does it really matter ?

Kriegs said:

Depends a lot on your light... Your headspace is only as good as your light's ability to penetrate it. I find my 400W to be penetrating pretty well to 3'; the bottom 1' is sketchy. If you have more, you can veg more.. light really rules first, headspace second..

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That is true and something I always try to mention, that you can outgrow your lights ability to provide adequate lighting but that is really mainly of importance to commercial growers and of less importance to growers for home consumption.

I have at times outgrown my lights ability to adequately penetrate to the lower portions of my plant so instead of getting decent sized buds down low I ended up with many good to great sized buds up high and great colas but a lot of popcorn on the lowest portion of my plants.

Well popcorn does not look impressive in a bag someone is trying to sell but it will still get someone high.

What I did the times I managed to outgrow my lighting was to harvest all the decent and larger sized buds in the/my normal fashion and then clipped off the harvested upper portion of the plant and then clipped the plant off below the lowest branches with popcorn on them and stripped them of leaves and hung the entire lower portion to dry.

I ended up with a whole lot of tiny buds and again while they are not impressive if you have a quality strain one or two of them in a bowl will get you high just as the upper buds will so you still end up with a larger yield, it is just not massively larger and not impressive looking if in a bag.

So while I would not recommend intentionally overgrowing your lights capability to penetrate to the lowest portions of your plants if by chance you do it, it is not something horrible and it is not as if you will not still gain at least a small bit from it.

I have found myself surviving on a large amount of popcorn while my next crop was nearing harvest and drying and without it I would have had to purchase or go without so in those cases I was grateful that I happened to somewhat overgrow my light ability to provide strong full powerful light to the base of my plants because if I hadn’t gone beyond that I would not have ended up with the large amount of popcorn that got me through until I could harvest and dry what was then under light.

So there is no real true total negative to overgrowing your lighting other maybe than adding days to the overall growing time because you vegged for a few days or a week longer, that is of course as long as doing so does not cause height problems.

Brick Top said:

What I did the times I managed to outgrow my lighting was to harvest all the decent and larger sized buds in the/my normal fashion and then clipped off the harvested upper portion of the plant and then clipped the plant off below the lowest branches with popcorn on them and stripped them of leaves and hung the entire lower portion to dry.

I ended up with a whole lot of tiny buds and again while they are not impressive if you have a quality strain one or two of them in a bowl will get you high just as the upper buds will so you still end up with a larger yield, it is just not massively larger and not impressive looking if in a bag.

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Yeah.. good thought. This is my first grow.. from hearing others I got the idea that low popcorn buds were garbage. Then, a whole bunch of mine frosted up beautifully with trichs.. and I was like, hey, how can these be worthless all smattered with these glands?

I do want to try to keep my upper and lower harvest separate, more to see if there's any difference in the high.