This article originally appeared in the May 2017 print edition of Cannabis Business Times. To subscribe, click here.
This excerpt from “Marijuana Horticulture Fundamentals: A Comprehensive Guide to Cannabis Cultivation and Hashish Production” (Green Candy Press), by Ken Morrow, has been reprinted (and edited for space) with permission. You may purchase the complete book at bit.ly/hortfundamentals.
Symbiotic rotation is essentially the practice of having all stages of your plants ready exactly when you need them. On the day of harvest, vegetative plants must be ready to install in the flowering room, and your clones must be ready to be moved to the vegetative room. After cleanup and decontamination, the clone room should be ready for more clones, taken from the plants in the flowering room. Empty space is a waste of time [and money].
For all practical purposes, you don’t want plants ready before or after they are needed, but exactly when you want them—thus creating a symbiotic rotation. Refining the variables is key. Catering to the plant’s every need is the first priority. Second is maximizing its full potential.
Choosing a Cultivar
Understanding the parameters and limitations of your chosen cultivar is also paramount. You must experiment and investigate all possibilities and options. All plants are different. Here we discuss the two basic cultivars and their strengths and weaknesses in regard to symbiotic rotation.
Cannabis Sativa
Cannabis sativa typically grows tall and lanky with long internodal spacing, creating long, airy buds. They grow too tall for most indoor situations and take far longer to finish flowering than cannabis indica; sativa can take 8 to 16-plus weeks to finish!
The symbiotic rotation style is more labor-intensive if you are growing cannabis sativa. It can be done, but you must skip a vegetative cycle, meaning your flowering sativa plants won’t be finished for (probably) 12 weeks or more, so you will have a quandary!
... The way to overcome this situation is to eliminate your vegetative plants after you’ve taken clones. Wait for clones to root, then install them in the vegetative room. By eliminating the previous vegetative cycle, you have allowed the slow-flowering sativa to finish flowering, but still have vegetative plants and clones ready exactly when you want them. Essentially, you are skipping a cycle to wait for the sativa to finish flowering.
To read the full article in Cannabis Business Times' May edition, click here.
Top photo courtesy of Green Candy Press
