in the land of Giants
There is something to be said for a giant specimen of your favorite plant variety or strain. When
the fan leaves make you feel small and you can
literally take shade beneath your cultivated plant,
you will know the feeling. A single plant might
occupy over 5 by 5 ft. of space at harvest time!
While that is indeed a swell feeling, most of us as
growers will get even more exited at harvest time:
very large yields and exceptionally high crop
quality are common characteristics of large grown
plants done right. This article is aimed at giving
you the foundation that you need to do it.
Good yields and excellent crop quality are only
some of the advantages of growing very large
plants. One of the other big benefits is that growers are able to maintain lower plant counts while
achieving comparable yields to more conventional planting densities. Experienced growers
know that large well-developed plants are hardier;
they withstand stresses that can happen during
the cropping cycle much better and still yield
well, whereas other less-developed plants will
suffer greatly, resulting in significant yield loss.
Just like in natural settings…
More efficient than you might think
Some of you reading this might be saying, “Well,
I don’t want to spend all that time growing my
plants out in veg before I can flower them to
achieve these large yielding sizes.” Fair enough;
if you did everything the same as before and just
spent longer in your attempt to create a monster,
you might be correct. However, when we grow
monsters, we need to create the right kind of
environment for our plants to show their gargantuan freakiness for us. Everything has to be
bigger! If you follow the prescribed methods, the
few small healthy plants you transplant into huge
containers with multiple light sources (which, I
admit, looks inefficient) will quickly explode and fill
up that large amount of space by harvest time.
The keys to gigantic growing
It is hard to say with certainty what the world was like in
the time of the dinosaurs, but it seems likely that plants
would have had to grow fast and large to feed those
gigantic creatures. It is surmised that elevated carbon
dioxide (CO2) levels and a lot of healthy bioactivity in
the soil (remember, there was no pollution back then)
would have created the ideal growing environment—
assuming that plants behaved the same back then as
they do today. Genetics would have been relatively pure
at that time; although, cross-breeds would have likely
occurred as pollen or seeds naturally traveled considerable distances. Still, the cross-breeding would have been
nothing like what humans have done to them.
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Maximum Yield USA | June 2013
“Good yields and excellent
crop quality are only
some of the advantaGes of
GrowinG very larGe plants.”
Another factor that’s very difficult for us to guess on is light
intensity and, possibly, spectrum (that is, we don’t know what
the levels of those factors were during prehistoric times). It’s
likely that light levels would have needed to be strong in order
to support large and fast-growing plants that could feed herds
of creatures that individually weigh more than several buses
combined. So, we can surmise that gigantic plants need to be
drenched in light from top to bottom.
And lastly, space; for plants to get monstrous, they will need
the room to do it (this includes the necessary clearance for
light fixtures and lamps).
So, in short, the components to the recipe for gargantuan
plants that look like they came out of the Jurassic period are:
• elevated CO2
• a very healthy and unlimited root environment
• genetics that are optimal for a given growing condition
and that can cause a plant to be big
• huge amounts of light that hit the plant top to bottom
• a lot of space