phxazcraig
- 543
- 93
I've been trying something my girlfriend suggested after my last harvest - cut the buds, but leave the rest of the plant in the grow tent, to fill out the tiny, albino buds that were growing beneath the canopy.
It's working, to some extent. This is just a concept and progress report. My goal is to get a bit more yield off my infrequent indoor grows.
So here's the deal. I tend to let my plants grow 'bushy', with a lot of leaf not trimmed off and pretty tall plants. I've harvested the top 3 feet of my 6 foot plants (4 of them in a 4x4 grow tent), and I got decent crop off them (well over a pound). But I had lots of tiny buds in the bottom 3 feet of the plants. I decided to just keep watering and feeding them, leave the lights on 12 hours/day, and see what happens over the next few weeks. In my last crop I left the lower buds for 2 weeks, and they fattened a bit and gained some color.
In this (my 4th) crop, I had to harvest a bit earlier than desired because I was heading out of the country on a trip for two weeks. My girlfriend stayed behind, but only to shut things down if there was a leak, not to take care of the plants. I had been watering every 2 hours in a drain-to-waste coco coir system. With nothing to lose here, I just took the drain hose and stuck it into the 30 gallon watering source reservoir. I knew the nutes would be used up, waste accumulated, and pH dropped, but my only goal was that the plants be alive when I got home. Sure enough, came back to pH 5.6 (down from 6) and sickly plants - but live plants. I had harvested a week before I left in order to have time to dry the crop sufficiently before traveling.
That was 9 days ago. I quickly dumped the water and replaced it, using a mid-flower nutrient schedule from GH. The health of the plants started to improve immediately, and the buds started growing again.,
Yesterday the largest of the plants broke out with an obvious new shoot - leaves and all. Not just a bud. Overall, all 4 plants have put a lot of bud weight on, and there is new growth in all the buds. Given that I would otherwise have cut down and thrown away the plants a month ago, this all looks good to me. I suspect I'll get over an ounce of bud from each plant, which is worth it to me.
Unlike the earlier part of the grow, which was essentially the same as my last grow as documented here in 'Explosive Growth in Coco Coir', I let convenience rule for this experiment, No more collecting 11-12 gallons of RO water in order to mix up a new batch of nutes. Now I just filled up buckets with tap water, mixed in nutes and dumped it into the tank after getting pH down to 6 or so.
I think I'll let this go on another couple of weeks before harvesting again. Seems an easy way to increase yields if only doing about 1 crop a year.
It's working, to some extent. This is just a concept and progress report. My goal is to get a bit more yield off my infrequent indoor grows.
So here's the deal. I tend to let my plants grow 'bushy', with a lot of leaf not trimmed off and pretty tall plants. I've harvested the top 3 feet of my 6 foot plants (4 of them in a 4x4 grow tent), and I got decent crop off them (well over a pound). But I had lots of tiny buds in the bottom 3 feet of the plants. I decided to just keep watering and feeding them, leave the lights on 12 hours/day, and see what happens over the next few weeks. In my last crop I left the lower buds for 2 weeks, and they fattened a bit and gained some color.
In this (my 4th) crop, I had to harvest a bit earlier than desired because I was heading out of the country on a trip for two weeks. My girlfriend stayed behind, but only to shut things down if there was a leak, not to take care of the plants. I had been watering every 2 hours in a drain-to-waste coco coir system. With nothing to lose here, I just took the drain hose and stuck it into the 30 gallon watering source reservoir. I knew the nutes would be used up, waste accumulated, and pH dropped, but my only goal was that the plants be alive when I got home. Sure enough, came back to pH 5.6 (down from 6) and sickly plants - but live plants. I had harvested a week before I left in order to have time to dry the crop sufficiently before traveling.
That was 9 days ago. I quickly dumped the water and replaced it, using a mid-flower nutrient schedule from GH. The health of the plants started to improve immediately, and the buds started growing again.,
Yesterday the largest of the plants broke out with an obvious new shoot - leaves and all. Not just a bud. Overall, all 4 plants have put a lot of bud weight on, and there is new growth in all the buds. Given that I would otherwise have cut down and thrown away the plants a month ago, this all looks good to me. I suspect I'll get over an ounce of bud from each plant, which is worth it to me.
Unlike the earlier part of the grow, which was essentially the same as my last grow as documented here in 'Explosive Growth in Coco Coir', I let convenience rule for this experiment, No more collecting 11-12 gallons of RO water in order to mix up a new batch of nutes. Now I just filled up buckets with tap water, mixed in nutes and dumped it into the tank after getting pH down to 6 or so.
I think I'll let this go on another couple of weeks before harvesting again. Seems an easy way to increase yields if only doing about 1 crop a year.