waterandmetal
Active Member
im with RKM and everyone else who has said cutting the light down to eight hours by the end. The thing to remember is that when growing indoors, you are nature, and that your plants follow the rules of nature as well. The trick is to make the grow enviroment as stressless as possible. When you've entered flowering the trick is to slowly tamper your light off. I personally light to start at 18 and 1/2 light to 5 1/2 dark for veg. Then when I enter micro I bring it down to 16/8. Then at the beggining of flowering I go 14/10 for the first week or two then 12/12 when they're well off, slowly tampering down to around 9/15 for the last week. Im with RKM on using the eight hour as a guide rather then a set goal.
Now i'll tell you this from experience (I've increased a crops light cycle as an experiment on this very subject) and when you increase the light cycle midbloom to anything above 12 the plant freaks. Internally at 12/12 the plant is in heavy flower hormone production, and if you increase the light then suddenly the plants flowering hormone production is corrupted, and this will actually throw off bud production horribly.
In my crop i had strong signs of preflowering at 16/8, then at 12/12 for two weeks heavy bud production. when the light was increased the bud production slowed heavily, and on two of the plants stop entirely. After a period of this for about a week and a half reversion to flowering came back slow, two of my plants became hermaphodites, and one changed gender fully to a male.
This gender change shows that any change in the photoperiod is far far far too stressful for the plants during flowering, and is just a stupid move.
The only reason you'd have a problem with the amount of light is if the light you were using for flowering was flourescent or lower, HID lights will never have this problem
And as for how the plant reacts when the light is further reduced, just like everyone else has said, lowering the light cycle towards eight sends a signal to the plant that frost is about to come and that its chance to reproduce is rapidly closing. This causes a rapid incrase in resin and THC production (both of which are used to attract pollen carrying insects and to trap the pollen) in a mad attempt to pollinate. This as it was well put "seals the deal"
Now i'll tell you this from experience (I've increased a crops light cycle as an experiment on this very subject) and when you increase the light cycle midbloom to anything above 12 the plant freaks. Internally at 12/12 the plant is in heavy flower hormone production, and if you increase the light then suddenly the plants flowering hormone production is corrupted, and this will actually throw off bud production horribly.
In my crop i had strong signs of preflowering at 16/8, then at 12/12 for two weeks heavy bud production. when the light was increased the bud production slowed heavily, and on two of the plants stop entirely. After a period of this for about a week and a half reversion to flowering came back slow, two of my plants became hermaphodites, and one changed gender fully to a male.
This gender change shows that any change in the photoperiod is far far far too stressful for the plants during flowering, and is just a stupid move.
The only reason you'd have a problem with the amount of light is if the light you were using for flowering was flourescent or lower, HID lights will never have this problem
And as for how the plant reacts when the light is further reduced, just like everyone else has said, lowering the light cycle towards eight sends a signal to the plant that frost is about to come and that its chance to reproduce is rapidly closing. This causes a rapid incrase in resin and THC production (both of which are used to attract pollen carrying insects and to trap the pollen) in a mad attempt to pollinate. This as it was well put "seals the deal"
.. More extreme light reduction does tend to start flowering alot faster though, anybody whos grown indoors and outdoors knows that..