In my most recent grow I had one of two cannabis plants re-veg at around day 50 of flower. I made a post on reddit to see what the cause might be. I received an influx of comments telling me it must be light related, which is the usual cause. I was confident there were no light leaks in the box, I am very particular about using light blockers at any ventilation points and use gaskets to seal the door.
So I took to the internet to try and find other potential causes. This is what came up:
- Light leaks
- High Nitrogen during flower
- Too much light (light stress)
- Poor Genetics
Re-vegging can be identified by the appearance of new growth coming out of otherwise flowering buds. Perhaps the most telling indicator is the round or flat-leaf. You can see the telltale sign in the picture below:
Monstercropping – is a technique that actually encourages you to re-veg your plants. It is done by taking clones off of a flowering plant and re-vegging them under 18/6 or 20/4 lighting. The idea is that these re-vegged clones will produce stalkier bushy plants. I have not tried monster cropping and do not plan on it. Re-vegging seems like a recipe for getting hermaphrodites or other stress-related issues.
Steps for fixing re-veg:
- Full reservoir water change
- No nitrogen in nutrient solution
- Light cycle from 12/12 to 10/14 (shorter days)
- Trim off all new vegetative growth
To tackle the problem with my plant I decided to do a complete water change. 6 Gallons of tap water was brought down to pH 5.7 and only 30mL of FloraBloom was added for nutrients. The hope is that this low nutrient solution would remind the plants that it is time to finish. The MicroBloom was added to give a Potassium and Phosphorous kick. FloraGrow and FloraMicro were omitted to eliminate any nitrogen from the solution.
The new growth was trimmed off for aesthetic reasons, and because I believe that it would not finish in line with the rest of the plant.
Finally, I cut the light cycle down to 14 hours of darkness 10 hours of light as a further bid to encourage the plants to finish and prevent any further vegetative growth.
A few days later I noticed that my other plant was starting to re-veg. I killed the lights and started to look for a leak.
Sure enough there it was. Glaring back at me. The duct tape cover I had put on my thermo-controller had peeled off. This was not a large amount of light, but it was in the red spectrum that plants are sensitive to during flowering.
This turned out, like most grows, to be a learning experience. Signs of re-vegging do almost always point to a light leak. The plants finished very well after taking the steps above and rectifying the light leak.
