Trimming during the vegetative state is good for making bushy plants, but never trim a plant once it is budding and in flower. When your plants have reached the end of their vegetative growth period, take a cutting from each plant before transplanting it and moving it to the budding room. This keeps your garden stocked with new plants as needed.
Transplanting Seedlings and Clones
When the cuttings or seedlings have completed the vegetative stage and are about two months old and two feet tall, they are ready to be transplanted and moved to the budding room. You’ll need:
• five-gallon planting containers with ¼” drainage holes in the bottom.
• lava rock or commercially sterilized gravel
• Pro-Mix or another commercial growing medium, preferably soilless
• water or a mild quarter-strength bloom fertilizer formula
After you have the materials,
1. Prepare the receptor plant pot so that it is half full of soilless mix.
2. Position your donor plant pot directly over the receptor plant pot.
3. Place a finger on either side of the seedling or clone’s main stem and turn the donor pot upside down. The seedling or clone should easily slip out into your hand. If the donor plant does not easily slip out of a plastic pot, squeeze all around the pot to break the seal of the soil against the sides of the container and then try again. For a clay pot turn it upside down and tap the sides and bottom with a rubber mallet until the donor plant slides out into your palm or receptor pot.
4. Flip your palm over and place the seedling or clone and its root ball into the receptor pot.
5. Add soil or mix around the root ball until it fills the receptor pot to a couple of inches below the top.
6. Water the plant to settle the soil around the roots, using pure water or a mild quarter-strength bloom fertilizer formula.
7. Move the transplanted seedling or clone to the budding room.
Basic Care During Flowering Growth
Flowering growth lasts about two months and follows two months of vegetative growth. Some cannabis plants require two and a half or three months of flowering to reach maturity, while others can shave a few days off the two-month flowering time and be ready after six or seven weeks of flowering. It all depends on the genetics of the plant you choose to grow.
Flowering growth requires 12 hours of light per day followed by 12 hours of uninterrupted darkness. Even a small light left on during the 12-hour night period can stop a plant from flowering and send it back into its vegetative cycle. Fertilizers that have a lot of potassium are essential in this part of the plant’s development. Most of the heavy bud growth occurs during the final two weeks of blooming, and if you harvest even a week or two early you’ll get skimpy buds that are half the weight and half the flavor of a fully developed bud. If you run out of smoke near the end of the budding cycle it is better to buy some weed than cut down your budding plants a week or two early.
Plants in bud stretch during the first few weeks of the 12-hour light regimen, sometimes growing twice as tall as they started before they are finally harvested. Once plants are over three feet tall, support them by tying them to bamboo stakes. If a plant grows too tall during its blooming cycle and comes too close to thelamps, bend it, don’t trim it. Squeeze the stalk at the bend and slowly force it so that it is horizontal to the floor, being careful not to snap the branch off. Once the plant is bent, leave it alone to recover — which it will. Trimming a budding plant stops any further growth along the limb. If you must trim a budding plant for any reason, trim a side branch but not the main stem. Trimming the main stem will stop or slow growth in the entire plant, while trimming a branch stops growth only in that branch. So, if you must try a sample of your weed, cut a branch, not the trunk.
When feeding your plants during flowering growth, keep an eye on the white flowering tips. If the pistils (white hairs) of the flowers begin to turn brown within a few days of feeding, it is an obvious sign of overfertilizing. Too much water or fertilizer and most insecticides will cause the white pistils to turn brown. Cannabis plants are very sensitive during flowering and should be monitored closely.
CO2 Injection
I don’t recommend CO2 injection for personal growers due to the constant exposure to hydroponics stores for CO2 tank refills. CO2 injection is a needless expense. It might increase the yield slightly, but it also requires closing the vent fans in your room, which leads to heat buildup that damages your plants. Having stated all these negatives, though, a properly set-up CO2 injection system can encourage vigorous growth and promote bushy plants that grow to maturity about a week faster than normal.
Hydroponics
You might hear a lot about hydroponics as being the best way of growing indoors these days. It is not. The same is true of aeroponics and flood and drain systems. The problem with all of these hydroponics systems is that they pump water and nutrients into the plants, and then the water returns to a common tank to be used again. That means all the plants share the same used water, so any water-borne viruses, diseases, or bacteria are shared by all plants. If one plant happens to pick up a bad infection, it will spread like wildfire through the entire garden.
My hydroponics garden once contracted a case of rust, and it spread to every plant. I had to start my garden over again from seeds. Similarly, root rot spread through my hydroponics garden one time, and it wiped out my plant crop and continued to infect my future plants even though I sterilized the entire garden, pots, lines, and pumps. I scrubbed walls and floors with bleach. I changed to a whole new strain of plants. And still the plants in my garden developed slimy root rot and died. I realized then I’d have to throw everything away and start with all new seeds, pots, and equipment. That is when I decided not to take a chance with hydroponics ever again, even though I had several decades of success using such growing methods. I went back to individual container growing, in which excess water and nutrients evaporate instead of returning to a common water trough, and I never had root rot or rust problems again. If one of my plants did happen to contract a disease, I could simply remove it from the garden without contaminating all the other plants.
3
MAINTAINING
Your GARDEN
With beginner’s luck and a modicum of knowledge about growing plants, it is possible to grow a bumper crop of pot even on your first try. The trick is to produce a heavy harvest of pot on successive tries. One reason that might explain why beginners often grow a good first crop is a result of hybrid vigor. Most commercial cannabis seeds today are crossbreeds or hybrids that for the first crop grow stronger and heartier than the second generation plants will, and in subsequent crops clones will become successively weaker. But clones are so much cheaper and easier to deal with than starting from seeds that the advantages of cloning exceed the drawbacks. In order to compensate for the weakening of the plants over time it is imperative to take advantage of every trick in this book. It is tempting to take shortcuts, but avoid the temptation. Every little detail I have included is for a good reason. Now let’s get started.