You do not need to give your plants 24-36 hours of darkness when you switch from an 18/6 to 12/12 light cycle, of from any vegging light cycle to a flowering light cycle. It is not a plus in any way. Claims like that are about equally true that if you go swimming in less than an hour after eating you will suffer cramps and drown.
While it might not be of much help to you I grew Big Buddha’s Blue Cheese a while back and I did notice a thing or two. The two varieties sharing the same strain name will have some similarities in that the same Big Buddha Cheese genetics was used for the female in the cross and a set of Barney’s Farm Blueberry males were used in the cross.
Blueberry or anything with blueberry in it is going to be nutrient/fertilizer sensitive to some degree or another. The more blueberry in it the more sensitive it will be.
I followed my normal routine and once I worked up to a full strength nutrient/fertilizer mixture I then slightly pushed it higher until I noticed the very slightest hint of tip burn. Just the edges of the very tips of the upper leaves turned slightly crispy looking, but not the entire leaf tip as in all the way across. I then backed down the nutes/ferts slightly and did not see any more hint of burn. Normally that tells me I have found the max the plants can take and I can then carry that on until it is time to flush, with of course making the change to flowering nutes/ferts after first using veggng nutes/ferts and again finding the maximum tolerable levels.
One night roughly three weeks before harvest just before the lights went out I inspected my plants closely. I had fertilized them as per usual the morning before and as each previous time I did not see any signs of nute/fert burn. The following morning I looked at them and roughly the top third of the plants were toast, burnt toast to be more precise.
I had the amounts measured and followed the exact same measurements and feeding schedule as before. Nothing else was changed. My lighting was not to close so it was not in any way or part due to a heat issue.
It is as if the strain hit a point where even with the reduced amount of nitrogen in flowering nutes/ferts the strain said no mas, no mas. There was no early warning, no slight signs of the beginning of any sort of problem. The plants went from picture perfect to looking microwaved overnight.
I might suggest going easier on the nutes/ferts than usual or then expected and then backing them down more and sooner than your othewise would with a different strain. Possibly the Barney’s Farm Blue Cheese is not as nute/fert sensitive as the Big Buddha variety but they do share the same mother/female genetics so that is something to consider.
While it shares the same strain name the breeder is different and while the two share the same mother/female genetics different males were used so things may be very different when it comes to Barney’s Farm Blue Cheese but that is the best I can offer when it comes to any information about any Blue Cheese, and also the only information that might possibly be significant. Other things I could mention were trivial and unimportant and would just be the same sort of general differences one might find between any different but yet still somewhat similar strains so they would not be of any assistance and are not worth mentioning.
