Jay Brown - Growing Marijuana Indoors

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.

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.

I don’t recommend CO 2injection for personal growers due to the constant exposure to hydroponics stores for CO 2tank refills. CO 2injection 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 CO 2injection system can encourage vigorous growth and promote bushy plants that grow to maturity about a week faster than normal.

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.

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.

Healthy plants are grown in soil or soilless mix with a pH level of around 7, which can be measured on a pH pen/meter (available from hydroponics stores for around $100). Such a pen is invaluable in growing plants indoors and allows you to monitor pH levels in both soil and water. Be sure to check the units of measure on the brand of pen you are using, as they may vary.

Check the pH of your water reservoir on a regular basis and keep it as close to pH 7 as you can. You can use pH up or pH down solutions (available at hydroponics stores) to balance your water to a reading of 7. Try not to put too much pH adjuster in the water at any one time. If you mess up and put in too much pH up, don’t put in pH down to rebalance the water. Better to drain your water and start over with clean water. Having a perfect pH of 7 isn’t useful if your solution has too many chemicals and not enough pure water. If after adding fertilizer to your water reservoir, you add pH up and then find that your final pH reading is 5.8 instead of 6.3 to 7 (the perfect range for pH) just leave things alone and go with that. If you try rebalancing with too much pH up or pH down, you may find your salts and pH meter readings are bouncing up and down and they may be unable to accurately read the final mix.

Ideally you must try to feed your plants a fertilizer and water mix that has been perfectly balanced to a pH of 6.3 to 7. Adding fertilizer to water will lower the pH of the water, so you’ll probably need to adjust it with a little pH up. Once you become familiar with the amounts of fertilizer and pH up required for your garden, start adding pH up before you add fertilizer. You will require less pH up if you add it before the fertilizer. It may require a little practice to become familiar with the levels of pH up and fertilizer required, but in time it will become second nature. A monthly check with a soil slurry will show a reading of the pH that has built up in your soil or soilless medium. Read further along this chapter for more information on how to conduct a soil slurry test.