does stressing the plant at the end increase yield

[keepleft]

last crop i accidently left the pump off!!! didnt feed for 3 days. grodan tried up and plants wilted. stressed but they yielded more than ever! could it be that stressing your plants at the end by not watering leads to increased resin production or something???

 

any thoughts?

[Guest Eikel]

last crop i accidently left the pump off!!! didnt feed for 3 days. grodan tried up and plants wilted. stressed but they yielded more than ever!  could it be that stressing your plants at the end by not watering leads to increased resin production or something???

 

any thoughts?

 

Yep it works - have to be careful however, don't want to cause hermies

 

I've noted on "dry" days an observable difference in the amount of resin grown by the plant, typically I give my plants a 48-72hr dry period once every 2-3 week period in flower, seems to keep 'em healthy, I don't get droop too bad but I do get more resin.

(Note though, you want them to be "dry" not "dehydrated").

 

I grow in CoCo/perlite or Soil/perlite, no idea how you dry/stress hydro plants, maybe increase the periods between waterings?

[keepleft]

last time i just forgot to water em for last 3 days. they were wilted - so i would say dehydrated. but yeah seemed more resinious. rockwool was dry as. then i cut em down. its 42 days in bloom now and i would usually cut em down now so i will let em sit with no nutes for 3 days and stress em a bit

[F420]

the bitches think they are going to die so thay speed up the process, I dunno about m0re yeild though?? i mean that would involve plant matter wouldnt it??

[everest]

nha .... yield wouldn't be any bigger :scratchin but i reckon the end result would be more potent if starved this way ....

i've seen a few plants near eat themselves to survive :smoke

[orion2076]

sounds like a good plan. gotta keep an eye on them...dont wanna get all tha way to tha end and stuff it...I got a hydro setup in a cabinet and at tha moment its pretty hot in there..they'll dehydrate real quick..

[SukonmiSkunk]

KeepLeft, you seemed to have stumbled on my method of the final flush... Ive beleived this for quite a few years now.

 

my interpretation,

ok, when the plant dries out, or is exposed to high (hot) temperatures, its the natural thing for that plant to try and cool itself... how does it do this, the same as any living thing, it sweats... MJ when it sweats like this tend to secrete resin.. IE trichombs...

how ever, this is a dangerous thing, left unchecked can and most probably make the plant suffer and could cause it to go dormant... not increasing yeild much at all..

 

ok, my flushing method,

 

over 3 days.. drain the heart(nute tank) unplug pump for 1 lightcycle. Then replace with fresh water on a continuos water, replacing with fresh water every 2 hours, this will rid the Medium of any unwanted salts, then on the last day(or when the nutes are all flushed out) drain out the heart, unplug the pump, again for another light cycle.

then on the fourth day replace with fresh nutes...

I do this every 2 weeks... and the final flush just b4 picking I would just replace with fresh water.

 

this is a trcky thing to get the hang of, I use perlite, so it tends to hold a bit of miosture.. you dont want the medium completely dry, other mediums will be slightly different, but the principle is the same. Be careful and watch for wilting, this is not a good thing, as a wilting plant will tend not to produce as much resin. If the plant wilts, water straight away...

 

also try turning fans off too, a warmer enviroment at the end of flowering will produce more resin than my flushing method...

its the natural thing for the plant to sweat when it gets hot, and that sweat results in resin production.....more so than the starving method,

 

my starving method will produce resin, but is more to leach the medium and the plant of unwanted salts.....

[Luke Skywalker]

plants don't "sweat" to cool down, they transpire water through their system.

 

IF there was an increase in % of resin on the plants I would imagine it to be a result of tissues being dehyrated rather than they're producing more in response to stress.

 

Sukomi, I would suggest you don't starve the plant but flushing can certainly help. You don't need to unplug the pump, if anything that would be harmful to health. Running watering consistently for 24 hrs would also increase the likelyhood of fungal problems, as well as it's just not necessary. If you've got a good watering can or a horseshoe type watering sytstem, you can simply run batches of fresh water through until they read no more than 0.1 ec on a truncheon higher than the input water.

 

There's something to be said for only using dilute nutrient solution as a form of flushing, as a severe drop in osmotic pressure at the root zone can actually harm the rootsystem. Flushing with about .4ec above whatever your base water can and then doing this repeatedly, dumping and flushing, dumping and flushing, until the water comes back at no more than 0.1ec above, could be a way to prevent that rapid shock from occuring by keeping root osmotic pressure at similar levels.

 

Stressing plants to increase yeild is a bit silly IMHO, you're actually preventing the plant from converting light to produce sugar to feed development and growth in cells. Yeild won't be increased this way. POTENCY could be, but I feel it would be marginal and you should be looking to strain selection for potency rather than artificial means of increasing it.

 

IMHO.

 

Tell you what, stress any other plant, and see if it does as well in yeild or strength as one without that stress. Where dissolved solids give flavour, (as in tomatoes), you can slightly increase this by waterstressing plants. But doing it to wilt point will cut off sugar production and it's a downhill slide from there. A similar, (though not quite the same) principle applies here.

[Frazz]

This is a living plant we are talking about not a bud producing machine that you can torture to get more resin

in nature you will find some of the best resin / hash producing cannabis growing in the tropics

where it rains every day and the soils are loaded with nutrients,

likewise some of the best comes from the parched desert environment

so this suggests strain is more relevant

 

when a plant is thirsty for water she will gradually shut down the non-essential services to the plant

and rather than "sweating" the plant will close the stoma's to prevent loss of fluids

the plant is not silly, it recognises that death may be imminent...

do you really think it increases resin production as a reaction to deprivation of water?

 

It may be so that resin production is increased in an effort to protect the calyx / seed pod from

hot drying winds, but i doubt a dry root zone would increase any production

 

Unless you had a control clone which had normal feed/water regime to compare against i cant see how you

can claim "it produced more resin"....more than what? :scratchin

:smoke

[SukonmiSkunk]

Luke,

I totally agree, plants need to be healthy. Mine almost... always are.

this flushing method by no means stresses the plant... the medium should never be completely dry, once the plant wilts it takes a bit of time to come back.. obviously..

 

I think you may have mis interperated my post.... this is more a flushing method I use at the end of flowering, the last 5-6 days... its really more to leach the plant of the nutes.. in between flushings I only do over 2 days. perlite tends to hold heaps of miosture and can go for about 2 days without watering at all, especially at the end when the pot is full of roots..as for healthy roots...no probs there, these things grow through 2 layers of shade cloth..and down the return tube... my plant gets nothing but fresh rain water every day for 10-14 days at the end of flowering.. by emptying the heart and not feeding over a light cycle just reassures the plant takes up what nutes are left.

 

I am in hydro so continuos watering isnt really too bad.. only for a night, over a week it might cause mold probs

 

I think stressing plants to increase THC is a myth.. to a point, how ever a warm enviroment is known to increase THC production.. this is fact

 

Marajuana Botany Maturation and harvesting pg146

 

as for unplugging the pump, this has to be done, no water in the heart...my pump is on a timer... I dont know about yours... I dont want it running dry...

 

the plant sweating theory was told to me years ago by a botanist who owned the hydro shop I used to goto, he was full of useful crap like that.. he was the one who put me onto the soda water trick too (Co2).

beleive me I quized him on this shit on a daily basis nearly, a lot of what he said makes a lot of sense...

 

they may not sweat pursay, but most definately increase in crystals, something to do with the heat... the sweat thing was good explination I thought..

 

all that said, the healthier the plant the more resin it will produce, so when a healthy plant is exposed to small amounts of "heat stress" you could say, will produce THC, who knows if it increases yeild, every grow goes different so there is really no way to tell, increased resin production most certainly will increase yeild wether or not it is signifigant, who really knows......

 

this is my understanding.... after reading this book anyway.....

 

http://www.mellowgold.com/grow/mjbotany-removed/

 

so in closing... I guess we sort of agree...

Edited February 15, 2006 by SukonmiSkunk