I started growing in 2019 and bought my first cuts — Sour Papaya and Poon Tang Pie — at the end of 2020, and I’ve been growing them ever since.
Trying to do too much, all at once, won’t get you anywhere fast.
If you wanted to become a better athlete, you wouldn’t start with different drills for different sports every day; You’d pick one, and you’d commit to a certain level of proficiency before moving on.
Even all-season athletes commit to one sport during each season.
Growing the same cuts over multiple cycles adds one more level of control to the learning process:
- Datings vs. Speed-Dating: If you only speed-dated, you’d never get to know what the rest of the dating process looks like. If you only grow a plant once, every cycle will be your “first time,” restarting your learning process.
- Practice: Growing the same cut is an exercise in repetition and commitment. The more you practice, more skills develop, and your ability expands.
- Dialing In: Adjust your efforts based on what you learn. You’ll figure out the inputs and environment you (and your plants) prefer easier with the same plants, than with different plants with different needs and tolerances.
- Baseline: In order to improve, you need to have a metric for comparison. Growing the same plant multiple times gives you that, allowing you to see how adjustments impact your overall efforts.
- Max Out: Every plant has a performance threshold; it can only produce so much resin and plant material. And, unless you’re an experienced grower, you’ll almost certainly never hit that max on the first attempt.
By growing the same cuts, I dialed in my inputs and environment, switching nutrients, adding beneficials regularly, and getting closer to an ideal VPD.
Getting familiar with the same variety taught me how it feeds (and how varied cannabis’ appetite is), when it’s ready for harvest (based on my personal experience with her), how best to train it for my space and goals (knowing how she stretches and responds), and what impact on yields these changes had (what’s her max capacity).
Growing the same plant more than once gives you a constant baseline (both visual and measured) for improvement.
