does 48 to 36 hours of darkness really work?

personally i dont see a difference. ive done 1 days darkness and 3 days darkness. id rather let the buds soak up the light for the remaining days.

yea i did it the first time i grew and didnt see a deferince in my plants,...i 'am about to harvest my new crop and i;am going to just cut my skunk down tonight it will be 50 days of flowering, and i still have 3 slh plants going 1 will be an 8 weeker and 1 will go nine,and the last one has to be a pure sativia dominate phenotype because all the trichomes are still clear and all the hairs are white...a very lemony smell,i think it has more lemon skunk in it than the other 2 phenotypes...

I can't find the links I had when I posted about this before. But the only credible study done on this claims there was a significant increase in THC and resin. Only to provide a disclaimer from the director stating that in fact the results were inconclusive later at the bottom of the page. Otherwise I believe those who insist it makes a difference are experiencing more of a placebo effect from their strategy. It all reminds me of the early days when some growers swore splitting the main stem and putting cocaine in the split weeks before, and then boiling the roots at harvest increased potency. These people really beleived it worked and claimed all sorts of plausible sounding proof to the effect. Then there was the Hops scion thing. With the idea you could graft a Hops top on a cannabis main stem, technically getting around the law. The belief was the Hops upper portion would begin to produce THC, but technically be still a Hops plant so cops couldn't bust you. Though quite difficult to do, hops can be grafted to a cannabis main stem. But it doesn't remotely produce THC as a result. We can laugh at this stuff today, but back then these folks were serious.

I've done 48 hours of darkness and none whatsoever and I can say the dark period makes your buds frostier.

Originally Posted by bullwinkle60

I've done 48 hours of darkness and none whatsoever and I can say the dark period makes your buds frostier.

Thing is others have done side-by-side comparisons with control groups of cloned plants (genetically identical) and found that the only reason the buds looked and in fact were frostier and heavier was the added 3 or 4 days before cropping, lights on or not. One would have to weigh out buds that seemed frostier in a controlled setting by comparison to determine if what seemed frostier actually translates into heavier or more resin to back up the assumption. The placebo effect can fool you thoroughly, much akin to a subject under hypnosis. So it requires far more than the buds looked or seemed frostier. Not meaning to dis your efforts, but too many who've done exacting comparisons repeatedly over successive crops say otherwise. Even the Guru of Ganga, Ed Rosenthal calims an extended darkness prior to harvest has no effect worth attempting.

Anyone have a can opener for this big ole can of worms I have?

Seriously though. You might as well be asking if flushing makes a difference. You're going to get all sorts of answers. try it and make your own decisions as the ones your about to get are all gonna conflict. (Just a prediction)

Originally Posted by srg.bigbud

some people say it works and some says it doesnt work....i read where it only works on certain strains. what is everyone's opion.

NO.waste of time.

Amaximus-

But the numbers tip heavily on both issues in favor of just following what's happened in Nature for thousands of years. Nutes get depleted in the ground to zilch by harvest, so feeding up till the day of harvest is pointless. And there's no place on earth, ever, where plants experience several days of darkness. So when you tweak what happens in Nature so far out of the ballpark, it invariably amounts to a whole lot of placebo effect and nothing else. Some just are dying so much to make some high tech breakthrough or effect the genetics in surreal ways to get off the charts results they're willing to con themselves it actually works. No hard nosed scientific evidence has been able to support the idea extended darkness has any such effect. And, just like some are more easily hypnotized than others, some are more susceptible to being influenced by the placebo effect than others.