cbdhemp808
Well-Known Member
I'm an outdoor greenhouse grower in a soil/coir mixture, so my comment here is a bit of a crossover between worlds, but perhaps helpful.With photoperiod plants (as opposed to autos) you can stay in veg indefinitely, as long as you provide enough of a light period. And it's actually the dark period that the plant is concerned with. Anything around 12 hours of darkness will cause the plant to go into flower as long as it is sexually mature enough to do so. It is sexually mature enough when it starts growing with alternating, as opposed to opposite, nodes on the plant. I suspect yours are already there.
So, the question becomes when to flip them into flower? The longest you'd want to leave them in veg is more of a height issue in an indoor grow.
I grow my plants as naturally as possible, meaning that they aren't getting more than a normal day's worth of sunlight. To keep them in veg, I use a blast of light 3x during the middle of the night. So, I wonder if simulating sunshine for longer than say, 12 hours, is stressing out the plants in ways that impact natural water and nutrient uptake. Another way to put it... forcing the plants to grow unnaturally.
I have been flipping to flower when the plant basically stops growing vertically; however, I'm starting to feel that I should be flipping sooner. This also relates to pot size.