Fumidoro recommends

Grow organically if you can. You’ll get better flavors, better highs, better looking plants and more color. Most importantly you can avoid supporting a stupid bottle industry that has ripped off stoners and growers the world over and at worst led to soil erosion, phosphorus runoff and algal blooms downstream of conventional agriculture inputs. Conventional agricultural fertilizers literally came from surpluses from the weapons industry. Choose Organic my friends and reap the rewards in your plants and dare I say it, on your conscience.

Listen to the great Clackamas Coot and top dress with malted barley. No you can’t use too much. Yes there’s probably an exception but I bet yours isn’t it, you can mulch with the stuff. Don’t overpay for garden amendments, none of them are made by Mercedes. Buy organic but don’t buy boutique. I like coconut water and aloe. I grow aloe in my veg space and give the pups to my friends because aloe likes to grow and make its own babies. Did you know Aloe was one of mankind’s first domesticated crops? It’s true! I just grind a whole frond in a blender and dilute with water. You can strain the fiber off if you want. You can even clone in it and if you have an aloe plant if you ever cut yourself or get a sunburn you can use some of your fresh aloe on yourself too!

I swear by an 11/13 flowering light schedule (11 hours on and 13 hours off) and I usually veg my plants at 16/8 to keep veg plants a more manageable size. The biggest difference you’ll find is in switching to 11/13 or even 10/14 (and of course anything between) is that your plants will more thoroughly enter flower. They will finish quicker, they will color up more, they will be more pungent and you will see more phenotypic variation from individual to individual.

In my opinion light schedules like 12/12 and 13/11 (13 hrs on) don’t quite trigger full flowering for the plants we like to grow. If you look at a globe or a map and look at places like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the rest you will see that they’re not too far from the equator, or at least closer than you thought. Use this fun calculator to visualize where on Earth a specific plant may have come from like Jamaica or South Africa or Burma and adjust the slider to their latitude. What you find is a radically different light schedule than most of us are used to up here in the global north at 45 ish latitude. http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/coordsmotion/daylighthoursexplorer.html

Take a look at Afghanistan. Gosh you don’t even get 11 hours of daylight at the end of October, what if your varietal doesn’t finish until the end of October? Well you would be blasting it with two to three hours too much light is what.

Not all varietals will thrive with that shorter schedule. Use your due diligence and experiment! If you’re running a pure tropical plant from close to the equator, you may need to keep it at 12/12. Or perhaps a shorter flowering time will trigger your plant to shorten its flowering time from 16 weeks to a more manageable 12 weeks. Give it a shot!