Re-Vegging Marijuana Plants After Harvest
It is quite possible when growing indoors to grow a plant from seed, through the vegetative cycle, flowering and harvest, and then force the plant back into the vegetative cycle to repeat the whole process!
How does this happen?
Cannabis' life is governed by the hours of light it receives, if a plant is kept under a light for around 16 or more hours per day it will stay in the vegetative cycle indefinitely, if the light hours are reduced to around 12 hours per day the plant will go into flowering mode. If, when the flowering has finished and the crop harvested the light's are put back to 18 +hrs per day, the plant will be forced back into the vegetative cycle.
How is it done?
It is possible to harvest plants and then rejuvenate (re-vegetate) them vegetatively for a 2nd and even 3rd harvest. A second harvest can be realized in as little as 6-8 weeks. Since the plant stalk, and roots are already formed, the plant can produce a second, even third harvest of buds in a little more than half the time of the original harvest. When harvesting, take off the top 1/3rd of the plant. Leave most healthy fan leaves in the middle of the plant, cutting buds off branches carefully. On the lower 1/3rd of the plant, take off end flowers, but leave several small flowers on each branch. These will be the part of the plant that is regenerated. The more buds you leave on the plant, the faster it will regenerate. Feed the plant some high nitrogen plant food immediately after harvest.
After you have harvested your plant and left some of it still in tact, you need to transplant your mother because she needs new soil and room to grow a new root structure to support the new growth. Make sure your soil is semi-dry so that the root structure when it slides out of it's old home stays mostly in-tact, but since you have reduced the size of your plant you can also reduce the size of your root structure significantly. You can cut off parts of the rootball mass without injuring the plant
When you intend to regenerate a plant, make sure it never gets too starved for nitrogen as it is maturing, or all the sun leaves will fall off, and your plant will not have enough leaves to live after being harvested.
Harvested plants can come inside for rejuvenation under continuous light or are left outside in summer to rejuvenate in the natural long days. As stated before, and in contrast to normal growth patterns, lower branches will be the first to sprout new vegetative growth. With the light's back to the veg cycle and the plant fed, the plant will start to grow new shoots. Usually it takes 2 or 3 weeks before any new shoots are noticed and the growth of the new shoots can look very strange, single leaves will grow as well as other mutant looking leaves (as seen in the pic below). This is completely normal and after a couple of weeks growth the 'proper' leaves will start to appear.
How Long Do I Veg For?
As with all Cannabis plants, the longer you keep the plant in the re-veg cycle before switching to flowering, the bigger and better your plant will eventually become. Although, for best results it is better to wait until the re-vegged plant is producing a good amount of 'proper', full leaves again before switching to the flowering cycle.
After harvest and 45 days in re-vegging
