You can plant a seed in the ground, give it water and hope for the best. Or you can get the best hemp products for growing and blow away the competition.
Growing hemp indoors will produce higher quality results than that of hemp grown outdoors on a large scale. Not to any fault of the grower, but due to the conditions of growing outdoors, the plants just have to endure more, including changing weather. Indoors, all of this can be avoided to grow hemp that looks and smells great.
However if you are growing industrial hemp on a large scale, there are still some hemp products in this list that you can utilize to increase productivity.
Hemp Products for Propagation
Whether you’re starting from seed or clone, you’ll need to start them in a controlled environment indoors. Whatever option you choose, you are best off putting those seeds or clones into some root plugs. There’s rockwool, coco, peat and other options you can try to hold your young plants, but you’ll need somewhere to put all of them once your seed and cuttings are put into the plugs.
Cheap and easy, all you need is a 50-cell plastic tray, or a 72-cell tray to house your root plugs. You’ll also need a bottom tray to hold your cells. This will make it much easier to move your plants around once they start to bulk up plus you can get them with holes for extra aeration and drainage.
Best Lights for Growing Hemp
When you are still in the propagation stage, T5 lights are one of the most common and effective options. They are also easy to find compared to other specialty lights.
The great thing about T5 lights is that you can easily increase their effective range. You can have two bulbs in one fixture to cover a smaller area, or if you have a larger propagation area pick up a 4×8 T5 ballast to cover twice as much area with one fixture.
Another great light option for propagation is LED light fixtures. LEDs can be expensive, but they are extremely cost effective and efficient in the grow. You can get just a single bulb, up to entire strips and fixtures depending on the area you need to cover. The best option by far though, is the 315 LEC (Light Emitting Ceramic) bulb.
Also known as a CMH (Ceramic Metal Halide), a 315 LEC bulb packs a lot of light power into one bulb. It is great for bulking up your plants during the vegetation stage, and is powerful enough to continually provide the light they need all the way through flower, resulting in healthier, more consistent yields.
You Need Rolling Benches
Hemp can be a vivacious plant that grows tall and wide if not trained and trimmed consistently. The bigger your plants get, the heavier they will become and the more space they will take up. If you just throw your pots on the ground or on a roller for each individual pot, you’ll be spending a lot of time moving plants back and forth just to get through your grow.
With rolling benches, all that extra work is gone. You can get benches as small or large as you need, and it allows you keep your plants in the same place, while still being able to move them easily. Benches are essential for optimizing the space in your grow.
You can push them together when you need more space, and you can push them apart to easily create walkable aisles. Without rolling benches, you’ll be spending way more time just trying to squeeze between plants without breaking branches.
To really succeed in growing the best hemp, there is more you’ll need to add to this list. Irrigation, humidity and other environmental controllers, the nutrients you use and more can all be a game changer if you aren’t putting as much focus into them right now.
Get some of the best tips for which products you should use, whether to grow form seed or clones and more on The Real Dirt Podcast.
