Force Flowering Basics for the Outdoor Grower
If you haven’t already noticed, cannabis is a crop with very particular environmental requirements. It is a plant which thrives in a hot, dry climates with extended seasons. For anyone growing cannabis outside of these very specific parameters, you will likely need to adopt forced flowering practices to improve harvest and reduce the risks of inclement weather.
The term forced flower is typically reserved for outdoor growing. It’s a cultivation technique designed to trigger the transition from vegetative to flower stages of growth. Forced flowering allows cultivators to grow cannabis outdoors, even outside of the ideal climate conditions seen in the likes of Northern California.
When Force Flowering Makes Sense
Putting cannabis through a forced flowering protocol makes sense for every outdoor crop grown in less-than-ideal conditions. It’s particularly handy for growers in Northern climates, with short growing seasons and wet conditions. Start the flowering early, and reduce the risk of crop damage or loss during the wet, cold, fall months.
This practice may also make sense in ideal climates as a way to maximize harvest potential. In some places, it’s possible to grow all year round, and therefore, it only makes sense to pump out more than one harvest a year. Using forced flower in warmer climates is sometimes referred to as perpetual harvesting.
When to Force Flower Your Crop
When to force flower your crop is mostly determined by where you live. Different regions will have slightly different seasonal changes in temperature, daylight hours, and precipitation and therefore different timing for transitioning your crop into flower.
You’ll want to pay close attention to the local weather. Ask the following questions to determine when it’s time to force flowering:
- What strain of cannabis are you growing, and what are the average durations of each stage of growth?
- What are the seasonal changes in temperature?
- When does the risk of frost occur?
- What are the season changes to sunlight?
Most important is determining when the temperatures or precipitation will change enough to ruin a harvest. If you live somewhere with a high risk of frost starting in mid-September, you’ll want to consider this. If your chosen strain takes six weeks to reach maturity, count backward from mid-September (when you want to harvest) to find out when to force flower. Usually, this means starting the transition in June to end of July.
Outdoor Forced Flowering Best Practices
What is the best way to force flower cannabis outdoors? Triggering an early flower requires only one significant change — shorter exposure to daylight. Naturally, in climates like Northern California, this happens in fall. But if temperatures and weather risk crop catastrophe well before crop maturation, then you’ll want to force into flower sooner.
Small hobby gardeners can rely on something as simple as a blackout tarp to manage daylight exposure. So long as there is proper ventilation and airflow, a tarp over a few patio plants is an affordable and accessible solution. Larger operations may invest in grow tent-like structures, or purpose-built blackout greenhouses to cover their crops. Finally, another solution is to grow cannabis in containers to allow ease of movement from outdoor to indoor spaces.
The two critical aspects of force flowering of outdoor plants are sticking to a very tight schedule and ensuring total blackout. If you forget to move your plants or follow a vague daily schedule, your plants will quickly become confused. In the worst cases, they may actually revert to the vegetative stage. Plant-confusion can also happen if you use a blackout technique with light leaks (ex. a tarp with holes).
Reducing Risk with Force Flowering Techniques
All outdoor cultivators growing in Northern climates can significantly improve harvests and reduce risks by adopting forced flower techniques. It’s a proven cultivation method which forces the plants to work under your timeline, not under Mother Nature’s unpredictable seasonal one.
