When is the best time to flip your soil growing plants from growth to budding?
I’ve noticed that older plants are not as vigorous with growing their roots nor their bud as a nice young seedling or clone. So I want large plants for a good yield but I also want a young plant that is vigorous with root growth. What are some good guidelines to follow?
Be very strategic in your up-potting: Use cloth pots and allow the root ball to fill out its current container prior to transplanting, but before root binding.
Consider growing SOG style if using clones, 4 week veg + 8-10 week flower. Ensure your mothers are sexually mature before taking the clones.
Edit: I should have asked, hydro or soil?
Growing in soil with pots, haven’t tried cloth pots yet. Will transplant into a greenhouse for the budding stage.
Cloth pots give amazing root structure and I’ll never go back. The last 5 gal i chopped was one solid root ball, i couldn’t even shake perlite out of it.
Edit: For workflow in a SOG, you can go from solo cups into one of these on a pallet: https://www.grassrootsfabricpots.com/shop/4x4-fabric-raised-bed/ Then when the time comes to flower, you just pallet jack your bed from your veg to your flower room (make sure your doors are wide enough).
I moved to the plastic rootmaker pots recently, but still definitely recommend the cloth ones. Insane roots compared to traditional pots.
I like the plastic ones only because they are easier to wash between uses.
Size.
I moved away from fabric pots because they are harder to clean.
If you order them in bulk they’re cheap enough to discard. For cleaning, flip them inside out and pressure wash with a mild bleach addition.
you wash your pots? I don’t think I’ve ever washed mine 
Lmao, ok, WHEN, I wash my pots!
Ok so the big question is where are the cheapest bulk cloth pots that are potentially Good Life Gang affiliate? 
Not washing them can be a quick way to transfer pytheum if you had any root rot. You could also soak a shit ton of them in a tote with something like UC Roots or bleach, if your only concern is sterlization.
that’s a good point. I typically only use pots nowdays for vegging, then 16 gal totes that get no-tilled for the most part so they always have soil in them.
You can flip any time after you start seeing preflowers. Do you know how much your current strain will stretch in flowering? Once you know that, you can figure out how big you want to go before flipping.
stay away from smart pots, they leak way too much water out the sides.
Real question, back on topic, clones or from seeds?
Clones I wait until they’re established and the size I want in the final pots.
From seed, once they show signs of being mature and they’re big enough to snip a couple of clones from, I’m on the pheno hunt from seed, so I’m more in a fast is better mood to determine if anything is a keeper.
this is solid advice if you have ceiling height limitations like me. I flip based on size 99% of the time taking into account the amount of stretch that strain has. I’ll also only flip if I have a sufficient amount of branching. If it reaches the target flip height and doesn’t have adequate branching, I’ll super crop the tall tops, or just cut them off and use them as clones and let the rest of the plant bush up some more.
While flipping for size can be beneficial, if you do 4 week veg and 8 week flower you can get 4 harvests a year.
Yep, that pic shows a good example of a female in preflower. Flipping any earlier won’t initiate flowering, but will stunt growth.
I’d add the caveat that gender expression in veg is very strain dependent. I’ve had some show in week 3, while others were nothing till week 5-6
Edit: if you allow some strains to become root bound, they’ll begin to flower under 18/6. Not useful for production, but I’ve done it during phenohunts.
