YAY!!!! 3 was always closest to what I was expecting to see. If you stop stunting them they will come back with a vengeance!
Yes perpetual is best to keep running the same strains. You can do more than one in fact perpetual makes it easier to do more than one but you want to keep doing it or the calendar gets all messed up. But perpetual done right takes some restraint and following of rules and being responsible. I am going to explain something that takes a lot of self control below. If you don't follow it then you will blow up you grow and have a mess on your hands.
So lets start with the idea of one strain...So the deal with perpetual is you want to think of it backwards. You want to think about what I was saying.....question #1: Do you want to harvest once a week and how many? Maybe you want to harvest daily?
Just as an example...
I want to harvest 2 plants a week because 2 full sized plants takes about 6 hours to clip partial trim and wash and dry. (maybe you are faster than me). That means that every Friday night you take 4-6 clones (if you are wanting to harevst daily 2 plants then daily you take 4-6 clones...please do not start your perpetual this way). You are only going to use the 2 best and toss the rest or give them to your closest friends. It isn't so much about extras for failure. Cloning is easy and they always work. But for many reasons some will rebound faster than others. So we don't pick that fastest ones or the biggest ones or the best looking ones. When it is time to select 2 we take the 2 that are most similar in rebound state. 2 that if I put them in soil then in a week they will be identical. Some times I would even do a 2 pot method and place them in a first pot of about 2 gallons after they sprout in the peat plug. Then I make the selection form the 6 after full potted rebound to get the best consistency. Yo can grow a month in there and have very consistent plants. you can even trim and train a little in that month to get near identical plants.
So there isn't much more to it than that. You really focus on starting them in the process in order to get them out in a reasonably even way. Once you have it dialed in and you know it isn't 12 weeks to harvest and you know this strain is 12.5 weeks then you could switch clone day to Wednesday.
If you are running a good soil blend then there isn't much to do than add water. So it doesn't hurt to just run those 6 up to flower if you have the space and then chop down the ones that are worse off. That is generally good practice until you got yer shit together. What if you stunt one...well you got 4 backups. It gets real hard though to chop down a plant that is late in bloom. The farther you go the more you will be likely to keep it and break your back.
There are 2 things to consider beyond that which are just kind of obvious but I will point them out.
1) The veg time is fully dependent on the method of growing. Growing in a scrog increases the veg time about 2-4 weeks depending on what you are doing and how good you are. So that means at 4 weeks extra, times 6 plants a week you have 24 more plants if you wait until the bloom flip to cut the stragglers. A good reason to cut the stragglers after the first month in a real pot.
2) you want to size the grow space to accommodate the number of plants in the grow (which you can't do until you know how long it takes to bloom the plants). So lets assume you have a strain nailed and know for the method you do you grow them for 10 weeks in veg and 9 in bloom. Then we need a bloom space large enough to handle 18 big to large plants a.d a veg space able top accommodate 36 plants in various sizes from small to medium in possibly 2 sized pots (24 unselected clones + 12 selected clones). I never counted but I was well over 40 at one point. Since you are constantly chopping down some and cloning more it is a fuzzy number.
So you need to think about your method but I recommend tossing SCROG out the window for perpetual for many reasons. Most obvious is transitioning the plant from one grow chamber to the next. It is much better to have each plant in their own bucket (hydro or soil). It is much better to have a small individual scrog or to do supper cropping and LST. I like LST with Lollipoping myself. LST with Lollipoping will also ad like 2 weeks to veg. Lollipoping is where you get your clones from by the way.
So lets take a step back. To do this right...
#1 Nail how to grow the plant using your preferred method. Then you know it takes 9.5 weeks or something like that.
#2 Then do the math to figure out when to start cloning.
#3 Build the appropriate grow space.
That is the right way to do it. And in step one you can run 10 at a time or whatever to fine tune things and try different methods.
Now what many people do is set up a grow space and try to fill it and end up with a mess on their hands. I am not going to explain all the things you can do wrong.
Now maybe you want to harvest once a month so all that math changes a bit. But think about this. your bloom space can hold probably max 8 plants in in the various bloom states. If your bloom is 8 weeks long you could pull one plant a week, 2 plants every 2 weeks, 4 plants every 4 weeks or just run them all together at 8 weeks but they are much more cramped. By doing one a week the fullest one is competing with much smaller ones allowing for more optimized utilization of the space. If they are all running at the same age then they will max out the space. If they are staggered the biggest ones have more space.
So simple right?
The key is having the maturity to kill good plants to maintain your production rate without going insane.
Oh yeah and so running more than one strain is fine. You don't have to do it for the second one. You just start one from seed and run it and take clones and don't worry about the mother. Then run those clones right next to the ones you have dialed in and take notes. At the time to take the ones over to the bloom then you note were these new ones faster or slower. then bloom it with then and take notes. After about 2 full cycles you should be able to tune those in and take the clones at the right time.
What I am saying is the first one is hard. once that is dialed adding more is a snap.
Yes perpetual is best to keep running the same strains. You can do more than one in fact perpetual makes it easier to do more than one but you want to keep doing it or the calendar gets all messed up. But perpetual done right takes some restraint and following of rules and being responsible. I am going to explain something that takes a lot of self control below. If you don't follow it then you will blow up you grow and have a mess on your hands.
So lets start with the idea of one strain...So the deal with perpetual is you want to think of it backwards. You want to think about what I was saying.....question #1: Do you want to harvest once a week and how many? Maybe you want to harvest daily?
Just as an example...
I want to harvest 2 plants a week because 2 full sized plants takes about 6 hours to clip partial trim and wash and dry. (maybe you are faster than me). That means that every Friday night you take 4-6 clones (if you are wanting to harevst daily 2 plants then daily you take 4-6 clones...please do not start your perpetual this way). You are only going to use the 2 best and toss the rest or give them to your closest friends. It isn't so much about extras for failure. Cloning is easy and they always work. But for many reasons some will rebound faster than others. So we don't pick that fastest ones or the biggest ones or the best looking ones. When it is time to select 2 we take the 2 that are most similar in rebound state. 2 that if I put them in soil then in a week they will be identical. Some times I would even do a 2 pot method and place them in a first pot of about 2 gallons after they sprout in the peat plug. Then I make the selection form the 6 after full potted rebound to get the best consistency. Yo can grow a month in there and have very consistent plants. you can even trim and train a little in that month to get near identical plants.
So there isn't much more to it than that. You really focus on starting them in the process in order to get them out in a reasonably even way. Once you have it dialed in and you know it isn't 12 weeks to harvest and you know this strain is 12.5 weeks then you could switch clone day to Wednesday.
If you are running a good soil blend then there isn't much to do than add water. So it doesn't hurt to just run those 6 up to flower if you have the space and then chop down the ones that are worse off. That is generally good practice until you got yer shit together. What if you stunt one...well you got 4 backups. It gets real hard though to chop down a plant that is late in bloom. The farther you go the more you will be likely to keep it and break your back.
There are 2 things to consider beyond that which are just kind of obvious but I will point them out.
1) The veg time is fully dependent on the method of growing. Growing in a scrog increases the veg time about 2-4 weeks depending on what you are doing and how good you are. So that means at 4 weeks extra, times 6 plants a week you have 24 more plants if you wait until the bloom flip to cut the stragglers. A good reason to cut the stragglers after the first month in a real pot.
2) you want to size the grow space to accommodate the number of plants in the grow (which you can't do until you know how long it takes to bloom the plants). So lets assume you have a strain nailed and know for the method you do you grow them for 10 weeks in veg and 9 in bloom. Then we need a bloom space large enough to handle 18 big to large plants a.d a veg space able top accommodate 36 plants in various sizes from small to medium in possibly 2 sized pots (24 unselected clones + 12 selected clones). I never counted but I was well over 40 at one point. Since you are constantly chopping down some and cloning more it is a fuzzy number.
So you need to think about your method but I recommend tossing SCROG out the window for perpetual for many reasons. Most obvious is transitioning the plant from one grow chamber to the next. It is much better to have each plant in their own bucket (hydro or soil). It is much better to have a small individual scrog or to do supper cropping and LST. I like LST with Lollipoping myself. LST with Lollipoping will also ad like 2 weeks to veg. Lollipoping is where you get your clones from by the way.
So lets take a step back. To do this right...
#1 Nail how to grow the plant using your preferred method. Then you know it takes 9.5 weeks or something like that.
#2 Then do the math to figure out when to start cloning.
#3 Build the appropriate grow space.
That is the right way to do it. And in step one you can run 10 at a time or whatever to fine tune things and try different methods.
Now what many people do is set up a grow space and try to fill it and end up with a mess on their hands. I am not going to explain all the things you can do wrong.
Now maybe you want to harvest once a month so all that math changes a bit. But think about this. your bloom space can hold probably max 8 plants in in the various bloom states. If your bloom is 8 weeks long you could pull one plant a week, 2 plants every 2 weeks, 4 plants every 4 weeks or just run them all together at 8 weeks but they are much more cramped. By doing one a week the fullest one is competing with much smaller ones allowing for more optimized utilization of the space. If they are all running at the same age then they will max out the space. If they are staggered the biggest ones have more space.
So simple right?
The key is having the maturity to kill good plants to maintain your production rate without going insane.
Oh yeah and so running more than one strain is fine. You don't have to do it for the second one. You just start one from seed and run it and take clones and don't worry about the mother. Then run those clones right next to the ones you have dialed in and take notes. At the time to take the ones over to the bloom then you note were these new ones faster or slower. then bloom it with then and take notes. After about 2 full cycles you should be able to tune those in and take the clones at the right time.
What I am saying is the first one is hard. once that is dialed adding more is a snap.
