Install the rooted clones in the vegetative room for 14 days.
7. On day 12, induce vegetative plants into flowering (with 12 hours of light and 12 hours of complete darkness).
8. Two days later (day 14), take clones from new flowering plants.
9. Move new flowering plants into the flowering room. (The original donor plants will by now have already finished, so the room will be empty.)
10. After approximately 46 to 53 days into the flowering stage, turn the lights to 10 or 11 hours of light, eliminate CO2, and slightly increase the potassium and phosphorus levels.
11. Eliminate ammonium nitrogen and dramatically decrease nitrate nitrogen or eliminate entirely.
Steps 10 and 11 sound complicated, but they basically have to do with aiding the flowering plants to finish in approximately 50 days, allowing you to install the vegetative plants in the flowering room sooner, thus allowing the installation of clones and the beginning of the process again. They are covered later in this book.
No schedule is set in stone; it is flexible and you must refine it. If you clone and it takes 15 days for them to root, then hold them for 21 days, and vegetate for 14 days; that equals 50 days of vegetative growth and allows the flowering plants to finish in approximately 50 to 55 days. You must experiment and practice to achieve a perfect symbiotic rotation. All the while, make sure you’re harvesting your buds at peak potency, and not before.
The same rotation cycle can be achieved by using mother plants. Simply follow the same principles, except take clones from mother plants instead of the vegetative plants. It can sometimes be difficult to get large numbers of clones rapidly from small numbers of mother plants, so it makes more sense to simply clone from the vegetative plants (unless, again, you are only growing a small number of plants with limited space).
As stated above, it is necessary to refine the variables and understand the limitations of your chosen cultivar. Working backwards, examine the flowering cycle length. Most cannabis indica and cannabis indica / sativa hybrids finish flowering in approximately 60 days. But, as explained in the cloning section of this book, you can induce flowering in your vegetative plants two days before you clone. You can run lights for ten or 11 hours a day during the last one or one-and-a-half weeks of flowering. Both practices are meant to shorten the flowering cycle. Finishing these plants earlier means being able to induce the vegetative plants into flowering sooner, thus enabling the clones to be transferred to the vegetative room earlier.
After clones have been rooted and installed in the vegetative room, they will grow for approximately seven to ten days (depending again on genetics / cultivar and environmental conditions). On day seven, or whenever they are approximately 8 inches tall, strip off all the lower foliage except the top four leaf and branch sets. If they are not approximately 8 inches tall, wait and then strip them. Four to seven days later, induce flowering two days before taking the next batch of clones—again, shortening the vegetative cycle.
If the vegetative cycle must be lengthened, simply leave them in that stage longer. The clone stage is difficult to manipulate—in this situation you do not want more clones, faster! Because you will be waiting 50 to 60 days for the flowering stage to finish, you want them fast, but also at the exact right time. To achieve this goal, you must be able to hold clones in a form of suspended animation, in perfect health in every way, without them stretching (growing too tall), stalling, or becoming unhealthy. The result is that you will have shortened the flowering cycle to approximately 50 days. If the vegetative cycle is maintained for optimal health, stature, and vigor, plants will be 12 to 14 inches tall, finishing at approximately 24–36 inches tall after flowering.
Tall plants on the outer edges and short plants in the middle guarantee that all plants receive maximum light.
Photo: Andre Grossman
The cannabis plant is basically a weed and it will grow almost anywhere. The key trick is to maximize its full potential, to make its yield the greatest possible, with the most flavor and highest THC content.
There are many small- and medium-sized hydroponic, aeroponic, and Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) systems on the market today—some good and some bad. I maintain that simplicity is best for the novice, and recommend an organic soil or soilless mix method of cultivation until you familiarize yourself with the equipment and understand what you are doing. Then, after you completely understand the basic principles of plant cultivation, cloning, vegetative, flowering, and symbiotic rotation, you can progress to one of the units for sale, or even build your own.
Remember, when constructing the cultivation environment, you must consider how difficult it will be to eliminate in a hurry. Do not create a nightmare for yourself. Construct your systems and chambers as if you might have to tear them down and get rid of them as fast as possible. Unnecessary high-tech gadgets can be fun, but too many of them become a quagmire of chaos. Keep it simple: old school, low tech, with as few moving parts as possible, and nothing to break.
Construction Examples
Option 1
400-watt light for the vegetative chamber.
6 600-watt lights in the flowering chamber.
8 fluorescent lights for the cloning chamber.
Option 2
2 600-watt lights for a larger vegetative chamber.
6 fluorescent lights for the cloning chamber.
8 1,000-watt light in the flowering chamber.
Option 3
