How To Maintain A Perpetual Cannabis Harvest

If you love cannabis, then you probably enjoy having freshly cut buds anytime you can get your hands on them. Depending on your setup, you could be harvesting as often as you like. Whether you are growing at home or have a job mass producing weed, setting up perpetual cycles makes every stage of cultivation easier to manage. This article teaches you how to organise your grow rotations so you always have a harvest waiting around the corner.

Why Maintain Perpetual Harvests?

Other than the obvious reason of having a constant supply of weed, why would one want to maintain perpetual harvests? Well, a steady flow in the harvesting department means you do not have to do it all at once. In other words, the labour of harvesting one plant per week is much less demanding than having to chop a whole garden full of plants every month or two.

Rotating cycles usually involves organising individual grow tents so that each tent contains plants at different stages. Having separate grow spaces for clones or seedlings, vegetative and flowering plants also means not all your eggs go in one basket. That means if something goes wrong, there isn't such a high risk of losing the whole harvest.

• Full control over each stage of growth
• More harvests per year
• Less work on harvest day
• Easier to manage problems

How Often Should You Harvest?

How often you harvest comes down to your goals as a grower. If you're under pressure to produce a lot of weed, you may want to spread out the work by having a few extra tents so you can harvest more regularly. Commercial grows often involve a lot of work, so it can help to distribute the load rather than having to deal with one massive harvest.

The more tents or spaces you have to grow, the more regularly you can harvest. An individual looking to maintain perpetual cycles at home can happily manage with just two tents. Of course, more grow tents requires more equipment, so it can get quite costly to install. How big you go depends on how often you want to harvest, which will also determine how many tents you need.

It also helps to know your strains flowering times and how long you plan to keep them in vegetation. Sativas tend to have longer flowering times than Indicas, so if you want to harvest more often, consider the genetics.

Autoflowers, on the other hand, can all be placed in the same tent and perpetual harvests are still possible because the light schedule is less important than it is for photoperiods.

Setting Up A Perpetual Grow

Multiple Grow Spaces

In order to achieve perpetual cycles, you need to have a different space for each stage of growth. Each phase (seedling, vegetation, flowering) requires distinct conditions so it makes sense to have 3 spaces where you don't have to constantly adjust light schedules, temperature or humidity.

As a minimum, the idea is to have your vegging plants ready to flower at the same time you harvest flowering plants so they can be moved into the flowering room. New seeds or clones can also be ready to move into the now free vegetation room. And the cycle continues.

4x8 multi-strain rockwool perpetual grow

However, if you do not want to have to move your plants around, simply have different tents with their own harvesting date. Start the cycles in relation to when you want to harvest.

So, if you want to harvest every two months, start another grow in a separate tent two months after you start the first one, then another two months after that, and so on until you reach 6 harvests per year. Either way, you can at least double the amount of harvests you get in a year by planning with perpetual cycles. This more than makes up for the extra expenses. 

Clones/Seedlings

Clones and seedlings require fairly specific conditions if they are to get off to a good start. Although they can be grown in the same room as your vegging plants, it is best to keep them in a separate space so you can look after them properly. They do not need much room but having their own space means the conditions can be set to meet their exact demands without interference from other plants.

A single square meter tent is enough to host hundreds of clones or seedlings that can later be distributed to their vegetation rooms. Bear in mind, the larger the space, the harder it is to control, especially if it is full of plants at different stages.

It's best to group plants by strain to avoid getting them mixed up. For example, you might be growing 4 strains, and have 10 clones of each. They can all be kept together in one space and then as they root, each strain can be transferred to a dedicated tent with more powerful lights.

Tip: Clones and seedlings benefit from cool lights such as CFLs which can be set on a 24/0 or 18/6 schedule, or somewhere in between.

Vegetation Room

The vegetation room is designed to keep your plants on a steady 18/6 schedule until they are big enough to flower. Your plants will still be small compared to their final size, so plan accordingly. Cannabis plants can double or triple in size after moving them to the flowering space.

An indoor cannabis plant normally spends about 4 weeks in vegetation before flipping it into flower. This depends a lot on the strains you are growing, as well as whether you apply any training techniques to control their size.

Tip: Keeping a mother plant in your vegetation room means you can always have new cuttings ready as your flowering plants reach harvest day.

Flowering Room

Your flowering room can be set to 12 hours of light, 12 hours of dark. The most important factor here is that the space is completed sealed from light, as you do not want to accidentally revert your plants back into vegetation. 

Once you have moved your plants into this space they can spend the rest of their life there until harvest. To give you an idea, roughly 9 plants medium sized, fully flowered cannabis plants fit comfortably in a 1x1 meter grow tent.

Remember to start your new clones or seeds 3-4 weeks before harvest so you have some plants to put in your vegging room once it's empty.

Tip: Clean your grow rooms between each move to prevent spreading any potential pests or fungus.

Autoflowers

Autoflowers are a great way to fill up extra space around your grow rooms. They also work extremely well for maintaining perpetual harvests and multiple plants can be kept in the same tent on the same light schedule, but all be at their own stage in life.

Alternatively, you can set up various tents and group autoflowers into their stages of growth. An autoflower has a short cycle anyway and requires less maintenance than a photoperiod strain, so this way you are able to produce tonnes of weed in no time, and have constant harvests.

Autoflowering perpetual harvest by DudeGrowsWeed from GrowDiaries

Conclusion

Getting the rotation right may take a bit of practice but the key is timing. As you learn more about your strains and how to grow effectively, your schedule will develop to suit your needs. Just remember to think realistically about how much weed you need and how often.

Do you grow perpetually? We'd love to hear about how you set up your cycles. Share your ideas with other growers by dropping a comment down below! Happy harvesting!

External References

Vegetative growth of Cannabis sativa L. cultivars in Jamaica using 18/6 photoperiod. International Journal of Plant Science and Horticulture. - Emanuel, Machel & HENRY, Valrick & Robinson, Dwight. (2020)

Chemotaxonomy of Cannabis I. Crossbreeding between Cannabis sativa and C. ruderalis, with analysis of cannabinoid content. Economic Botany. - Beutler, John & Marderosian, Ara. (1978)

This article was updated November 2020.