Is there a way to speed up crop-outs?

Sometimes we hear this from beginning growers who wonder about plant cycle times. They may be trying to pack more production into a shorter time frame, or maybe they're just impatient and they really want to harvest early.

So can you speed at crop outs? Sometimes, but not really.

You can't magically make plants harvests quicker. You can't just say you want to harvest at this time and then snap your fingers and make that work. But you can do certain things to make plant cycles shorter, and growers have tried a lot of these in the process of trial and error, to come up with the best systems and procedures that work for them.

One technique is to simply choose plant varieties that have earlier harvests. Instead of buying a random pack of tomato seeds, and germinating them, buy the early maturing varieties. By doing this, you're shaving something like 15 between days off of your grow calendar, and getting earlier harvests.

Another technique is to start germination earlier in tiny plant pots or by germinating seeds between paper towels. The sooner you start to sprout your plants, the quicker you can get them growing in hydroponics, and the sooner harvest will be.

Aside from these planning measures, there are other ways to expedite grow cycles. Many growers experiment with inducing flowering, which can help them to harvest earlier.

There are various elements to the process of inducing flowering in plants. One of the biggest ones is light cycles -- a grower might go from 18 hours in the light and 6 hours in the dark, to a “light all the time” approach to try to get plants to produce fruit more quickly. Some nutrient elements may also apply to this process. It's all part of micromanaging the plant to try and get more out of your hydroponics setup, and optimizing the growing process.

In some cases, sophisticated high-tech monitoring tools can help. They may not get your plants to harvest more quickly, but they may get them to produce healthy fruit and larger fruit earlier, just by enhancing the environment where your plants grow. Things like automatic temperature, humidity and pH value monitors and adjusters can really make a difference in hydroponics environments to help growers to do more with less labor.

Take a look at Dealzer’s webpage for much more on how to put together the best hydroponic systems that will help support capable and efficient grow cycles.