodal (the space between the branches) stretching or slow growth development, and stunting.
This Blueberry Haze is an example of a high-yielding sativa. It eventually produced two pounds of bud.
Photo: Mel Frank
Juicy Fruit in full flower. This wonderful cultivar derives its name from its unique smell and taste. She is sativa dominant.
Photo: Andre Grossman
The way to overcome this situation is to eliminate your vegetative plants after you’ve taken clones. Wait for clones to root, then install them in the vegetative room. By eliminating the previous vegetative cycle, you have allowed the slow flowering sativa to finish flowering, but still have vegetative plants and clones ready exactly when you want them. Essentially, you are skipping a cycle to wait for the sativa to finish flowering.
MIRV from Trichome Technologies is a truly fantastic indica-sativa hybrid. It is a highly stable, and very resinous cultivar.
Ultra Violet bud from Trichome Tech has Purple Kush in its lineage. It has a 60 day flowering period.
Washington, named after America’s first president, is an indica-sativa hybrid stabilized and backcrossed to perfection by Trichome Tech.
Photos: Andre Grossman
Sun-grown cannabis.
Photo: K
Cannabis indica and cannabis indica / sativa hybrids are perfect adaptations, and so adapt to a symbiotic rotation flawlessly. Starting from seed or clone, you will grow your plants to approximately 10 to 12 inches tall, depending on your chosen genetics / cultivar and internodal length. The plants will have many branches available for clones. Strip the donor plants of all available clones and place donor plants in the flowering room. Clones can take from 7 to 21 days to root depending on environmental conditions and genetics / cultivar. Ideally, you want the plants to finish at approximately 24 to 36 inches tall, so you will induce flowering when plants are approximately 12 to 18 inches tall. So, if you take clones (which take 14 days) and you then vegetate for 14 days, you will have both ready before your other plants have finished flowering. This would create a problem.
Pruning the bottom branches for rotation garden.
Photo: Mel Frank
This is an adaptation of Trichome Technologies’ schedule for starting new facilities. In this scenario, the grower needs four rooms / chambers / areas: one for clones, one for vegetation, and two rotating flowering areas. Again:
Area 1: Clone area
Area 2: Vegetative area
Area 3: Flowering area
Area 4: Flowering area
(Area 3 and 4 are also used for vegetative growth and for producing more available clone material.)
The rooms / chambers / areas can be a closet or part of a room sectioned off, whatever you like. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them simply “areas” from now on.
Step 1. Start with eight plants from the same cultivar. Grow plants to approximately 12 inches tall and completely strip off any clones. (This process can yield about six to eight clones per plant; about 48–56 total.) Allow 14 days to root each clone.
Step 2. After the clones have rooted thoroughly, 14 days later, install the rooted clones into the area 2 vegetative areas with 18 hours of light.
Step 3. Seven days after installation of the clones, clean plants up. All lower leaves and vegetation should be removed to allow the plants to concentrate all available energy into developing the next batch of available clones. Any unhealthy leaves should be removed. Only healthy clone stock is left on the 6- to 8-inch plants. All healthy upper vegetation and leaves are left on intact.
Step 4. Twenty-two days later, again strip and remove all available clones and eliminate the donors. (This time, you could get up to 400 clones from 64 plants.) Fifty percent of these will later be eliminated; only the best are kept and installed into the vegetation area.
Step 5. Move the remaining half of the plants into the area 2 vegetative room with 18 hours of light. Take only the best plants, and dispose of the other half. This ensures that you only grow the best plants.
Step 6. Clean off all the unhealthy leaves and unwanted lower branches, as in Step 3 above.
Step 7. Twelve days later, transfer vegetative plants to the stage three flowering areas. Put the best one-quarter of the best plants in each room. Keep the lights on at the 18-hour cycle. Dispose of the leftover half of the plants. (In one example, 50 plants were placed in each flowering room and 100 plants were discarded.)
Step 8. Two days later, turn flower area one into a 12/12 light cycle. Area 2 remains 18/6.
In this photo you can clearly see two different stages of plant development.
Photo: Freebie
