Growing your own weed is a resourceful way to cut on your weed buying costs, and it also ensures you never run out of your favorite smoking blunts. However, you must first ensure that weed cultivation is legal in your state. The idea of homegrown weed is rapidly gaining momentum as it is an inexpensive way to have quality weed in your jars. Growing weed at home doesn’t have to be complicated. This guide explains each step by step from the beginning to the harvesting of your cannabis buds.
Choose your growing location.
You can cultivate cannabis indoors or outdoors. If your climate is warm, outdoor growing is suitable to take advantage of natural sunlight. But you risk your plants being stolen or trampled upon by animals if you don’t fence your weed plantation. If your climate is cold, indoor growing is suitable as it allows you to control the growing conditions better. With indoor growing, you carry a lot of responsibility since the plants depend on you to survive.
Select your cannabis seeds
From personal experience, you may already know the kind of cannabis strain you enjoy, whether cannabis Sativa, cannabis indica, or cannabis ruderalis. Your choice depends on what strain you enjoy smoking or which performs as good medicine for your ailment. From there, choose what cannabis seed type to grow, whether regular seeds, feminized seeds, or auto-flower seeds. This will depend on your growing location and experience. Feminized seeds offer the best option if you only want female cannabis plants that produce the most desirable buds.
Choose other cannabis growing fundamentals.
Grow light
If you are growing your cannabis indoors, think about how you will improvise the grow lights. If you are growing limited plants in a pot, you can place the pots in a windowsill to take advantage of natural sunlight. But if you are planting your weed in a more discreet location, add artificial grow lights such as LED lights. The bulbs are cheap and readily available, and they don’t consume much energy.
Grow medium
Where will you grow your weed? Your growing medium should provide your cannabis plants with enough root support and the much-needed nutrients to grow into healthy plants. Every grow medium comes with requirements such as how frequently you need to water the plants, but the key thing is choosing a grow medium you can handle. Soil is the most common and easiest, and you only have to add organic compost to enrich it.
Air
Your plants will need plenty of aeration to prevent fungus growth. Stale environments also encourage pests and can trigger stunted growth. If your growing location is indoors, you can install some fans to keep the air circulating through the weed plantation.
Nutrients
Your cannabis plants will need nutrients to grow into healthy plants and maximize your harvests. Provide the plants with soil rich in organic compost, nitrogen, minerals, and vitamins. With nutrient-rich soil, your plants will have all they need to get through their life cycle. Also, ensure the PH of the water you will use to water them is appropriate.
Germinate your seeds
For your seeds to germinate, they need an excellent growing medium, water, and favorable temperature(warm). A pre-made seed germination kit that you can find in a local grow shop offers the easiest and quickest way to germinate your cannabis seeds. After the seeds sprout, you can transfer the entire medium to the weed plantation or pot for easy transplanting.
The vegetative stage
When your cannabis seeds from i49 develop their first leaves, they have entered the vegetative stage. At this point, the plants need plenty of light as they grow bigger and stronger. If you are growing indoors, expose them to 18+hours of light a day and 6hours of night light. You also need to ensure the grow room temperature is warmer than the room temperature around 68-86degrees Fahrenheit. Outdoors, cannabis grows rapidly when the daylight hours increase during the spring and summer.
The longer hours of light and warm temperature indicate that your plants will need plenty of water. Keep them moisturized but avoid overwatering them. How well your cannabis grows in the vegetative stage influences your yields. Tall and denser plants mean plentiful buds, but smaller plants will produce fewer buds.
The flowering phase
When the flowers start to form on your outdoor cannabis-grown plants, they have entered the flowering phase. That is when the summer heat has reduced, and autumn is approaching. This phase lasts till you harvest your cannabis buds. If you are growing indoors, you get to control when the flowering begins by changing the light cycle to 12hours of daylight and 12hours dark. But if you are growing auto-flower seeds, they begin to flower as soon as they reach maturity regardless of the light cycle.
This stage is also referred to as the blooming or budding stage. Interesting floral arrangements form depending on the strain you chose, and aromas develop. The plants may get large and bushy, and you can trim them or bend the leaves to have a flat canopy at the top so that the light can penetrate well. But ensure you understand the trimming process before you do it to avoid harming the plants. This stage requires cooler temperatures of 64-78degrees Fahrenheit. If you added any nutrients, water the plants more to flush out the excess nutrients to produce high-quality weed.
Harvesting and drying
Observe the color of the pistils, which notifies you of the right harvesting time. It starts with wispy white hairs on the buds, which then turn amber at the peak of maturity. Wait until 40% of the pistils turn darker in color to harvest. If you want buds with high THC content, wait until 50-70% turns darker. If you want high CBD content, wait until 80% of the hairs are dark, which indicates that a large portion of THC has converted to CBD. Clip the buds off the branches with scissors, then hang them to dry for five days.
Curing the buds
After drying, put the buds into a sealed jar and open the container after every few days to allow air. Cure your buds for two weeks to get the best smoking weed.
Last words
Now that you have learned about the growing process, you can enjoy cultivating your small weed plantation to enjoy smoking quality homegrown weed.