Why have one cannabis harvest in a year when you can have up to 6?

To keep product flowing in your space, consider growing cannabis in a perpetual harvest.

If you're just trying to grow your own weed, this means keeping your jars always stocked with fresh buds. If you're commercial, this means steady income and employment at your facility.

Perpetual harvests take out the waiting game, allowing you to stay busy working without everything piling up all at once.

To achieve this type of schedule and its benefits, read this guide on how to maintain a perpetual harvest.

Organizing Your Perpetual Harvest

The only way you can pull off a perpetual harvest is to get organized. 

When you're growing one crop at a time, you're only controlling one set of environmental parameters. This includes changing your temperature, humidity, and light cycle based on the growth phase your plants are in.

With a perpetual harvest, all phases of growth from start to finish happen simultaneously.

Due to the differences in each phase of cultivation, you'll need separate areas to prevent altering intended growth. Depending on the scale you're going for, you can do this by having three separate tents or rooms. 

Tents are smaller but are completely light-sealed, meaning you won't have any leaks. If you choose this setup, you can either move plants between different phase tents or simply keep one run in the same tent through harvest.

If you're setting up different rooms, you have the opportunity to have more workspace and higher yields. You can fill out your space with these bundle kits of pots and irrigation.

In addition to organizing your space, you'll want to plan, track, and record the following parameters of your grow:

• Timelines for germinating seeds or rooting clones
• Timelines for vegetation ("veg") and flower
• Transplant dates
• Watering and nutrient schedules (to make it easy, try the Full Tilt regimen)

It's all about getting a rhythm. You want to make each timeline sync with one another so that you always have plants filling the empty spaces after harvest. Having a plan and recording the time that everything takes will help you achieve this.

Throughout the process, you'll also need to make a system for sanitizing the spaces and treating pests before moving new plants in. Be sure to find a Safer Choice cleaning product that's safe for the people and plants in your facility. 

Designing Separate Spaces for Each Photoperiod

If needed, you could work with only two separate spaces. Cannabis starts and vegetative plants have the same minimum light requirements, so you could group them. That said, having a designated space for seedlings or clones will keep your ship sailing smoothly.

It allows you to watch them for healthy root development and early issues. For example, if you buy clones from someone else, quarantining them in a separate space will allow you to make sure they're healthy before integrating them into your veg room. 

Space #1: Seedling or Clone Photoperiod

Your first growing space for your cannabis starts will be the smallest and fastest cycling area. 

If you go from seed, it will take 2 to 3 weeks longer than starting from a clone. Some people prefer this method so that the plant develops a strong taproot. To get fast and consistent results, use a heating pad set to around 78F. 

Should you decide to clone from your own plants, keep in mind that cloning from clones can eventually lead to senescence. Senescence is cellular degradation over time due to genetics getting worn out. To avoid it, you can keep a healthy mother to clone from rather than cloning from vegetative or flowering plants.

Regardless of which method you choose, cannabis starts should have a minimum 18 hours of light. 

They thrive in temperatures of 78-82F with a high relative humidity of around 68-72%. 

Using an incubator kit, clones will be ready to put into the veg room after a few weeks once they develop healthy roots. To stay on schedule, you'll need to start new clones 2-3 weeks before you harvest the plants currently in flower. 

Space #2: Vegetative Photoperiod

Once your cannabis starts develop healthy roots, you'll move them into your veg room. 

Here, they continue thriving on an 18/6 light schedule but prefer a blue light spectrum for optimal leaf and node growth. Temperature-wise, you should shoot for 82-86F during the "day" and higher than 77F at "night". 

At this phase, they need a relative humidity between 72-78%. Due to the potential issues involved with this much moisture, you may need to add extra air circulation depending on your space.

The timeline of the veg period can vary with the cultivars you work with as well as the desired size of the plants. For example, pruning and low stress training small plants can reduce the veg photoperiod.

Having an understanding of how long your cultivar needs to finish flowering will allow you to keep your vegetative plants growing for the same amount of time. That way, when you harvest one crop, the veg plants you have going are ready to fill their space.

Space #3: Flowering Photoperiod

To mimic nature, you should reduce your light cycle to 12/12 in a red light spectrum to flip your plants into flower. It's critical to keep the light schedule consistent, as overexposing your flowering plants to too much light can send them back into veg. To avoid error, use a master lighting controller to automate this process. 

The ideal flowering temperature is between 72-86F depending on the stage of flower you are in. Supplemental Co2 is recommended, especially with higher temperatures.

For relative humidity, there are three different guidelines based on where you're at in flower:

• Early flower: 65-75% humidity
• Mid-flower: 55-70% humidity
• Last two weeks: 45-50% humidity

Tapering the relative humidity as the plant finishes can reduce the chance of bud rot, mold, and powdery mildew. This is because powdery mildew, for example, needs high humidity for its spores to germinate. 

You can also take the preventative measure of using fresh air exchange (FAE) equipment in your flowering room. This includes inline and exhaust fans with filters.

Keep in mind that your flowering room needs to be bigger than your veg room, as plants get 2 to 3 times larger in their last push of growth.

Other Perpetual Grow Considerations

Unfortunately, there's no blanket statement advice to give as far as setting up your exact timeline for your perpetual grow. It takes a combination of knowing your cultivars, experience growing, and experimenting to find your rhythm.

That said, Indica-dominant strains are faster, as Sativa-dominant strains take their sweet time in the final flowering phase (sometimes up to 4 weeks longer). If you're wanting to find the fastest cultivars to flip, look for either India-dominants or auto-flowers.

Still, each cultivar has a slight variation. If you don't know how long a specific strain will take to finish, start with one strain and record all the data. Or, you could set up individual tents for each strain to figure out the timing, but this could get confusing for a beginner.

This allows you to learn about the genetics you're working with so that you can create a smooth-sailing operation.

Another consideration with perpetual growth is getting consistency. What's the point of having an efficient timeline if you're not achieving maximal growth?

In other words, you should dedicate time to low-stress training and pruning your plants to keep a consistent height and canopy. This especially rings true if you're growing different cultivars, as you don't want tall plants to outcompete others for light.

Most indoor growers choose between two pruning techniques: SOG or SCROG.

A SOG is a "sea of green", which is when you grow a higher number of plants so that you have a full canopy of even growth. A SCROG is a "screen of green", which aims for that full canopy but achieves it using fewer plants. You can do this by forcing the plants to grow horizontally instead of vertically.

Although it's highly debated, both methods tend to yield similar weights. The decision then comes down to the space you're working with, the time you want to spend, and the number of plants you want to cultivate.

Keep the Flower Flowing

Now that you know how to maintain a perpetual harvest, you can get geared up for an endless supply. Set up your 3 growing areas and be sure to keep healthy plants in every growth phase at all times.

It will take time to find the right rhythm for the cultivars you're interested in, but it's well worth the challenge. If you're brand new to the cannabis world or want an easy-to-reference refresher, check out our How to Grow guide.

Shop now to get the equipment you need.