Hypothesis - Plants respond to insect attack by detecting chitin in wounds, and boosting potency and/or terpenes.
Indoor growers using sterile media might be missing out on this potency trigger.
Test - Simulate insect attacks by scratching/cutting leaves/stems with your fingernails. Ideally file your nails a bit first, to increase chitin surface.
Inflict a little bit of damage on your plants with your nails, copying a typical leafhopper attack. (scratch new shoots).
If it works, it might reduce yield as a tradeoff for the increased terpenes in an attempt to discourage insects.
Obviously, a good or bad result on just one plant doesn't tell us much, it would need to be quite a few plants experimented on.
Just a thought.
