August 04, 2020
There are several stages to growing medicinal plants with your indoor grow tent kit. Preparation starts from deciding what seed to buy and ends at harvesting. Here are the stages of growing a medicinal plant
Choosing the seeds
Germinating seeds
Moistening seeds
Seedling stage
Vegetative stage
Flowering stage
Harvesting
Given that explaining each stage in-depth would take quite some time, we are going to be honing in on one very important stage today: the seedling stage.
Your indoor plants will never be as vulnerable as they are in their seedling stage. Seedlings are prone to damage and disease than they are at any other stage in the plant’s life cycle. That’s why taking special care at this point in the growing process is a must.
While these warnings may sound dire, the truth is that while caring for indoor plants seedlings is extremely important, it isn’t terribly difficult to do if you know what to look out for. This article is meant to serve as a beginner’s guide to caring for seedling indoor plants.
These three basic steps should be enough to get you started:
Choose the right pot for the pot
When it comes to picking pots, we recommend the following approaches for autoflowering and feminized seedlings.
THE RIGHT POTS FOR AUTOFLOWERING SEEDS
When growing autoflowers, we recommend planting them directly in their final pots. Because of their short life cycle, it’s best to avoid putting autoflowering strains through any kind of unnecessary stress, including transplanting. While the exact pot size you use will vary depending on the strain you’re growing and the size of your grow space/indoor grow tent, most auto growers use pots between 5–15l.
THE RIGHT POTS FOR FEMINIZED SEEDS
If you’re growing feminized seeds, transplanting isn’t as much of an issue since these plants have time to recover from the stress. Using Easy Start germination pots, you can support robust health right from the beginning. You’ll want to transplant your seedlings just before they start outgrowing their starter pots. We typically recommend transplanting once they’ve grown sets of true leaves that spread out to cover the full circumference of their current container.
From here, most indoor growers move their plants directly into 12l pots, but you can go above or below that to suit your particular strain and grow setup. Keep in mind that you can (and should) up-pot feminized photoperiod plants a few times to max-out development, meaning you don’t need to transplant your seedlings into a giant pot right away.
THE RIGHT POTS FOR FEMINIZED SEEDS
A NOTE ON POTS
From cheap nursery containers to sophisticated smart pots, growers are spoilt for choice when it comes to picking the right container for their indoor plants. And while it’s possible to grow great medicinal plants in cheap plastic propagation containers, there are a couple of things you’ll want to keep in mind when choosing pots for your medicinal plants.
• Drainage holes
Make sure your pots drain well to protect your plants against fungal pathogens and root rot. If your pots don't already contain holes (or some other kind of mesh to allow runoff), you'll need to puncture them yourself.
• Aeration
One of the functions of a plant's substrate is to serve as a site for air exchange between the roots and the environment. Smart pots like the RQS Fabric Pothelp your plant’s roots respire by allowing more oxygen to reach them. This translates into faster, more vigorous growth, healthier plants, and a better harvest.
• Pot size
Keeping tiny seedlings in huge pots increases the risk of overwatering, as your plant’s roots won’t be big enough to extract all the water from their substrate. Any water that stays in the substrate will effectively drown the roots and attract pathogens and pests into your garden/grow room.
Environmental Conditions for Growing indoor plants
indoor plants seedlings are delicate when it comes to their needs for growth. The environment they’re growing in should be fairly specific:
Grow Room Lighting
Though seedlings are just small indoor plants, they already need a specific type of light in order to flourish. The good news is that they don’t need the same intensity of light that their fully grown counterparts do, and a simple CFL light or in the blue light spectrum should do just fine.Once they’ve developed healthy true leaves and at least 2–3 nodes, you can move them under stronger HID or full spectrum LED grow lights to start vegging.
Watering
Watering the seedlings is where many first time growers experience their first real issues. It’s easy to over-water, so that’s something that needs to be very closely monitored during the seedlings stage.
Provide the seedlings with the right nutrients
Your indoor plants will not yield quality and potent buds without the help of the proper set of nutrients. indoor plants seedlings, however, do well in producing their own nutrients without having much interference. That said, as your plant grows, it will need more nutrients than what soil alone can offer.
Do not overfeed your seedlings. Doing so will end your indoor plants seedlings’ life prematurely. Check that you are supplying the right nutrients as some of the well-meaning nutrients available in the market could poison the seedlings.