Pheno some nice looking plants you have there. Getting to be monsters.
I like a little more node spacing and a taller plant but thats just me. I've found more space is better for air flow and light penetration. Yields are of course lower somewhat but I'll take that when I'm at the trim table. That node spacing is GREAT when I'm trimming. Some of my best weed I've ever grown had lots of space between the nodes.
Not a hydro expert. I thought you hydro guys flushed to clean out your pipes and buckets??
The way to smoother taste is getting the plant to use up all the chlorophyll she has stored up in the leaves. I'm GUESSING that in a hydro setup you stop with the nutrients and use water only for several weeks prior to harvest??
The plant will use up stored energy going down the stretch. In hydro I can see that working. The only effect I see it having on taste is that the plants are using up chlorophyll in the plant. That I could see helping with a smoother tasting smoke.
In soil, the nutrients bond with the soil medium on a chemical/atomic level and the roots uptake as needed. Cation exchange is the process.
AS soon as some sort of soil medium is used that's when the chemical bond takes place with fertilizers and soil, flushing with water wont change those chemical bonds. And it wont have any effect on nutrients already in the plant itself. Roots will still have access to those chemically bonded nutrients in the soil medium.
Translocation only happens INSIDE the plant. A plant will not translocate stored nutrients from inside the plant out its roots and into the soil. The plant will output plant root exudate to help the microbes that are in the rhizosphere.
Root exudate and translocation are 2 different plant processes.
I think the question now is; what amount of plant root exudate can the plant output using up stored energy. What effect does that have on the plant (in question).
It MAY get down to:
"Relationships between leaf and root traits in shaping plant resource‐use strategies"
We just entered into the realm of the unknown and un-studied as it relates to cannabis and way way above my pay grade.
Lets just got with there's no science to back up any benefit to flushing growing medium (even in hydro).
Here's a fairly sciencey read on some research done on plant exudate as it relates to plant energy use.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.4383
I found section 4.2 to be of particular interest.
Flushing/starving/soil/soil-less/roots and leaves and how plants use energy. This is the real question.
How does what we do in the grow room affect the plants use of energy?
I try and mimic nature as close as I can, hope for the best and LITFA.
Oh and wait for the pest onslaught, becuase if it hasn't happened it's about to.
