[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]Claudan wrote:
how can i tell a female from a male db
and would you only recommend female clones?[/quote]
Recommend?
Yes, because otherwise you only get lots and lots of seeds.
Get some feminized seeds, make mother plants, cut clones, …, profit. [/quote]
I may be way behind the times but I think the way to grow for your personal use is to get some quality seeds and grow 4-5 plants from them. When you start cutting the light hours or, if growing outside, when the days start getting shorter, watch the plants closely for flowering and cut out any males at the 1st sign of a flower.
My belief is plants grown from cuttings grow way slower than from seeds plus you have to keep their light hours high all the time so they don’t go to flower until they’ve grown large enough. Cuttings would also be a lot of work for the casual grower growing for their personal use. If you want to maintain a line from a great plant via cuttings you will have to take cuttings from all your plants because you won’t know which ones will be the good ones until they’ve gone to flower and I don’t think you can get cuttings to grow after they’ve started to flower.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe DBC will come on here and say you can take cuttings from a flowering plant, blast it with nitrogen and 24 hours of light and it will grow. I don’t think most people want to mess with that though. The easiest is probably to grow enough seeds to make sure you will get at least one female, cut out males as they appear, and grow from quality stock. Maybe that feminized seed thing Orion mentioned would be worth while.[/quote]
You are right, seedlings do way better than clones.
However, over here, clones are legal, as are seeds, so you just put 30 on a square meter and off you go.
No way I am paying for inferior shit if I can do it ten times better.[/quote]
Seeds only represent a clear improvement over clones if you plan on growing outdoors for years at a time. Seeds are grown outdoors and take about a month or so longer than clones to grow. The only real advantage they offer is if you plan on growing outdoors for years at a time, because they develop a stronger, deeper root system that leads to greater and greater yields each year.
However, that is really the only advantage, and it’s a moot point if you have to grow indoors. Growing indoors is more expensive, but it also lessens the risks of pests, theft, detection, etc.
A clone will grow at about the same speed as a seed, and the yields are comparable if it’s a first-time seed. But if you don’t cut the stalk down and dig the thing up, the plant from seeds will grow back stronger the next year. But the advantage with clones is that you don’t have to wait until next year. A lot of people don’t want a huge harvest all at once, like what they would get from seeds.
Trust me, it’s a fucking bitch to have trim and manicure several plants’ worth of weed, especially if you started growing early in the spring and now have a pound or so (after curing) to get through. Add in the constant race against mold developing, and it’s not a fun time of year. Plus, the fact is that getting rid of all the trimmings is a waste since you can boil them all up in olive oil and get fucking wasted from an ounce of extra virgin weed/olive oil.
With clones, you can grow all year and have a constant, but much more manageable, harvest to deal with. You can stagger things so that every month or so you’re ending up with a few ounces. That makes it easier to store, trim, sell off if need be (it’s pretty tough to find someone who wants a couple pounds compared to finding a few people looking for an ounce).
Clones are a little bit more work, a little bit more money, and well worth all of it. Even if you get super high-quality seeds, when growing outdoors there are all sorts of variables at play that can negate that quality. Nothing is worse than spending all spring, summer and fall growing a few humungous plants, and then you find that you’re stuck with a bunch of garbage and have to wait until next year to start everything all over again. With clones, you don’t have to wait as long to get some buds, and if you fuck something up along the way, you just get more clones and start over. And starting over means saving at least a couple months. [/quote]
Two weeks ago I would have agreed with you, but we tried out some new ideas with seedlings and got around 950g under one 600hps lamp with seedlings, with only 9 on a square meter and no vegetative growth.
So, I am questioning conventional wisdom a bit at this point. [/quote]
I should have prefaced all of this by pointing out that I am referring strictly to people who are casual growers, people who grow primarily for themselves and maybe to make a little extra money on the side. I would assume that someone who tried out some new ideas has way more experience and knowledge than the casual grower.
Besides, to get back to my original point, conventional wisdom says that no product that is easy to produce will make money from tax revenue if the taxes themselves provide the incentive to produce it on one’s own.[/quote]
Ya well, its not magic.
The key idea was the plants compete for light but not for soil.
There is no root competition.
So, instead of 30 pots with 3 liters of substrate, have 9 that effectively have 90 liters of substrate.
Add CO2 and seedlings and those things explode.
Wait no, there is also the thing that the more CO2, the more light and heat and EC they tolerate, except when it comes to the roots, because 30° celsius is already too much while the plants tolerate more.
Gotta cool from below.
But not too much.