All the book reading is pointless without hands on experience its just words the speaker doesn't actually understand.
But that aside... you said last night somewhere that the dark period is not related to the light being off... Or words to that effect, can you please explain that one?
Agree about the words vs seeing the plant. Until you see a cannabis plant that's ready to harvest, it's really hard to describe what it looks like, even with excellent photos. The best I can do is add the word "fecund" but if you've never been pregnant or around a pregnant "person" that's a dead end.
Turn that around - "read the plant". That's meaningless. As a new grower, with no experience in growing plants, I can look at a plant all day and I understand exactly nothing about it. The written word was the greatest improvement in human knowledge ever. Without being able associate the "green pointy thing" to a picture that has a caption "leaf", I'm still ignorant about the plant.
The value of the details is that it allows me to associate what I see so that I can build an understanding of what's happening. That's how we create knowledge. Lacking knowing the underpinnings of why things are happening means that I'm not able to change the current environment to get the results that I want. In essence, chaos. No thanks. An understanding of why we are where we are today can help get what we want tomorrow. That's for me but I am under no illusions that's "the right way". It's just one way and one thing that's interesting to me is how grower's find their own "right way". It's sort of like Curly, one of the stars of City Slickers - "there's just one thing", he says but he never says what that is because that "one thing" is up to each of us to figure out.
Enuff of that.
Lights out ≠ the "dark cycle"//"dark period".
Best advice I can offer is that you Google the "Calvin cycle". I'm not trying to sell anything short but it's easy to get info on that, it's a really important part of how plants work, and my knowledge of plant bio is really thin. Before my three cannabis grows, the only thing I've grown is old (er).