Organic growing for better plants; many of you know that there are many different fertilizers available on the market, but there’s a clear division; organic fertilizers and chemical fertilizers. When you give your plants chemical fertilizers, especially in the ground, you can alter the concentration of the soil and contaminate it, making the soil less fertile. If you’re growing in a flowerpot or indoors, you can just throw the soil out although you’ll still notice the chemicals in the final flavor. Outdoors, where you might be planting other things or more cannabis plants in the future, you’ll need to use organic fertilizers if you don’t want to contaminate the soil and render it infertile. Many people also grow food in their gardens, and if you’re one of them you probably don’t want to be eating something that has been planted in contaminated soil. Also, organic fertilizers give the final product a might higher quality in as far as taste and effect.
There are a lot of organic fertilizer brands and ranges, some more expensive than others. The best thing to do is to pick a good range of products from the same brand and stick with it. When you fertilize with chemical fertilizers, you need to use them with every watering which really deteriorates the health of the soil rapidly. When you’re using organic fertilizers, the best thing to do is to fertilize once a week or spread out the dosages throughout the week if you’re using multiple products.
If you know what you’re doing right from the beginning you can get precious plants. Here’s what you need to do:
The first thing you need to do is enrich the soil and prepare it for your plants. If you’re planting in a flowerpot it’s much easier, as you just have to fill the pot with a light substrate so that the plant doesn’t get too overwhelmed with nutrients at the start of its life. If you’re planting outside and you planted the previous year, you can use a product called Mineral Magic to enrich the soil, as it tends to lose certain properties and nutrients when it’s been previously planted in. You can also add worm hummus to help the plants root and grow successfully during the first few months. This will give your plants a lot of energy and growth as long as you control how much you water them and fertilize them once a week.
The pH levels in the water are also extremely important, and you should water using bottles rather than straight from the hose, allowing you to adjust the pH levels. If this is your first grow in the ground, you can make a hole and fill it with three or four 50L bags mixed with up to 20% of worm hummus.
Once the soil is properly prepared, you should germinate your seeds and grow them in a small 3L pot with soil and hummus (in proportion to the size of the pot). If you don’t grow the seed in this pot at the start, animals and insects can get at it when it’s much too young to be sprayed with anything to protect it.
Once it has grown a bit, you can transplant it to your garden, where it will thrive in the soil that you’ve prepared for it and begin growing massively. Depending on when you plant it, it will turn out to be bigger or smaller, and this of course depends on where you’re living and what the weather is like there.
There are certain things that you can do to get gigantic plants by growing them inside and transplanting them outside, and we have a whole other article that deals with that topic, so feel free to check it out.
In this article, however, we’re going to focus on organic growing and nutrition. You can use certain sprays to make your plants stronger and more resistant; B.A.C Foliar Spray is the perfect example of a strengthening spray. Don’t forget to use preventive measures against fungi and insects every 15 days to make sure that your plant stays safe. Neem oil is a good product to use as a preventive measure against all sorts of insects as the smell of this oil is venomous to insects and they won’t dare go near your plants. It can also work as an insecticide although once your plants are thoroughly infected it’s really not that effective.
Once your grow is around 2 months old your plants will really begin showing themselves, and if you’re not planting feminized strains then the sex should also begin showing around this time close to the internodes on the trunk. When summer arrives, your plants will begin changing; they’ll grow upwards and will stop being as dense in the leaves. If your plants are in a flowerpot then now is when you need to transplant them to their permanent home where they can begin flowering. This is also when you’ll want to start using a flowering stimulant, of which there are many on the market. My personal favorite is Bio-Boost by Canna. This product prevents the branches from growing too long, making the buds more compact up and down the branch and therefore increasing the final yield. The internodes will also get shorter, making your plant more compact and stronger. It also pushes your plants to begin flowering precious buds earlier than usual. Once the flowers begin to form, you’ll need to switch up your plants diet by changing to flowering fertilizer and guano.
The best way to add bat guano to your plants is to dig a sort of moat around your plant, about 30-40cm from the trunk or near the edges of the flowerpot if that’s how you’re growing. The amount of guano that you should use is about a ladle or two max per plant. Bat guano is a natural fertilizer that is absorbed extremely slowly, so your plants won’t actually begin to absorb it until a month after you’ve applied it. Don’t forget to keep fertilizing weekly with a flower fertilizer at this stage.
This is also the right time to start using preventive measures against caterpillars and fungi; you’ll need to use neem oil for a week, then Bacillus Thuringiensis for a week and finally Propolix for another week. These products are guaranteed to keep your plants safe, and they’re also 100% natural.
A month after applying the guano you’ll need to apply the same quantity you did the first time and then you don’t need to use it again. Keep up with the flowering fertilizer until the end of the grow. Guano will give your plants that little bit of extra PK to push it through the flowering phase and the fattening phase.
Once your plants are almost ready, you’ll need to wash your plants’ roots out to clean the fertilizers out of the soil so the final product is as clean as possible. You’ll need to water abundantly with just water, and you can use the hose this time if you want, completely soaking the water and letting it drain multiple times. Then you need to keep it on just water until the day you harvest it. There’s also an article on our blog about when you should harvest your plants, so feel free to check that out too. You can also purchase many root cleaning products like Canna Flash or Final Phase, that will make your plant much cleaner leaving you with a perfect taste and more efficiency.
So, now you know exactly how to grow your cannabis crop organically, getting the best out of your plants without using aggressive chemicals that can harm the environment. Happy growing!
Author: Javier Chinesta
Translation: Ciara Murphy
