Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Small buds? Ask Ed


I have two plants that are on the verge of being harvested
and sadly, they are a bit spread out -- I am attributing this to the fact that I have used low-power CFL's for the entire grow, but I wanted to know for sure if this was the reason for a small yield. One thing I have read about is removing the smaller bottom buds in order to focus on the top buds, but Ed Rosenthal in Cannibis Culture explodes this myth.

courtesy of Cannabis Culture.com:

Will pruning during flowering increase bud size?

I have a White Widow plant growing indoors that is going into its final stages of flowering ? it should ripen in about two weeks. However, I think I made the mistake of allowing the plant to keep too many branches during the flowering process, and this one 16-inch plant has well over 50 flowering heads. As a result of this, the main tall branches have not budded out as fully as I would have hoped for, while the majority of the buds are small and relatively insignificant.

However, the plant looks very healthy, and is covered in crystals! What can I do to increase the yield at this late stage? The cycle is set at 11 hours of light (down from 12) and some of the hairs are just beginning to turn brown. If I cut some of the smaller buds off, will it help the larger ones grow?

Alex,
London, England

Ed writes:
It's too late to do anything to increase the size of the individual buds. The plant has already expended most of the resources it will use for flowering. Now it is filling out the infrastructure it has already built. Removing some buds now will not make much difference to the remaining ones because the plant does not have much more energy to spend on them. If you removed them now, you would be losing all the resources the plant has already allocated to them.

The buds may not be as cosmetically alluring as larger tighter ones, but you can see from the crystals that they will be potent when used.

On future crops you could manicure the plant a couple of weeks before flowering, two or three weeks after changing the light cycle.


This brings us to the obvious topic of pruning, which we will investigate tomorrow!

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