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How to Prune Your Cannabis

How to Prune Your Cannabis

how to prune cannabis plants

Plant pruning is an essential tool for keeping your plants healthy and keeping energy focused to the parts of your plant that need it most.

If you don’t prune your cannabis plants, the small branches and leaves under your canopy can steal that energy away. It might seem wasteful to cut off any part of your plant that looks like it is growing fine, but it can actually be the opposite.

Why Prune Cannabis?

When your cannabis plants are young and just starting their vegetative stage, they’re small and it’s easy for light and air to penetrate every part of your plants. But that changes as they grow.

As your cannabis grows taller and wider with vegetative growth, the canopy that develops can start to take the majority of light away from the lower portion of the plant. This means that branches, leaves and even potential flower sites can’t get the light they need.

Additionally, as your plant grows thicker and forms a canopy, it becomes difficult for air to penetrate and pass through the whole plant. This causes the lower parts of your cannabis to get stuck in pockets of warm air with little light, and that’s no good.

Pruning your cannabis is simply just getting rid of the parts of the plant that aren’t going to produce flower or benefit the plant going forward as it grows.

How to Prune Cannabis

You can maintain regular basic pruning practices with just your hands, but to really have an impact, you’ll want to use a pair of trimming scissors and have a pair of shears on hand in case you run into a tough branch.

Before you break out the scissors, check your plants for dead leaves, withering leaves, and leaves lower on the plant that aren’t receiving light. Remove these leaves by hand to get a better view of your plants throughout to see the branches and flower sites you might want to remove.

Next, beginning at the bottom of your plants, you want to looks for branches that are growing upward and underneath the canopy. Due to their growth pattern, these branches will never be able to get the light they need to produce harvest-worthy flowers and be cut out.

There may also be flower sites that have formed directly on the stem of your plants. You want to snip those off too.

By cutting out these branches and lower flower sites, your plants will focus more energy on the tops of your plants, producing bigger, better flowers up top.

Don’t Prune Later in Flower

While you can (and should) prune your plants regularly throughout their vegetative stage and early into the flower stage, you will want to cease pruning when they get three to four weeks into the flowering stage.

Cutting off portions of your plant later in the flower stage can reactivate vegetative growth from the sites you cut. Needless to say, if vegetative growth starts up in your flower stage, it’s going to take extremely valuable energy away from your flower sites at the top of the plants.

Best Cannabis Root Supplements

Best Cannabis Root Supplements

best cannabis root supplements

The fastest way to plant your cannabis isn’t always the best, and just putting your plants into the ground and giving them water doesn’t always get the best results.

Just about every ganja grower is planting their outdoor cannabis over the next few weeks if they haven’t already. Especially if you’re growing from clones that you got started inside, you need to take extra precautions to make sure they don’t suffer from transplant shock or rooting issues once you move them to a new outdoor medium.

There’s a few different products we like to use at The Real Dirt that have been tried and true over the years. These are proven root supplements that yield great results, from thriving root zones with fat, healthy roots to lush vegetative growth that gets your plants primed for flowering. If you have other root supplements you love to use, comment at the bottom of this post what your favorites are!

What is a Root Supplement?

To get the basics out of the way, when it comes to plant health and development, there’s three major nutrients that plants need, and you probably already know them: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (NPK).

But NPK isn’t all a plant needs to thrive, and supplementing other micronutrients and beneficial bacteria with your regular nutrients can boost plant development during specific stages. When you want to boost your plant’s root health so they grow bigger and stronger – which will always leader to bigger and stronger plants above ground – you use root supplements.

Best Root Supplements

Here’s our top three root supplements that you should try out.

Elite Root Ignitor

Elite Root Ignitor root supplement

Engineered to perform, Elite Root Igniter is specifically formulated to increase root mass. Like the foundation of a house, a root mass that is thicker and spread evenly will provide stronger support.

This translates to lower stress levels on your cannabis and more effective absorption of both water and beneficial nutrients. Simply put, more root mass is better!

This formulation is a state-of-the-art liquid mycorrhizal inoculant. Mycorrhizae, a species of beneficial fungi, are scientifically proven to increase root mass, and lessen the damaging impacts of medium toxicity.

General Hydroponics RapidStart

general hydroponics rapidstart root supplement product

RapidStart enhances your growing experience by delivering a powerful blend of premium plant extracts, amino acids, and nutrients generating explosive root growth.

This root supplement stimulates prolific root branching and development of fine root hairs that increase nutrient uptake and grow healthier, whiter roots.

Using RapidStart will make your plants explode! And you can use it during the entire growing cycle in all types of growing media, including coco.

Botanicare Rhizo Blast

botanicare rhizo blast root supplement plant product

Rhizo Blast from Botanicare is a powerful root developing tonic that boosts root growth.

Their proprietary formula contains a blend of seaweed, single-celled algae and other mineral nutrients that help generate robust root growth while maintaining a strong rhizosphere.

Strong Roots = Strong Plants

That’s what it all comes down to in the end. Some plants have naturally strong roots that will spread throughout your soil rapidly. Others might need a little help in the beginning to get going.

But with a root supplement at the beginning and throughout your growth cycle in addition to your regular feeding regiment you can create a massive, strong and healthy root zone that will be visible in your plant size, durability and yields.

4 Issues Cannabis Growers Deal With

4 Issues Cannabis Growers Deal With

Growing cannabis isn’t easy. In fact, growing great cannabis consistently is difficult for most. However, the issues growers face are widespread and much more common.

New growers face a lot of the same issues when they get into cannabis cultivation. But even experienced growers can face the same issues, especially when expanding. 

The fact is, the bigger your grow, the more problems you’ll likely have to deal with. From mold and mildew to clogged lines and broken timers, here are some of the most common issues growers deal with, and how to deal with them yourself.

Powdery Mildew

If you’ve been growing, you’ve probably already dealt with powdery mildew. For the lucky few that have avoided PM up to this point, powdery mildew is a fungal infection that destroys your plants.

PM thrives in warm environments, which makes your flower room a great spot to sprout its spores. The reason PM is so hated by growers is that it can’t be cured. Once your plant is infected, it must be destroyed. Then you need to spray down the rest of your plants with some fungicide to prevent the PM from spreading any further.

Luckily there are organic options for dealing with PM so you cannabis plants will still be consumable.

Bugs

As long as plants exist, so will bugs that try to eat them. When it comes to cannabis specifically, the most common bugs growers encounter are aphids, mites, thrips and white flies. There are other bugs that can be problematic if you are an outdoor grower, like grasshoppers and crickets.

When it comes to bugs like mites, that are so small you can’t see any problem until your plants are affected, it is better to be proactive in the grow. The options for pesticides and insecticides are vast, but there is a select list of products you can use on cannabis. Keep in mind that the permitted products on the list don’t apply in all states. For example, some pesticides permitted in Colorado are not permitted in California.

Irrigation Issues

Irrigation issues normally plague growers who are producing on a larger scale and must use irrigation to compensate. While a drip irrigation system is extremely cost effective and efficient in the grow, one problem can throw off your entire system

Other issues that can arise in your irrigation are mold and mildew, which can do just as much damage to your plants.

One clog in your tubing that goes unchecked can result in the death of however many plants are down-line from that clog. And in a large scale operation, that can mean hundreds of plants. However with regular maintenance, checking your lines for clogs consistently, cleaning them out often, and timers and notification systems that you can set up, these problems can be easily avoided.

Environmental Control Issues

There is a small window of environmental settings that allows cannabis to thrive. Straying too far outside these climate requirements is detrimental for your plants. A lot of new growers will just throw some plants in their room and feed them, without much regard for the temperature or humidity of the room.

The easiest way, though an expensive option for the hobbyist or home grower, is to have an automated environmental control system. You can set up monitors that track your temperatures and humidity, and notify you when there is a fluctuation. Of course, if you don’t have a proper ventilation system or A/C and heat set up in your room, a controller won’t be of much use.

As long as plants are growing, bugs will try to eat them. Hand watering won’t always be efficient. Cold weather will damage your plants if not accounted for. These issues seem obvious, but a lot of people deal with them every day.

But you don’t need to break the bank and build out the next generation grow room to be efficient. There are plenty of DIY options for irrigation, as well as simple and easy to use pesticides that are also organic for use in cannabis. And you don’t need a high-tech environmental controller to stay on top of humidity.

If you’re willing to put the time and work in to save the money, you’ll be fine. Or if you got the change to spare, spend it wisely.

Maintaining Cannabis Quality: Tony Don’t Smoke OG Ep. 107

Maintaining Cannabis Quality: Tony Don’t Smoke OG Ep. 107

Cannabis quality isn’t everything when it comes to growing, but it’s definitely at the top of the list.

Chip, Tony and i225 are back this week with a new episode of Tony Don’t Smoke OG. In this episode, the three talk about cannabis quality.

i225 Grew some great Cookies that the gang puffs on during the episode, and it brings up the topic of growing great tasting weed, consistently. While it may be as simple as i225 puts it — just making sure your plants get what they need when they need it — it ain’t always that simple.

How plants are grown, how far apart plants are places in the garden, air flow, etc. All of this plays a factor in how your plants turn out. But being consistent with how you grow your plants, regardless of how well you’re actually growing them will always produce similar results.

That’s why it’s always best to stay on top of your schedule, take care of your plants just right, and do it consistently. Don’t over-pour your nutrients or over water to compensate for not watering often.

Hear more on consistency in the garden in the full episode of Tony Don’t Smoke OG!

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