The flip to flower is the most structuring decision of your cycle: it sets the final size of the plants, the harvest date and the occupancy of your room. This step covers how to trigger it, the stretch that follows, and a setting that almost the entire profession applies without ever having questioned it.
Triggering flowering
Hemp is photoperiodic: it is the shortening of the lighting period that triggers its flowering. So you decide the moment, something no day-neutral crop allows.
This decision commits everything else. The later you flip, the bigger the plants are at the start, and the bigger they will be at the finish. The earlier you flip, the more cycles you gain over the year, at the cost of a lower yield per plant. It is an economic trade-off between yield per cycle and number of cycles.
The non-negotiable technical point was set out in the step on light: during the long-night phase, darkness must be uninterrupted. A single light leak is enough to disrupt the signal, and the fault is hard to diagnose because it cannot be seen.
