How to Grow Cannabis 101, Part 2: Early Season Success!

Welcome back, budding horticulturists.

First and foremost, yes, that pun was intended!

We’re so glad you’re back! By now, we hope you’ve already germinated your CBD seeds and transplanted your established seedlings into larger pots. Ideally, those potted plants have migrated out of your germination station and into the sun, where they have been transplanted again into even larger pots. Essentially, we’re hoping you’ve got your very own backyard CBD farm!

As this is being written (June 8th, 2023), the plants at our farm are slowly, but surely, making their way into the ground, and that means it’s time for you to do the same! That way, we can all successfully harvest our CBD flower before the cold weather takes hold.

Planting Your CBD Plants

To begin, ask yourself some questions.

• Where will my plants be happiest?
• What part of my property gets the most sun?
• Are there nosey neighbors that will see my plants?
  • Is that a bad thing?

Once you’ve chosen the perfect new home in which to grow your very own batch of CBD flower, transplant your plants into their final pots. Or, you can plant them directly into the ground if 1, you’ve got naturally-great soil or 2, you plan to fill in the hole with high grade potting soil and/or compost.

Keep in mind that the size of your plant's final home will determine its eventual size. So, if you’re going for discretion and would prefer smaller plants, use a 5 gallon pot. If you’d like larger plants, use a 15-20 gallon pot. Looking to see just how big your plants can get? Grab a 50 gallon fabric pot from the garden store or put your plant directly in the ground!

Nutrients

Now that you’ve got your plants in the ground, it’s important to remember one thing - it’s called “weed” (or, in this case, CBD weed) for a reason. It literally grows like a weed. Your plants have one goal, and that is to get as big as they can and produce pungent, resinous, CBD-rich hemp flowers.

While it’s true that they’ll grow regardless of what you do, you’ll need to give them the nutrients they need in order for them to reach their full potential, and produce the nicest CBD flower possible.

We recommend using fertilizers listed by OMRI, the Organic Materials Review Institute. These fertilizers are produced using high-quality organic ingredients and will help you to produce CBD flower free from synthetic chemicals and heavy metals - just like ours!

Choosing the Right Fertilizer

You’ve got a couple different options when it comes to organic nutrients. You can use pre-made fertilizer blends or you can make the blends yourself, using individual ingredients that provide the nutrients you need.

Here’s a quick list that you can use to develop your own blends:

• Fish meal for nitrogen
• Bone meal or bat guano for phosphorous
• Kelp meal for potassium
• Dolomite lime for calcium and magnesium

For first-time growers, we recommend using a pre-made fertilizer blend; OMRI-listed, of course. It’s entirely possible to make your own, using the constituent parts above, but without proper research, it can be easy to over-use certain ingredients.

On the other hand, if you’ve spent time cultivating your soil, you can rely simply on compost tea. Not sure what that means? We’ll leave that for another time.

Vegetation Phase

As we said earlier, we’re writing this article at the beginning of June. If you’ve already planted your hemp flower babies or are about to plant them, you’ll need to give them nutrients that are intended to encourage vegetative growth. These fertilizer blends will often be called something like “Grow” or “Core,” and will be high in nitrogen.

Flowering Phase

In early July, you’ll begin seeing your CBD flower plants pushing out pistils (colloquially known as “hairs”). That means your plants are transitioning from their vegetative growth phase to their flowering phase!

At this point, it’s time to switch to nutrients that will encourage the growth of your plant’s CBD flowers. These nutrients will be high in phosphorus and will be called something like “Bloom” or “Flower.”

Pruning

So, your plant is flowering! Congratulations.

It’s time now to start pruning your plant. You’ll want to do this in 2 different places.

1. Lower branches

These branches will not receive sufficient sunlight to produce anything of merit. Instead, they’ll simply pull energy from viable flowers on the outer edge of the plant.

1. Small buds close to the stalk

You’ll want to get rid of these as well, for the same reason listed above.

Support

Your plant will need to be supported, as its branches will soon be heavy with resinous, CBD-rich flowers.

If you opted for smaller plants, this can likely be done with a stake placed against the central stalk and a few stakes around the outer edge to prop up individual branches. Go to your garden store and get some green tape. Use this to tie your branches to the stakes.

If you went for larger plants, we suggest getting some rolled fencing from your local hardware store with a minimum mesh size of 3” x 3” - but the bigger the better! Using this, you can make a cage around each plant, and as the buds get bigger, you can gently pull them through the mesh, offering the branches extra support.

That’s it for now, friends! We’ll catch up with you later in the season for some new tips. 

In the meantime, are you feeling antsy for some harvested, trimmed, and cured flower? You know we've you got you covered with the finest hemp flower around!