Ok, so our ladies have been in the tent for a little over a week now. They have grown up enough to move over to their 3-gallon home. Today I am going to show you the transplant that will enable our ladies to start experiencing explosive growth in Veg.
The State of the Grow
These plants have gone through some pretty great growth over the past week. I have been getting in there and really topping all of the plants, which will produce many colas during the flowering stage. I have decided to stick with Botanicare nutrients throughout the rest of the veg cycle, but will start a new grow soon and will be trying out the House and Garden nutrient line. The idea here is to have a perpetual grow happening which means there should always be plants in the veg and flower tent with harvests happening every month and a half or so.
Why Transplant Anyway?
I have found that by transplanting my plants into larger containers from the start of the grow can have some amazing benefits come harvest time. Like any plant, cannabis can outgrow it’s home and it communicates this to us with warning signs. Soil that is constantly dry means your plant is drinking more water than it’s current home can hold. This will result in droopy leaves and dry cracked soil (along with very frequent waterings). By moving up to a larger container allows the plant to not be root bound and have a bigger reservoir from which to feed from.
Transplanting also helps to promote bigger healthier roots. If you take a seed and plant it in say a 5-gallon container, it will surely grow, but it may not grow into the biggest plant possible. This is because it has such a large space to fill and has to send roots out far from the center to feed. The result is less healthy root growth. Now take that same plant and keep it in a smaller space where it’s roots have only so much space to develop in, which promotes a lot of root development. Transplanting into a bigger container with an established root ball means bigger healthier roots that grow into the size of the container they are in. Transplanting up to larger containers until you get to Flower means a large root system which means larger plants with many more trichomes (which equals greater potency).
What’s Next?
Well next time you see me we will be defoliating the plants. This means I will be removing a large portion of the plant’s leaves. But why? Well the theory is that it promotes large amounts of growth in veg readying the plants for flower. Essentially you strip the leaves off and the grow back in literally 4 days. This allows light to penetrate down in to the canopy as well as sends signals to the plant to grow more leaves giving it a little boost in development we are capitalizing on to make our plants super strong and ready to grow lots and lots of cannabis (or hemp). Basically it makes the plant grow a ton of weed.
These little tips and tricks are what takes you from pulling 1 pound of weed out for your tent to around 3. So pay attention!
That’s it for this week’s episode. As always, a big thank you to the people at Black Dog LED. They make the best grow lights available period. I also want to say thank you to Botanicare nutrients for sending me a ton of great products to use. If you haven’t already, check out our grow book here. It is sponsored by Botanicare nutrients and is a good start for anyone just starting out. See you next time on What’s Going On in Dave’s Grow?