24/12 Light cycle results

And he said, let there be more light:

So, the results are in on my experiment to see what would happen if I imposed my God like will & put more light hours into the room, by keeping the 12 hour night but adding about 2 days of light (12/24) per week. The main thing I learned is that it had no effect on the flowering process but did speed up the time to harvest.

One of the more difficult things I had to do was set the timers to run 24/12, especially in this room with one timer for each of 4 lights. A seven day timer requires that you reprogram the timers once a week because it doesn’t even out into a smooth rollover at day 8 on a 24/12 cycle.

I started the experiment with two stages of flowering plants. One group of 15 plants was already 3 weeks into flower on 12/12 and 3 veg plants had flowering induced in the 24/12 cycle. I kept the 24/12 cycle running for 3 weeks, for a 6-week total amount of flowering time instead of 8 weeks.

There was a difference in the induced plants, and they lagged behind all of their clone sisters in another flowering room. The 12/12 room has small half inch flowers forming so far, and the plants in the 24/12 room appear to be slightly beginning to flower. I think this could be due to the experiment group having less total 12 hour nights than the plants in the 12/12 room have had so far, but they’ll be relieved to know they go back on 12/12.

The plant tracks the amount of dark time to know when to flower, (AKA – night dominant), but this could just be a major factor that the plant uses as some other plants use different stimuli, such as the amount of daylight, or the progression of daylight hours or even root temperature (cilantro). Throw autoflowers in that list.

There could be another experiment to see if the transition to flowering could be sped up by running 6 on, 12 off and compare to clones in a 12/12 room after a week.

The result is big fat arm-sized colas which look no different than previous grows that have had 8 week 12/12 cycles.

Would I do it again? Probably. But I wouldn’t induce flowering on that light cycle. There were no herms. There was no stoppage or slowing of the flowering growth. Everything proceeded normally but it just took less time to harvest. One run isn’t enough to reliably quantify a whole lot. It did show me there is no harm in doing it for half the total flowering time. The less time you spend in flower the better your luck on a lot of fronts, be it lack of ability to combat any pest problems during flowering, to just having the buds harvest quicker. Flowering is a pretty vulnerable state to grow in and time in flowering isn’t helping. I’ve lost entire rooms in the last week, so if you can kick the pedal to the floor in month 1.75 or month 2 and nothing goes wrong, I’ll take it.

These were seed-grown plants of a Blackberry (male) and GG4 (female) in week 3 of normal 12/12 flowering. And yes, I have picked out two phenos with big arm sized colas of Blackberry, with the GG4 level of frost. These mothers will become rooms full of bud for the next year or so, assuming they survive being revegged. The 3 that I induced flowering were GG4 clones.