Thank you for your great info!
You're welcome.
and I readily admit I know very little about growing sativa.
I think you now know a good deal; you just need to try and apply it next run. Remember, the best teacher is EXPERIENCE, which, after growing a few of these haze plants, now you have.
I knock Amnesia for its inconsistency on how three plants grew three different ways
Ah. . .I get it. What you are describing is what most in the cannabis internet world call "instability". Without getting overly complicated here, this means the plants genetics are hybridized, and you see a variety of traits from either parent in the se-eds you grew out. In other words, the breeder didn't "work" the line with enough generations to ensure that all the offspring are similar and high quality. Unfortunately, this is pretty common amongst commercial "strains".
There are three ways to deal with this sort of thing; which you choose is up to you:
a. Forget this line, and find something more stable you like better.
b. Deal with each separate plant as a unique individual on its own. This is probably OK if you're growing 1-3 plants, but it quickly becomes a hassle with multiple different ones.
c. Pick your favorite individual plant, maintain it as a "mother" plant (you can do that from one clone, or even a re-vegged flowered plant), take clones from it, and then do your grows from those clones. In addition to the benefits I listed above, the biggest one is stability. . .since every clone is genetically identical, they'll all have similar growth characteristics.
I am open to suggestions of what strains would fit the bill for me. I typically veg 5-7 weeks (around 20" tall) and am trying to have a flower (12/12) time of around 8 weeks....or less.
Time to scramble your brains.
You're running 13-15 weeks from se-ed to harvest, right? So how about, instead of starting from se-ed every time, you start from CLONES. Since you can create and root the clones at the same time as you're flowering your big plants, you don't lose ANY start time this way. Right when you pull down your big plants for harvest you can introduce new clones into flower. That will give you 8 week cycles, instead of 13 week ones, thereby
improving your overall yield by nearly 40% even with the same yield per plant.
Alternatively, if you're starting with sativa-type clones, you'll be on 12 week cycles, BUT you'll have all the advantages of starting with clones, plus the benefit of sativa-type flowers when you're through.
While many have no problem growing weed only to have to toss out 1/2 of the plants, but I do...my grow space is very valuable to me and prefer fem-only.
Start with clones, and you won't have to do gender selection.
Personally, I don't find doing gender selection to be a big deal at all. You can do it in small (eg 2 liter) pots that take up absolutely minimal room. Its possible do do cloning and maintain plants in an area the size of a small bookshelf using dirt-cheap fluorescent lights, and you don't need odor control for these.
Most plants show "pre-flowers" when sexually mature, so you don't even have to use room in your flowering area (assuming you have separate veg/clone/seedling and flower areas, but even if you don't, since the pre-flowered plants are so small, you should still have plenty of room in flowering area for increased numbers to cull out any males.
