Please explain two stages of vertical growth.
Okay, so due to legal stem count limits in Colorado, I grow fewer, larger trees as opposed to many smaller shrubs. In practice, this means that my plants need to grow pretty big before I put them in my trellis. I do a one plant per trellis style grow, each trellis is 4' x 6.25' so each plant has to cover a full 25 ft²!
In my perpetual system, fresh cuttings are taken 8-10 weeks before the bloom room is ready for them; 2 weeks to root, two for growing out of a four inch square pot, and the rest in RDWC getting some 3' tall and broad enough to cover at least 2/3 of the trellis panel when it goes in.
That's how I get just four plants to fill in a 100 ft² vertical silo, without waiting for two months to flip them into bloom. Since this is a vertical growth forum, yes, perpetual growing becomes a basic and all but essential technique for getting big enough plants to take full advantage of a vertical garden.
The other option, of course, is to simply grow more plants and have several layers or racks. This cuts down on lead times but can be risky from a plant count perspective.
The op I've built is a very carefully crafted lab that reconstructs a commercial indoor growhouse in miniature for developing and testing industry specific and optimized designs, techniques and equipment.
To this end, I've eschewed the 'blast and bail' tactics of SOG or massive numbers in favor of a process that takes advantage of the stable nature of a legal indoor facility by allowing for a continuous ('perpetual' in our jargon) production line of plants from clones to harvest.
Larger scale facilities do this for too many other good reasons to list here, but since space is money indoors, the ability of continuous production lines to cram large outputs into small footprints cannot be ignored. This is simply because building spaces for individual stages of plants as they grow from slips to bloom ready saves space while providing for ideal growing conditions- both of which improve productivity.
Since I'm investigating vertical growing for its advantages in space saving techniques as a direct driver of cost reduction, it only makes sense to extend that approach beyond just the bloom room. Vertical trellis saves space, perpetual/staged/continuous production techniques do the same for time.
That should teach you to ask me a simple question, lol!
