Creating the Best Growing Environment for Cannabis
When growing cannabis there are ways to create the best growing environment for your cannabis plants. If you are growing in a grow tent you can easily control the environments, however if you’re growing outdoors, it will be harder to do.
Why is having the Best Growing Environment So Important
If a grower would like to have the healthiest cannabis, and the increased yields then the best growing environment is very important for the grower to have. A poor growing environment will lower your yield, get more diseases on the plants, and have poorer quality marijuana buds.
If you can keep your growing environment in check, you can have bigger yields, plants will grow faster, healthier, greener and pest resistance plants, better smell, taste and potency with your harvest cannabis.
Keeping your plants happy will reward you ten-fold over the years.
Most important factors for a cannabis growing environment
There are five very important factors to keep the best growing environment that include:
Temperature
A marijuana grower must keep the cannabis plants temperature in check. If the plants temperature is on the low side or even too low the plant will no grow fast and will die if it gets too cool in your growing environment. The cannabis plant does best with a temperature of 69.8F (21C) to 77F (25C).
When the plant gets under 60F (16C) it will start to slow in growth. You can grow in higher temperatures of like 82.4 (28C) however it will not help much unless you use CO2 Supplementation in your growing environment.
Keeping temperature in a good range will make sure you don’t get Fox tailing on your flowering plants. This is when the cannabis flowering sites start to stretch out from the plant. To keep your plant’s buds dense, it is important to keep your grow room cool. This is the second most important factor to light in getting tight dense buds on your cannabis.
Grow Environment Lighting
Indoor grow lighting has changed a lot over the last few years. Growers have gone from power-hungry High-Pressure Sodium lighting that was very hot and inefficient to much cooler and better LED grow lights to get the best growing environment.
The amount of light the plant gets in vegetive growth doesn’t have to have the intensity of the light the cannabis plant will need when it starts to flower.
Lighting that you give to your cannabis during flowering is the number two factor in how large a yield you will get from your plants. It is only number two to cannabis plant genetics.
When picking lighting for your grow room it is important not only to pick a bright light. You must also check if the growing like has the right spectrum for your grow. Will you use it to grow your plant for vegetation or use it for flowering the plant. If you are using the light for vegetative growth you will want to pick a light that is high in blue light waves. Buy a light for flowering will require a light with more yellow and orange waves.
Keeping the Humidity in check will create the Best Growing Environment
Unlike temperature and light humidity will have a somewhat smaller impact on your growing environment. If the humidity gets out of range it will not normally cause any major problems in the growing environment.
All cannabis plants environments will require different humidity in the space depending on what stage of growth it is in.
Best Growing Environment Humidity
- Clones – Around 70% Humidity
- Vegetative Growth – Between 45% to 60% Humidity
- First Weeks Flowering – 40% to 50% Humidity
- Final Weeks (last two weeks) – 35% to 45% Humidity
The most important time to keep your marijuana grow room in range is during the last few weeks of flower. Not keeping your humidity in lower during this time of growth can result in your cannabis flowers growing mold inside of the buds.
Once mold gets inside the buds it is very hard to spot until you see you buds starting to turn brown and die. If you are getting access humidity in your grow room it is advised to get a dehumidifier.
Growing Environment Air Flow and Ventilation
When growing cannabis, you will always want to have great ventilation of your marijuana grow space. No matter how warm or cool it is your growing space, not matter how hot the lights are you will always need to be ventilating grow room air.
Cannabis plant transpire no different then humans. They will give off warm wet, humid oxygen in the grow space. They are also removing CO2 from the grow room space as well. For this reason, it is important to remove that spend air from the space. It is best to remove the old air in the space every 5 minutes.
So, for this reason it is also very important to bring new air from outside the space to replenish the old air you have just ventilated out of your space. Keeping the air clean in your grow space can prevent issues with things like, bud rot, mold, fungus gnats, and most importantly in flower powdery mildew.
Importance of Air Flow over your plants
When using a fan in your grow room always remember you don’t what to be blowing the leaves almost off the cannabis plants. Instead, you will want to keep a gently breeze blowing over your plants. The grower is looking for the leaves to just be moving slightly in the breeze you have created in your grow space.
Using Ventilation to Keep the Heat Down
One of the most important usages of ventilation is to vent the grow room to keep you heat down. If you are using older forms of lighting like HPS or Metal Halide bulbs you will need to keep the room vented to the outside. Many growers forget that even with LED it is important to vent the room to keep the heat down. If your cannabis grow room is consistently over 87F (30C) it will be best to bring in Air Conditioning or some other form of cooling the room.
Even with LED lighting it is still very important to have good air exchange in your marijuana growing spaces.
Making the Most of your Marijuana Grow Room Lighting
Cannabis is very much a light loving plant. For this reason, you will want to make the most of the light you are using. It is important for the cannabis grower to use something to reflect the light to their plants to help create the best growing environment. If you are buying a grow tent then this aspect of creating the best reflection of light to the cannabis plants, will be take care of for you. However, if you are making a room or using a grow closet then you will need to make sure you are using something reflective to reflect the light hitting the walls back to the plant.
There are many ways you can do this so we will only talk about the best ones in our opinion.
- Paint the walls of the room with glossy flat with paint
- Buy reflective materials like the ones you get in your grow tent
- Buy white glossy plastic to staple to your walls
Anything that you do will stop the walls of your grow room from absorbing the light will help give your plants for light and a bigger harvest.
Conclusion
There are many things that can go into creating the best growing environment, but we feeling these are the most important ones. If you can master these issues in your cannabis grow space you will have the best harvest of marijuana buds possible. If you are looking for cannabis seeds to get started in your new growing spaces please visit our cannabis seed shop.
