It seems you have acquired some misinformation and I really don't want to bore you so I will try to keep this short.

In plants, flowering may be triggered by one or more of several sensory pathways which the plant uses to determine the season. One such pathway is light. A photoreceptor in plants known as phytochrome is responsible for causing the flowering response when night becomes the appropriate length. This is because phytochrome comes in two forms which are converted between each other. During the day more of one form exists and during the night more of the other form exists. This pathway for triggering flowering in cannabis has a requirement for long nights. For a short-day plant (or long night) long-day conditions presumably causes a hormone to be produced which delays flowering. To my knowledge, this hormone has yet to be identified and it's very existence is only a theory.

  • Flowering is still growth and growth is best with the most light.
  • The flowering response is like a switch - on or off.


With these two points we can determine that the best situation to be in is the longest day which still causes flowering (such as the recommended 12 hour day). The only way around this I can think of (but have never tried) is to trick the phytochrome into thinking the night is longer than it really is.

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thepaan Reviewed by thepaan on . Light cycles and budding hormones? I read somewhere that cannabis plants are always producing a hormone that induces budding. Also this hormone is destroyed by light and this is why the plant will not bud when the days are long. The light is destroying the hormone enough so that it has little, if any, effect. Then when the light period is reduced to 12 hours, the reduction in light allows the hormone level to get high enough to allow the plant to bud. I was wondering if having even less light would make much of a difference Rating: 5