July 30, 2020
Growing medicinal plants is a fine hobby that can secure your personal stash. With months of planning, water and energy usage, you want your plants to produce as many flowers as possible. Find a discrete location where you can cultivate. You can grow outdoors, where you have the advantage of natural sunshine and atmospheric conditions. Growing indoors/using indoor grow tent tends to be more reliable however, as you have a lot more control over that environment. Whichever you choose, there are a number of principles to keep in mind for maximising yields.
And it’s always worth it to try new techniques for maximizing your yields. After all, the larger your production, the higher your profits. The higher your profits, the more potential there is to expand your operation, increase yields yet again, rake in more money, lather, rinse, repeat.
Whether you feel like you’re stuck in a rut or you just want to make sure your current yields are really the best you can do, we’re going to share some great tips for growing more quality buds than ever before.
Let’s start with the most effective adjustment you can make.
Sometimes when a plant is struggling to grow, it doesn't even have the strength to support itself. If medicinal plants have a structure bearing their weight, it can help them advance to a more developed stage. A basic technique of gardening is trellising. This is where wooden structures are built to aid and guide the growth of plants. The material can sometimes be wood, but also bamboo or kinds of metal. Any such strong material can be arranged in a mesh or simply as supportive rods. These can keep your plants separated and sturdy whether you're grow setup is horizontal or vertical. A bamboo rod could be enough for your medicinal plants to continue flourishing.
Use Bigger Containers For Your Plants Indoor
Much like goldfish, your plants will grow to fill the container it’s in. One simple way to scale up production is to, well, scale up production. For higher yields indoor, you want your plants to grow wide rather than tall. You want a bushier plant so more buds have access to direct light, rather than a long, lanky plant with several buds hidden under a canopy. By transferring your plants to larger containers, you can encourage more outward expansion.
Give The Right Light Spectrum While Buds Form
Giving plants more red and far-red light in the flowering stage seems to increase yields compared to using the same grow light in a bluer spectrum.
Indoor Grow Lights
Choose lights that include white, red, and far-red diodes. It’s common for suitable flowering LEDs to be listed with a “3000k” light spectrum, or listed as being high in reds. The light often appears pink/yellow/reddish.
HPS Grow Lights
The spectrum of HPS is already perfect for maximum yields in flowering, but make sure to choose a high-efficiency bulb (“Super HPS” bulb) as they produce more light for the same amount of watts.
Nutrition
Something that will need to be precise throughout every stage of cultivation is nutrition. This includes the high demand for water which must be met. Bare that in mind if you live in a drought-prone region. There are nutrients the plant needs, but be careful not to provide too much of them. Yellow tips on your plant are a sign of too many nutrients, potentially spoiling the plant. A key balance to get right is between the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in your fertiliser. During the vegetative stage, there should be high nitrogen, medium phosphorus and high potassium levels. During the flowering stage, there should be low nitrogen, medium-to-high phosphorus and high potassium. It's also possible to use certain Epsom salts to provide sulphur and magnesium for the plant's health.
Control Temperature (and humidity)
A good growing environment is crucial to the health of your plants, as well as your final potency and yields. When the temperature (and to a lesser extent the humidity) is too high or too low for your plants, your plants will not grow properly and buds won’t fatten up no matter what else you do.
Too high temps late in the flowering stage can also reduce the potency of smell of your buds by burning away cannabinoids and terpenes.
By controlling temperature and humidity, you can actually increase the smell and potency of your buds at harvest.
If there is a particular source of heat that is harming the plant (like a hot quantum board grow light), you’ll know because the leaves closest to the source of the problem will wilt and turn a brownish color.
Harvest At The Right Time
The rule of thumb is: do not rush into it. Patience is key.
Harvesting too early means the buds have not had time to reach peak potency. Once you're past "too early", the longer you wait to harvest, the more the effects of the bud move from a speedy, energetic high to a more relaxed, narcotic high.
Final Thoughts On Maximizing Yields
As mentioned at the beginning, there are many factors that effect medicinal plants yields. The 6 detailed above are the ones that will have the largest impact. Get them right and you will enjoy yields far larger and far more potent than the average grower.