Advice needed -broke flowering light discipline

[Joshua BenNun]

Have one Dinafem Diesel, 4 weeks into flower, under 6 CFL lights on 12/12. Heavy with buds and trichomes, a few stigmas turning reddish, but should have at least 4 more weeks before climax. Last night an overhead fluorescent light was accidentally left on. Nowhere near as close and strong as the CFLs, but definitely exposed the plant to light throughout its dark period. For practical reasons, I can't just flip the light/dark cycle, so now plant is getting 36 hours continuous light before resuming its original schedule.

Everything I've read says that much light at the wrong time can completely stop flowering. Does it resume vegetative growth? If so, can it later, after completely adjusting to veg mode, be put back into flowering? Or am I better off just harvesting whatever is there now?

 

[TanR]

Hi Joshua,

Please understand that I am not an expert on this topic, but I saw your post and thought to share what I've learned from reading on this site. The short answer is I think your plants will be alright.

The info/logic to that short answer is that light suffers from inverse square law/rule. Basically, for every unit of distance away from a light you move the power from the light is reduced by the square of that distance. So a basic overhead light that proves sufficient for seeing in a room, but is several feet a minimum (I'm guessing) from your plants is providing very little beneficial light to the plants. Only you know the light/environment specifics, but if you would not expect your plants to grown solely with the overhead light left on, then that same light left on one night shouldn't disrupt their cycle too much if at all.

My suspicion is that your girls won't miss a beat.

Be well.

 

[Joshua BenNun]

Thanks for the encouraging reply, TanR. Appreciate your observation about relative strengths of the lights in question. Yes, there was some distance between the fluorescent tube and the plant. The fluorescent doesn't yield anywhere near as much light as my CFLs (which throw something like 10,000 lumens). But I've read statements, attributed to professional growers, to the effect that merely shining a flashlight on plants can "ruin" a grow. Ed Rosenthal says even small amounts of light at the wrong time "confuse" a flowering plant. (Which makes me wonder how marijuana can produce well outdoors, where it's rarely if ever perfectly dark.)

Anyway, what do I have to lose by trying to keep the plant on track? If you're right and it continues what seems like a normal flowering, well and good; if flowering stalls, I assume I can still get something usable out of it. That would be a disappointment for my first plant, but not the end of the world--I've got five plants in earlier stages behind her, and I need flowering space for them.

 

[toasted]

I think the worst case for you would be that your plant would hermie - partly or fully.

That said, personally I think that since you didn't actually interrupt a dark period but merely extended the amount of the light period - all that will happen is flowering may be drawn out a bit more. Of course I can't say this authoritatively but I have had something similar to this happen and it turned out to be nothing more than a few days before they recovered.


Keep an optimistic attitude, and I wish you the best of luck!