there are many ways to skin a cat.
Not when you are dealing with proven facts and if you want the best results possible.
People are free to believe whatever they want to believe. You can believe the world is flat and the moon is made of blue cheese if you want ... but when you start telling other people things like that as if they are facts ... that is just plain wrong and it should not be done.
Sites like this are supposed to be for learning facts about the very best way to grow, they are supposed to be educational, and not debating societies where people discuss, or argue, what they prefer to believe rather than believe proven facts.
Cannabis plants are not really all that different from other plants, other maybe than their are tougher than most plants and they produce cannabinoids that will get a person high. Just like other plants they perform certain functions and when things happen to them or are done to them they will react in the very same ways.
As much as growers who totally lack any true botanical education want and need and love to believe that cannabis plants somehow magically and mystically exist outside the realm of horticultural science and that proven facts, even proven facts that were found while researching cannabis plants, do not in any way apply to them, they are incorrect.
As much as many growers want and need and love to believe that anything and everything new is always better than something older, that older equates to out of date, out of touch, as being inferior, there is no expiration date on scientifically proven facts. Just because something was not thought up yesterday or last month or in the last year or two does not make it any less valid, any less factual than it was on the day it was proven to be factual.
No matter how much they love to believe that someone fiddling around in their basement or store room or closet or spare room or garage or in a cabinet or a PC case or a greenhouse or their backyard happened to stumble across something that highly educated people whose life work it is to research plants, including some whose research specializes in cannabis plants, somehow managed to miss ... it just doesn't happen. It is a myth just as their supposed amazing findings and reasons they claim for them are myths.
Many growers share something in common. They are desperate and they are gullible. They are desperate to find a way to squeeze even just a few more grams from what they grow and to squeeze even just a tiny bit more potency from that they grow and that makes them gullible. It makes them open to every crackpot claim and snake oil salesman pitch about how some 'new' growing method or some product works like a miracle and is the greatest thing since sliced bread .. or sex maybe.
If growers would attend horticulture classes at their local college or Jr. college, if they are offered, and then apply what they learn there to their cannabis growing, their success rate would go way up, the number of problems they would have to deal with would go way down and the quality of what they grow would go up and their yields would go way up.
But for some reason many growers are education phobic. Education and them mix together about as well as a cobra and a mongoose.
Someone comes along who actually knows what they are talking about and offers others very good advice, and they reject it, but then some little clown shoe who hardly knows enough to be capable of growing fungus between his toes tells them some incredibly wild fanciful absurdity and they instantly accept it, they are on it faster than a duck on a June bug .. and then they parrot it over and over and over again as if it is a fact.
Each time that is done someone makes the critical error of believing them and then they pay the price, then they suffer the consequences, their learning curve goes flat-line.
Sites like this should be storehouses of knowledge and educational sites, but sadly most are universities of ignorance where myths and urban legends and misconceptions and inaccuracies and half-truths and old hippie folklore and fads and voodoo growing techniques spread from person to person like a plague and the infected make their best attempt to defend their absurdities against proven facts, and never give in and never admit that they are wrong.
I find that to be sad, shameful and at times flat out disheartening. When I see someone who needs help, who needs good solid factual advice, and they receive, say, 20 replies and among the 20 there are only 2 replies that are accurate, but because of the preponderance of inaccurate replies the person who needs help goes with the inaccurate replies, simply because they figure since more people say it's this way or that way, then they must be right, it sometimes makes me think growers would be much better off if sites like this were never created. They would be much better off purchasing a few good growing books and Googling for proven true facts and taking a course or two than taking the inane advice that many on sites like this dispense.
