Time to Flick The Switch?
Timing the trigger to start transition and flowering correctly takes a fair amount of experience. Most novice growers tend to leave things too late and end up with unmanageable indoor jungles inhabited by stretched and leggy plants. Sure, you can thin back the foliage but that basically adds up to wasted time and energy.
So how do professional indoor gardeners end up with their enviable “seas” of uniform, low, wide, squat specimens with an abundance of flowering sites all basking at the same height beneath their grow lights? What are they doing that the noobs aren’t? We asked our chief grower, Guy Green, to reveal his insider tips on managing the transition from vegetative growth to flowering and fruiting.
Switching your lights to 12 / 12 and reaching for Pure Essentials Black Label BUD A & B is just the beginning. Sure—with our help you will have no trouble in meeting your plant’s altered focus when it comes to nutritional requirements, but there are tons of other things you can do to boost productivity and crop uniformity.
1. Stop the stretch with low, even negative, TDiffs!
Tdiff stands for temperature differential. It’s the difference between your daytime high and your nighttime low. For instance, if temperatures in your indoor garden are 78 F during the day and fall to 62 F at night, you have a TDiff of 16 F. During transition you want your TDiff to be as low as possible. Some growers even use heaters to the extent of making their nighttime temperatures HIGHER than their daytime!
WHY? The transition from vegetative to flowering and fruiting is often marked by a period of vertical stretching. This can make plants tricky to light efficiently with HID grow lights during flowering. The last thing you want are tall, leggy plants unless you’re gonna get busy with side lighting and all that jazz. Have fun with that!
Use a thermostatically controlled block heater to maintain warmer nighttime temperatures. Ideally your nighttime temperature should be as close to your daytime temperature as possible—the mid 70s are ideal. Low temperature differentials like this can work wonders to help your plants avoid the ‘stretch’. Switching to a premium flowering base nutrient formula is also important…
“Pure Essentials Black Label BUD A & B is a premium,
Dutch-style two-part hydroponic nutrient that drives
incredible results in the budding, flowering and fruiting
stages with the purest, raw mineral elements available.”
2. Increase Nutrient Strength
When you switch your lights, raise the concentration of your nutrient solution by 10 – 20 percent, or just below your plant’s nutrient strength tolerance level if they are known. Increasing the concentration of mineral salts around the root zone makes it more difficult for your plants to uptake water and this, in turn, can help push plants into flowering mode faster. IMPORTANT: You must have good environmental control to implement this mild-stress technique. Do not consider this if you sometimes suffer from low relative humidity (below 50%) or do not have good temperature control or you will get wilting / burnt plants.
3. Irrigate Smarter
Increase the time between irrigations to encourage a drier root zone. Obviously you don’t want wilting, unhappy plants but allowing the growing media to dry to a point where the roots are getting a little “concerned” about their next drenching is not a bad thing at all. It basically gives the plant a kick up the butt and encourages quicker onset of buds. It’s particularly important to keep your plants’ root zones drier at night so be sure not to have your drippers dripping less than a few hours before lights out.
4. Stay Chilled
If you have a nutrient chiller, you’re already enjoying more control over the temperature of your plants’ root zones. So here’s a great tip just for you guys. Try slightly cooling the solution down to 65°F (18°C). This mild root zone stress will not harm your plants but it will certainly help to push them into producing more flowers and fruits.
5. Pure Essentials Black Label Bud Enhance!
Oh yeah baby! You knew this one was comin’! This is the ultimate flowering booster—guaranteed to contain no artificial plant growth regulators (PGRs) that are sadly so endemic to lesser products.
Pure Essentials Black Label Bud Enhance is our premium flower booster with an extremely extensive and complex array of supplementary phosphorus and potassium. We’ve also added hormones and catalytic agents for faster flowering triggers. Growers consistently report more flowering sites, extra girth and weight as your plants keep piling on the pounds right through to the late flowering stage.
Seriously, try Pure Essentials Black Label Bud Enhance, experiment with some of these tips too, keep your plants squat and low with some topping out and pruning, and see the difference it all makes!
Okay—that’ll just about do for this week. Hope you’ve had a good one!
Swerving wildly in my imaginary car,