While getting the best high yielding marijuana seeds for your cultivation is critical, you could still fetch low yields if you don’t integrate them with other factors. Top on the list of these contributors lies proper plant health management. Failing to manage your cannabis plants’ health can significantly reduce their yielding potential.
What management practices guarantee high yields? This article discusses the management practices for healthy cannabis cultivation and harvest. Keep reading to learn and benefit more.
Manage Pest and Disease
Let’s start with one of cannabis’s top enemies, pests and diseases. Cannabis is vulnerable to many pests and over 90 diseases. These include mold, viruses, spider mites, aphids, powdery mildew, botrytis, fusarium, and viroids. All these issues worsen when your plants are exposed to an open environment through water, nutrients, air, and touch.
These elements significantly affect cannabis health. So, how do you optimize your cannabis growing conditions and develop an effective disease and pest management strategy? Below is our five-prong strategy to help you do it.
- Prevention. Prevention is the best cure for most cannabis pests and diseases. It would be best to proactively prevent these pathogens from invading your garden before they mess up things.
- Early detection. You must also be watchful to detect and prevent pests and diseases before they infect your crops. Inspecting the plantation or garden for pest and disease signs is vital. Some signs to watch out for include leaf yellowing, discoloration, spotting, and stunted growth.
- Integrated pest management. Developing an integrated pest management approach is the best foot forward. It helps you combine preventive measures with biological controls and chemical therapies.
- Sanitation. You must take essential precautions to sterilize all the equipment and tools you use during a cultivation cycle to save yourself from unnecessary trouble.
- Record keeping. Lastly, keep records for successful disease and pest management. Detailed records of all pests and diseases should include disease or pest type, infestation severity, and treatments applied.
Additional CO₂
Unlike humans and animals, plants breathe CO₂ during the day and use it to energize themselves. Although more research is needed to prove these suggestions, most people believe CO₂ introduction into a growing facility can boost its overall yields. While this practice might be beneficial, it may not suit every grower because of its cost implications and the risks of human intoxication.
You must also seal your grow room well for this method to benefit cannabis. Further, while CO₂ isn’t toxic to plants, it can be counterproductive if it pushes oxygen levels down. Therefore, we suggest you use this tactic after mastering all the other methods.
Defoliation
Defoliation, or removing useless, dying leaves from plants, frees up the energy plants need to develop buds. However, this management practice is only beneficial before cannabis flowering when it uses its energy levels to grow buds. Otherwise, if you do it prematurely, you might inhibit your plantation’s growth.
You may begin defoliation near the bottom and remove wilting and yellowing leaves. Yellowing is a plant’s natural way of self-pruning that removes unwanted growth. Don’t fear aiding the process but don’t overdo it because the plants still need leaves for photosynthesis. You may also remove leaves hidden from the light and use more energy than they produce.
Proper Canopy Management
Managing your canopy correctly is one of the top ways of manipulating plants into better yields. This method allows proper light penetration to plant flowers and even energy distribution to all plant parts.
Canopy management is a broad concept and includes practices that stress cannabis, while others apply to its plant density. Below are the top variations you may try.
- Topping – cutting off a plant’s head or apex;
- Fimming – multiple plant topping actions and removing its lower branches;
- Netting – installing a trellis to support plants’ weight;
- Low-stress training (LST) or bending – slightly bending cannabis branches;
- High-stress training (HST) or super-cropping – unlike LST, this method gently and purposely scars plant stems in several places;
- The screen of green (SCROG) – threading of stems through ropes or string grids;
- Sea of green (SOG) – cultivating and flowering plants in very high density.
Climate Control
Climate control is another factor to consider to improve yields. You must avoid heat stress and cold extremes because they can damage your plants, reducing their yield potential. This indoor growing measure also saves your plants from mold infestation due to poor humidity.
We recommend keeping temperature at 70–85° F, or 21–29° C, while the plants are receiving light, and setting the temperature at 58–70° F, or 14–21° C, when the plants aren’t exposed to light. Humidity levels of 50–70% are perfect, depending on your cannabis development phase.
Don’t Expect Automation to Do Everything
Climate automation is vital for successful growth. However, never expect it to do everything for you. Growing healthy plants requires you to take time and visit your crops in person. Most challenges affecting cannabis health usually manifest after a few hours. Most industry experts and experienced growers affirm that it’s easier to spot plant needs by getting personal and closer to them. A one-on-one connection lets you detect and address all health issues before they escalate.
Lighting
Lighting is one of the most crucial elements comprising the indoor cultivation climate. It empowers your crops for all metabolic processes affecting growth, from transpiration to nutrient uptake. When addressing lighting, you should pay attention to the following aspects.
Photoperiod (lighting schedule)
Your plants need different light exposure levels, calling for varying adjustment schedules. As plants grow, their chemical signals change growth patterns to respond to day-length shifts from spring to summer and autumn. Growing cannabis indoors lets you mimic and manipulate these seasons.
Light intensity
Grow light intensity also affects cannabis growth and production levels. It’s measured via photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) and refers to the number of photosynthetic photons falling on a square meter of a surface over a given period.
Photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) is the number of photons a lighting device emits. In simple terms, it’s the amount of light photons plants can absorb and use to photosynthesize.
Light spectrum
This element is critical to indoor lighting. You need to understand your plants’ spectral requirements to trigger accurate development. Based on your plants’ growth stage, you must target a particular spectrum, for example, flowering or vegetative.
Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD)
Lastly, consider your plants’ VPD value because it informs you of how they react to the environment. Proper cannabis VPD ranges from 0.5 to 1.5. Through VPD, you can know when cannabis opens its stomata or pores. Fully open stomata indicate that your cannabis is healthy and using photosynthesis. Closed stomata signify that your plants are stressed. Understanding these things helps you increase your crops’ positive stress.
Toward your crop’s final stages of the growing cycle, you can increase its VPD to close cannabis stomata through positive stress. This way, cannabis blooms well. However, if the stomata are closed prematurely, your crops will suffer negative stress.
Parting Shot
You are up to date with some of the most important plant management practices that maximize your yields. The ball is in your court to use them in your growing facility to get optimal returns on your environment.
The author of this material is Tia Moskalenko, an expert in cannabis growing and a regular blogger at AskGrowers. She monitors the market for efficient weed-growing tools and techniques and tries all innovative equipment out to share only the most effective findings with her readers and simplify the growing business of all interested consumers.