Looking at running my first outdoor grow and I have a couple questions.
I am planning to use 25 gallon grow bags and coast of maine soil.
I’m experience at indoor growing and typically start my seeds in a cup and transplant to 5 gallon for indoors and call it a day.
For outdoors, do I go right from the solo cup and put the seedling into the 25 gallon bag, or is it recommended to pot up to say a 5 gallon for a month and then transfer the larger plant into the 25 gallon.
I know according to coast of maine their soil can feed up to 120 days in a large enough container, so my thought is potting up this way will reduce the need for nutrients.
When I use soil ,I tend to go strait from the solo cup to the final grow bag. When I run peat, I am an up-potter. I do 4x4, 1-gal, 3-gal, 7-gal bag - but I only run peat indoors.
I wish someone would have told me peat isnt great for outdoor grows two summers ago lol. 20 gal container and i was still watering every 36 hours during the heat of August.
The biggest thing you need to worry about is timing. If you start seeds indoor on 18 hours of light and they’re mature when you move them outside on 14-15 hours of light can cause them to start flowering. But since days are getting longer until late June they will eventually revert back to veg, and then start flowering again at the end of summer when they would normally flower.
One transplant or many doesn’t really matter. You’ll get a little stall after transplant so doing it often will probably lead to smaller plants but that’s about the only difference.
I use timeanddate dot com to see how many hours of sunlight for particular days in my city. Once it’s like 15 or more I know I can put a vegging plant out and know she won’t flip and then revert back to veg 3 week later. Handy little site once you figure out which calendar you want.
For instance where I am, we hit 14hrs/day on April 20th and 15 hrs/day on May 8th. So I time my clones so that they are ready to go out mid May. Photo seedlings are the same.
Strains can have widely different critical photoperiods. I have seen studies where some plants start flowering at 16 hours and others won’t until they are closer to 12.5. When I put my plants out on June 1st, I have some supplemental lighting…just a strong porch light to make sure it does not force flowering and reveg.
I pulled this screen shot summarizing 1 study from a lecture Dr. Bugby gave in our class last year on this subject. The percentages are how many of that strain flowered at each of the indicated “lights on” periods. None flowered at 18 hours and all flowered at 12.5 hours
