The Sun Moves

Hi everyone,
Hope all is well and flourishing...anyways. Quick thought outside the box with all the timing dilemmas.. No matter where your location is and growing keep it relevant with grow and harvest seasons. Meaning, the sun doesn't just stay 18/6 and then 12/12.. I'm just thing if you follow the April-June light for veg and then migrate to a preAutumn down swing in light. To me, that is most natural, involving more work but I am curious if its being done or had been done? If so, was there a different in quality is my main goal not quantity. Stay safe out there.

I've just been thinking about how much light we give to seedlings but in nature that would fall under winter/spring I would guess so less light than 24/0 or 18/6 veg

NaturalBatch14 said:

Hi everyone,
Hope all is well and flourishing...anyways. Quick thought outside the box with all the timing dilemmas.. No matter where your location is and growing keep it relevant with grow and harvest seasons. Meaning, the sun doesn't just stay 18/6 and then 12/12.. I'm just thing if you follow the April-June light for veg and then migrate to a preAutumn down swing in light. To me, that is most natural, involving more work but I am curious if its being done or had been done? If so, was there a different in quality is my main goal not quantity. Stay safe out there.

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You smoke entirely too much weed man! Lol. Just give em 18 and call it good!

24/0 ftw

NaturalBatch14 said:

... I am curious if its being done or had been done? If so, was there a different in quality is my main goal not quantity ...

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I have not done that for VEG cause they are germinated and/or cloned under 18/6 so they are kept 18/6.

I have stepped down the lights-on time gradually over 10 days as they head towards 12/12 with blurples. And I didn't notice any difference in quality either way. They were still sticky, stinky and rockin' my world. But graduating lights-on time did seem to quell the stretch by a few inches which is pretty handy with only a 5' ceiling.

I am trying the same thing now with the exact same strains under some QB's. In a couple of days she will be in total 12/12. Then give me 13 weeks to flower and cure - then I can let you know if there is anything different quality-wise with graduating them under SMD's.

NaturalBatch14 said:

Hi everyone,
Hope all is well and flourishing...anyways. Quick thought outside the box with all the timing dilemmas.. No matter where your location is and growing keep it relevant with grow and harvest seasons. Meaning, the sun doesn't just stay 18/6 and then 12/12.. I'm just thing if you follow the April-June light for veg and then migrate to a preAutumn down swing in light. To me, that is most natural, involving more work but I am curious if its being done or had been done? If so, was there a different in quality is my main goal not quantity. Stay safe out there.

Click to expand...

It does not matter if you try to copy the suns natural cycle during a given season or not but you are on to something here. There are way more than just 2 settings for indoor horticultural lighting. Plants on earth have evolved to trigger a flowering response at around eleven hours of darkness but the sun does not go from 18/6 to 12/12; this is why plants “stretch“ when you flip from veg to bloom phase.
You can virtually eliminate stretching and grow plants that closer mimic the bud structures of plants grown outdoors if you simply reduce the hours of light gradually instead of setting right to 12/12 for bloom phase. Starting at 18/6 or 24 hrs from seedlings begin reducing the hours of light by an hour or two per week at any point after they are mature enough to sex. Six/seven weeks or so is a good time to start. Go to 17/7 for a week and then to 16/8 and so on. You can also jump right to 15/9 to get them to preflower. At about 13/11 most strains show sex. At that point you can go to 12/12 for the duration or go back to 18/6 to re-veg. This is a great way to sex out the plants and monster crop for maximum yields if you have the patience.