OK. Let me just get this straight. If I have a pretty mature mother plant that has been vegetative for about 2 months, I can take cuttings and immediately induce flowering in them?
yep!
If so, doesn't that affect the quality of the bud?
nope!
Or does the plant know to start putting energy toward bud growth after achieving sufficient root mass?
I don't think that cannabis plants give too much consideration to anything. They're a bit brainless, you know.
DNA is a bit like a computer program. When presented with certain conditions, the DNA responds with certain behaviours, pre-programmed by millennia of evolution under certain conditions.
So it happens, cannabis is indigenous to latitudes where there are cold winters. The plant manages living in this sort of climate by producing seeds at the end of the warm parts of the year. The plant itself then dies off, with the next generation sprouting from seed in the following spring.
Cannabis takes its cue for the time of year mainly by the day length, but to a lesser degree from the overall colour or spectrum prominences of the sunlight. In summer, with long days and high sun angles, cannabis plants grow tall, so as to get their flowers up high in the air, which gives a better chance of catching some pollen. When sunlight is hitting the earth's surface at a relatively high angle, the path through the atmosphere is short and very little blue light is filtered out. Lower sun angles through the atmosphere in temperate latitudes in autumn filter out most blue light, making the autumn light appear more red-yellow.
As such, we know that cannabis will grow in a
full flowering habit when presented with a 12 hour day length and will grow
fully vegetatively when given >18h/day light. The growth habit response will be mixed with day lengths in between 12-18h. It doesn't matter whether a plant has had any veg growth when encouraged to flower. If it has had no veg growth, it just doesn't get as tall by the time it is in full flowering habit.
The responses are really quite separate, but as anyone who has had to re-veg a previously flowered plant will tell you, the plant produces some weird growth habits, with mixed vegetative and flowering characters, when the natural annual photoperiod schedule has been defied. Fan leaves with one blade, like an oversized bud leaf, or small clusters of empty seed bracts, like those appearing on a bud, will grow at the nodes on the mainstem when a previously flowered plant goes into 18+h/day light for a few weeks. Flowering female plants whose dark period is frequently interrupted will commonly throw out some male flowers (hermaphrodism) in an attempt to self-pollinate since there is uncertainty about the day/night lengths and it may not have time to wait for pollen from another plant.
Cannabis plants don't get continuous 12/12 days in their indigenous latitudes. Their flowering response is much stronger under our artificial schedule, producing large masses of seed bracts (aka buds) where they normally only need to produce a few.
You can see that the cannabis plant is highly manipulable when you can control the environment. This is exploited to the greatest degree by SoG, where we are actually tailoring the plant through manipulating its natural responses to grow under artificial light. Indoor lighting only can penetrate foliage so deeply (dependent upon light power output), so it makes no sense to grow tall plants indoors. Buds out of the prime range of the light will be thin & fluffy. Even the mighty 1000HPS can only penetrate about 40" from the tip-top (when lamp-leaf spacing is considered)- so your plants should be no taller. Simply by not giving the plant any vegetative cycle lighting after the clones set root and inducing flowering immediately, you get short plants which suit the light penetration.
In SOG, mums and clones are kept in perpetual 24/0 light, meaning they are strongly vegging. It takes about 4 weeks for the veg habit to fully cease, even once put under 12/12 light. This is why they gain any height at all even though they have not had any veg time post setting root. By wk4, they're at their finishing height.
Also, how do you set up the nutrients. Though I haven't started my own op yet, I can assume that fresh clones require little to no nutrient mix at all, right?
That's right. I was at one time using a weak veg nute soln for clones but found that it slowed rooting. I now use only water with 50% grade H2O2 @ 1ml/L, pH adjusted to 5.8 for clones. They don't really need any nutes until they get into the flowering area, when they start on 1400ppm @ 5.8, which they get until harvest.
Thanks for this post. It should be stickied, it's so informative.
No worries, thanks for that. The thread gets so many reads that it kinda stickies itself, though. It's rarely off the top 10.
hey Al I'm running SOG now too maybe check me out...journal is in my sig......
cool, will look later.
Al-
I got the tables set-up/they are true 4'X4'(inside diameter), How many of the 175mm pot should I use?
I have 46 pots under each 1000.
Dr. VonDankenstine
