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
Clean off all the unhealthy leaves and unwanted lower branches.
Photo: Freebie
Step 9. Two days later, take clones from plants in area 1 and 2. The plants in area 4 are topped (the tips taken off to prevent the plant from getting too tall) and only a few branches are left on them while the plants in flowering room 4 are allowed to finish flowering. Light schedules in areas 1 and 2 remain the same (i.e., area one at 12/12 light cycle and area two at 18/6).
Step 10. Twenty-one days later, turn flowering area 4 to a 12/12 light cycle.
Step 11. One day later, transfer rooted clones to area 2.
Step 12. Vegetative plants in area 2 should be grown to approximately 12 inches tall and completely stripped of all available clones—preferably as many as possible. However, leave plenty of viable material to finish flowering.
Step 13. Eleven days later, turn the lights in area 3 to 10 hours on / 14 hours off and significantly lower the ammonium and nitrate nitrogen (nutrient) levels (this process is fully explained later in this book). Eliminate all ammonium nitrate by the end of the growth cycle. (This is the N in the NPK ratio, or the vegetative component in nutrients.)
Be sure to stake your plants at an appropriate time so they are prepared for flowering.
The tool used here is the HT-B2 Tapener Max. It utilizes green gardener’s