and other questions...
What's a soil mix or soil you would use for this? The clones are already rooted in a nice potting soil. I want to root them into these new pots and grow them a little bigger. Then either out to the planter boxes or grown into a mother. How do you recommend growing a clone into a mother? What light is good for a mother indoors? Can you put a plant outside during the day then under the T12s at night with no bad effect? How can I gradually lower the light cycle if my clones are at 18/6 and it is more like 13/11 outside so they don't freak? Can I change it an hour lower every two days perhaps?
Thanks!
Whoa, sister, all these questions! Let's hit 'em one at a time, k?
For soil, I really like
Gardener & Bloom's Blue Ribbon potting soil mix. If you want to lighten it up further, I like rice hulls over perlite all day long, however, they can be more difficult to find as my local feed shop doesn't always have them in (I use the inexpensive animal bedding hulls).
I would grow a clone out into a mother using the cheapest lighting possible, that being fluorescent. If you have T12s, then use those with a good mix of daylight bulbs and a couple of warm bulbs.
If you want to put a plant outside, just be sure it's well hardened off to the sunlight. Starting out under dappled shade works great, if you don't have that then some shadecloth will work well for you.
You don't change the photoperiod for putting clones out, you match it to the day you plan on putting them out
and then you interrupt the dark phase. I'm going to link you to a tool I've used over the years, it's called the daylight explorer tool. You need to know your approximate latitude, and if you know your exact lat even better. From here let me explain what I do for mine.
So, let's say I want to put my plants out on May 15. Using the handy dandy
Daylight Explorer Tool, along with knowing my latitude (input your address here: ), I know that on that day the day will be 14.1hrs long. Using a timer I match that as closely as I can (I use a cheap timer from Walmart that gives me 15min increments). With me so far?
From there I set the main daylight phase to, let's say 14hrs just to keep it simple, k? THAT's your daylight phase. Now, what you want to do to keep the clones in a vegetative growing status is to interrupt the dark phase, because it is by sufficiently long periods of dark that photoperiodic plants such as cannabis 'know' to switch growth phase from vegetative to regenerative (flowering, sexual).
My schedule would look like this:
ON: 6:00am
OFF: 8:00pm
ON: 10:00pm
OFF: 12:00pm
ON: 1:00am
OFF: 3:00am
I like to use 2hr interruptions because then I know for sure nothing will flip back into flower unless it's root bound. But you can use 1hr interruptions. The goal is to keep the lighting phase closely matching the veg photoperiod while simultaneously "telling" the plant that it's not time to flower yet. You're using 18/6, so you want to add 4hrs of light, DURING the dark phase. I'm not 100% sure it
has to be matched in this manner, in other words, it may work perfectly well by interrupting only a total of two hours during the dark phase. But, this is pretty close to what I do. Works GREAT with clones, DON'T do this to seedlings!
