jacksthc
Well-Known Member
I am going to take it easy on you, and lead with the really obvious problems first.Not true. I used to get at least 10 oz dried bud per plant on plants that would get up to 5' tall indoors.
- Grow rooms, by their very nature, have a ceiling. Most of us only have about eight feet to work with. Somewhere between the top of your growing medium and the bottom of your light is the maximum height of the plant. In most cases, this is not more than about four feet.
- Taller plants have a higher center of gravity. If a two foot plant in a five gallon pot puts on a few pounds of wet buds, it is just a nice plant. That same weight on six foot plant can tip the whole plant and pot right over. This is an even bigger problem if you allow your growing medium to dry out. Now think about dominoes.
- Plants that grow tall quickly often have flimsy stems. Once the buds put on some weight, this is going to mean a lot of work staking, caging and tying, or a lot of bent and broken branches
- The taller the plant, the more stem you find between the roots and the buds, presenting two problems. The plant has used a ton of energy to grow that long stalk that it could have used for grow big fat buds instead. Additionally, the plant must spend further energy pumping water and nutrients against gravity to a higher elevation than necessary.
- CO2 is heavier than air and settles in grow rooms close to the floor. This means the roots are receiving much more CO2 than the leaves and flowers, when it should be the other way around.
- Tall plants cast longer shadows and decrease the available light to their neighbors.
- When plants grow to be tall, the distance between the light and the lower branches increases. According to light intensity principles and the inverse square law, as the distance between leaves and light source increases, the lumens reaching those leaves rapidly diminish. On tall plants, the higher leaves usually shade the lower branches preventing direct light. The only light that can penetrate the thick foliage to the lower branches is far red light between about 760 and 800 nanometers. Far red light activates phytochrome far red (PFR) which signals the shaded branches to stretch to compete for more light, exacerbating the problem further.