Join the conversation
perpetual rotation update, week whatever it is now
just pulled a purple punch auto last night, dried weight came in at 47g which i'm pretty happy with for a single plant in the corner of my 3x3. she ran about 78 days from sprout. buds were tighter than i expected, good bag appeal, smells like grape candy and something earthy underneath. definitely running her again.
the same day i chopped i had two new seedlings already sitting in solo cups, a mephisto sour bubbly and one more purple punch to keep that cut in rotation. they both popped within 24 hours which always feels like a good sign. got them under the edge of the canopy right now stealing some light while the big girls finish up.
two more plants are mid flower, probably week 5ish. one of them is throwing some really thick side branches from the lst i did early on, like genuinely surprised me. the other one is a little more compact but the calyx stacking looks solid. both should be ready in the next 3 weeks or so if they stay on schedule.
the whole point of running it this way is i basically never have a down period in the tent. something is always finishing, something is always starting. takes a little planning at first but once the rhythm clicks it runs itself. happy to talk through the timing if anyone is trying to set something like this up.
5 Comments
47g from a corner of a 3x3 is respectable, especially if that corner is getting secondary light and not dialed center canopy. People undersell what a well-trained auto in a partial footprint can do.
The part I'd push back on slightly is the "runs itself" framing. It does smooth out, but perpetual in a single tent with autos means your environment is always serving two or three different life stages at once. Your seedlings want high RH, low heat stress, gentle airflow. Your week 5 flower wants VPD around 1.1 to 1.3 kPa, more aggressive transpiration, and you may be running foliar feeds early in the cycle you absolutely can't do near open buds. Those needs actively conflict and most growers in a single-tent perpetual end up compromising more than they realize.
I ran a 4-plant staggered rotation in my 4x4 for about 8 months. Worked fine until I had a pythium issue and suddenly "always something finishing" became "always something at risk." Flipping to a 2-tent setup or even a small separate veg/seedling space fixes almost all of that.
None of that is a knock on the method. The yield speaks for itself and the logic is sound. Just worth thinking about environment management before the rhythm gets fast enough that the compromises start costing you grams.
the environment conflict point is real but i'd say smell management gets complicated fast in perpetual too, and nobody's talking about that.
in my 2x2 i run single plant at a time partly because once you've got seedlings sitting open in the same airspace as week 5-6 flower, your carbon filter is working overtime and any weak point in your ducting shows up immediately. the filter that handled one canopy just fine starts getting tested harder when you've got multiple stages of transpiration and that late flower funk all hitting at once.
not saying perpetual is wrong for smell, just that most guides on staggered rotations barely mention it and then someone wonders why their odor control stopped keeping up.
if your carbon filter is sized for your tent at peak load you're probably fine. if you sized it for "average" use, a perpetual setup is exactly when you find out.
The filter sizing point is solid but i'd argue the bigger variable is where you are in the cure cycle. I've had jars cracked open on a shelf two weeks post-chop throwing more smell than anything live in my tent, so if your cure space shares air with your grow space at all, that's another load your filter never gets credit for causing.
That cure smell point is real, my jars two weeks in are usually putting in more work than my plants. I do keep my cure shelf in a separate room though, so for me the filter load stays pretty predictable. Curious if you're curing in the same space you're growing or just nearby.
Curing in the same space definitely loads the filter more than people expect, separate room is the smarter call. I noticed a real difference when i moved my jars to a closet down the hall, tent RH stabilized a lot easier after that.
More in Indoor Growing
- perpetual rotation update, week whatever lol
- Scrog update, net about 70% full going into week 4
- Scrog net about 70% full, stretch still going
- Scrog net hitting 80% full, things getting interesting
- Scrog net at 70% day 18 of stretch
- Week 6 flower update, chasing a lockout in DWC
- perpetual update: fresh chop, fresh sprouts in the 3x3
- Week 4 of fill, net is finally coming together