Greed and the Sea of Green

The natural tendancy the first time you try to grow your own indoors is to get greedy.  By this I mean you are going to go with more plants than you have room for and your going to grow them as tall as you can.  Big mistakes.

By cramming six plants into an area meant for no more than two, you are stunting the growth of all six plants, guaranteeing you minimal yield from any one plant.

don't crowd your plants

By growing your plants too tall, you run the risk of overgrowing your lights.  The fact is your plants will grow a foot-and-a-half to two feet AFTER you switch to flowering mode (12 hours light, 12 hours dark).  If  your plants are taller than your lights two thing will happen, neither of them good.  You’ll burn your plants where the light come into contact with them and you’ll minimize the yield from the top of the plant, which is where the biggest buds grow. 

Follow up:

 

plants grow into lights

After several rounds of growing, I’ve developed the following procedures.

  • As soon as the plants are showing roots, switch to flowering mode.

first roots showing from clone

  • After plants get to be between 18″ and 24″ tall, bend them sideways so they are growing at right angles to the ground.  You thick string to hold in place.  This is commonly known as the sea of green technique.  What it does is expose lots more plant to the light and you end up with much higher yields.

sea of green

So, don’t get greedy.  Think counter-intuitively and you’ll get bigger harvests with a lot less sweat.

Tagged with:
 

Recent Entries

  • Blogroll

  • Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    *

    You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>