How To Feed Cannabis Plant – Best Tips For You

Feeding and watering your cannabis plants is crucial to successful growth. It’s just as easy to over-water as it is to overwhelm your plant with too many nutrients today, I’m going to talk about different growing mediums, nutrients, and water. How much? When to water? And how to be responsive to your plan? 

Let’s start with the growing media. You can choose from soil, natural materials like sphagnum, and coco. They can even be certified organic, or you can grow hydro. This literally means without soil. Using materials like Rockwool or pea gravel, if you choose soil, you’ll decide between something inert like Pro-Mix or a super soil with preloaded nutrients like Xtreme Coco.

After deciding on your soil, you have to choose your nutrients. Do some research, there are many lines of nutrients out there offering many deferent pros and cons. It’s always recommended that you try out a few lines of nutrients before sticking to a single one, especially since not all strains react the saime to nutrients. 

 

When deciding on the amount of each nutrient that you need to feed just stick to the manufacturer’s instructions. Later on in time once you have more experience growing with the same strain and nutrients you’ll start to notice small changes in the number of nutrient you feed, but it won’t be from what the manufacturer suggests so that’s a really good place to start. 

The last thing to note is overfeeding your plant. There is only so much nutrient you plant can absorb, anything adobe this will stay in the water and in the soil causing the pH and EC to change which results in the stomata (the thing that collects nutrients) to close up, if this happens next time you feed your plant won’t make use of most nutrients. An easy way to avoid this is to measure the ppm of your runoff, as long as it’s below 1000 you are ok, but ideally, you want to be around 500ppm. If the ppm of your runoff is higher than 1000 I recommend you use a flushing agent to reduce the nutrient buildup and allow for better nutrient uptake in future feeds. 

In the topic of overfeeding it’s also important to consider using too much of one type of nutrient or additive can cause a nutrient deficiency. Basically what’s happening is a competition in the root of the plant. When you feed your plant, the elements are competing to go into it, the winners go in and the losers stay behind, the problem is that in the case of cannabis those ‘losers’ are vital for a healthy grow. This deficiency only occurs if you add more of one type of nutrient that you should have, it can happen by accident, and it’s no biggie; however if that overfeeding is caused by conflicts in your regular feed, then its an issue.

Sorry if I said feed too many times in that last paragraph, but it was an important point. One which won’t apply to you if you stick to one nutrient line for your entire feed or you properly research how all the nutrients work together when designing your feeding regimen.

 

Now let’s talk about water. I found the best way to water your plants is to cycle. Cycling involves watering to complete saturation. Then allowing the pot to almost completely dry before watering again. This will encourage the most prolific root system. Cycling keeps roots, constantly searching and growing each time the moisture recedes the root system will improve creating a solid root ball.

Adding nutrients can affect the pH of the soil. So check your inputs and runoff. Optimal pH for soil gardening is around 6.5. So make sure your inputs are between 6.2 to 6.7 for hydroponics optimal. pH is around 6.2 and for coco it’s closer to 5.8. The pH balance of the soil affects how well your plants absorb nutrients.

If the pH is too far. You’ll quickly notice signs of deficiency like yellowing leaves, anything more than three or four tents outside the optimal range, and your plants will struggle, like trying to drink liquid through a collapsed straw. If the pH level of your nutrient solution is too low. Just by using a PHL product, add just a little at a time until you hit your mark.

If the pH is a little high, as high as seven, I suggest you don’t adjust organic media always acidifies over time that said, if your inputs consistently come in very high, you can adjust down to six points. Just 6.7.

 

Another thing to monitor is the PPM or parts per million of your water. This represents a level of dissolved solids in this. Monitoring input numbers and comparing them to run-off numbers is one way to know if you’re over or under feeding different stages of the growth, have different acceptable PPM levels.

Try not to overdo anything. When plants are young, they require very little of anything too much water or newts can really stress them out. The best thing you can do for your plants is to check on them regularly, get to know them and the timing of their wet, dry cycles and how this changes as they.

Keeping the pH and the PPM levels as optimum as possible, getting these details, right. We’ll give you a far better chance of success.

 

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