Every farmer expects to enjoy the highest possible yields from their cannabis. However, the law of life requires everyone to reap what they sow. This rule implies that every cannabis grower should invest in their expected and desired bumper harvest. Paying the price for this good harvest isn’t always easy, but it’s still necessary and possible.
So, what should you do to enjoy optimal results for your investment? What techniques should you use to ensure your cannabis crop yields the best it can? This post discusses the strategies you must employ to get rich yields from your cannabis plantation. Remain on this page to learn more.
Begin with High-Quality Seeds
As seen from the law of seed and harvest, your desired bumper harvest starts from and depends on your seed quality. The market has hundreds of strains spanning the Indica, Sativa, and Ruderalis categories. Choosing the correct strain of high yield seeds for sale https://askgrowers.com/seeds/high-yield boosts your harvest prospects by giving you a good head start because all the other techniques will be supportive. That means buying poor-quality seeds and expecting great yields is like investing in a Toyota Corolla and expecting to enjoy an experience only Rolls-Royce gives.
Use Fertile Soil
Getting the right seeds is good. However, all seeds may thrive or fail, depending on where you plant them. This fact brings us to the soil fertility (or other soilless mediums) your cannabis will grow in. Natural soil is the best medium because it has most of the nutrients plants need. It contains other living organisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and protozoan, that make cannabis healthy.
Address pH
Addressing the pH issue builds up on the soil factor we addressed earlier. Cannabis thrives in acidic-leaning soil. Most cannabis strains grow well in pH levels ranging from 6.0 to 7.0. Conversely, exposing your plants to a pH shortage or excess reduces their ability to absorb nutrients. Thus, you should monitor soil pH levels using lab testing, handheld pH meters, and automated sensors.
Automate Growing Environment Controls
All plants develop in specific environments and respond to external factors. You may grow your crops outdoors or indoors. The environment depends on essential factors like temperature and humidity, critical to cannabis survival and thriving.
Some locations may expose cannabis to excessive cold or heat. If you live in such an area, growing marijuana indoors should minimize the external risks your plants get exposed to.
Moreover, indoor growing allows you to automate environment-managing processes. Automation saves you time and money, reducing the risk of human error. It also saves your plants from sudden temperature changes.
Using computerized automation seamlessly blends ventilation, cooling, irrigation, and heating, significantly reducing the need for human labor. For instance, automating humidity and temperature controls can help you optimize plant development and reduce mold breakout possibility, producing healthy buds. Automation ensures excess temperatures don’t burn delicate cannabinoids and terpenes during flowering. Lastly, you rest assured of harvesting crops with increased potency, effects, and flavor profiles.
Automate Nutrient Supply
Automating nutrient supply is another technique that boosts cannabis plant yields. Timely nutrient supply guarantees plant survival and health. It ensures you supply the right nutrient quality and quantity. Giving inadequate nutrients retards plant development, while excess supplies cause leaf burn.
Increase Light Intensity
Providing your plants with sufficient lighting is a life savior for cannabis. You must provide weed plants with an evenly distributed light source. We recommend finding the ideal distance between your plants and supplying upper and side light sources to maximize light exposure. Again, research the most energy-efficient lighting systems for your grow room to reduce heat stress and energy costs. In such a controlled environment, you can easily intensify the lighting intensity and boost photosynthesis.
Apply Plant Training
Plant training is another method that improves overall plant yield. By bending the plants, you can manipulate their growth using low-stress training. Taller and thinner plants usually produce low yields, while flat and wide ones produce more due to increased light exposure to their leaves.
More light availability to leaves gives your weed sufficient energy to boost the plant’s overall growth. However, this method requires extra care, and you must only engage it when plants are still young and flexible enough. Applying this method late could break the plants and cause them to become unproductive.
You may also train plants through Screen of Green (scrOG). This manipulation tactic involves placing a net or screen over cannabis to make plants remain shorter and grow wider.
Lastly, you can train cannabis through super-cropping. This method lets you bend plants until they produce a snap sound before taping the broken part. However, be careful not to break the plant’s skin. This method needs extra caution and skills to achieve satisfactory results. This training promotes new growth at the near-break points without interfering with plant growth.
Increase Container Size
Scaling up production is another method for boosting cannabis plant yield. Increasing the container size and production space allows you to grow more plants. This technique is effective if you have a budget and enough free space to do it.
Use Trellising
Some plants struggle to grow and lack the strength to support themselves. A plant with a supportive structure bearing its weight can advance to a more advanced phase. Trellising is a basic method where you build wooden structures to guide and help plant growth.
You can construct these supportive structures using different wooden and non-wooden types of materials. These support pillars can be horizontal or vertical. It allows your plants to keep thriving without unnecessary struggles.
Execute Accurate Harvest Timing
Lastly, learn to listen to plants to get optimal yields. Successful growth requires you to do the right thing at the right time. You should discern the timing to harvest the highest possible yields. Most strains have a two- to three-week harvesting period. However, you may push the period a little longer to allow plants to increase in size.
Premature harvesting produces poor yields, and your buds are doomed to low potency because they don’t have enough time to mature. Inversely, delayed harvesting may also be counterproductive. It makes buds lose potency, terpenes, and the necessary cannabinoid concentration in the form of THC and CBD.
So, what factors affect harvest timing? According to David German, general manager of Commonwealth Alternative Care in Massachusetts, this crucial timing depends on the plant’s life cycle and your grow facility’s overall operations. David adds, “Harvesting may be the last step, but harvest timing is also the first step.”
The plant life cycle is a continuous process that enables a farmer to plan everything on time; it lets you plan your plant genetics on time and maximize your growing facility’s overall output. This way, listening to nature allows you to understand how well to support your outdoor growing around the year. For instance, formerly, growers looked for windflower lupin before planting their gorilla plants. Lupin growth tells you that the soil is rich in nitrogen, which promotes better cannabis health. Capturing nature’s voice allows you to know the necessary adjustments to make.
Bottom Line
There you go with everything you need to know about the techniques that enable you to boost your cannabis output. We hope you will apply these tactics to boost your next cannabis-growing project.
The author of this article is Denys Svirepchuk. Denys is an avid grower interested in cannabis cultivation and trying various growing techniques since his college years. He tests various productivity-boosting methods and shares his observations with the audience of AskGrowers to simplify people’s entry into the weed-growing industry.
