Taking care of cannabis plants should, above all, be a pleasure; yet it’s perfectly legitimate for the smart cannabis grower to try reducing time spent doing repetitive and boring tasks. Some growers might be short on time in general, while others simply want to lighten the workload. Sometimes, a few small adjustments can make a big difference in your daily and weekly maintenance routine. Or perhaps a radical change in growing technique is the best solution to time issues. In most cases, by carefully planning your tasks and resources, you should be able to save precious time without compromising your crop’s volume and quality.
Here are some tips for running a highly efficient cannabis grow.
1. OPTIMISE THE SETUP
We could start our optimisation process by assessing the pros and cons of the growing location. Indoor growing is more complex and time-consuming than a traditional open air garden. Hydroponics might be more complicated than soil at the beginning, but it likely turns into the most efficient technique over time. If you have the opportunity to choose sunlight over a grow box, be sure to plant your cannabis seeds outdoors at the right moment for your specific location. Not having to worry about lights, tubes, and everything else is a big time-saver, not to mention money-saver.
If you have to grow indoors, invest some time finding the tidiest setup for cables, fans, and ducts, then organise your tent or room so it’s easy to open and access, with a clear path in and out, and to your water source. Objects, obstacles on the floor, or any kind of mess close to the growing space will cost you a little extra time that compounds into minutes or hours by the time harvest comes around. You’ll also need to maintain easy access to all parts of the plants you’re growing. If you don’t, you’ll either waste time reaching the remote corners, or risk having pests start taking over the hidden nooks of your grow room.
All your tools must be close to your growing area, and you should keep the most frequently used instruments within arm's reach from your plants. This is going to save you hundreds of micro-moments. Even if building our own accessories and devices can be a good way to figure out how to optimise a grow room, also take some time to visit your online or local grow shop. In the accessories section, you can find the latest hacks and tools for easy growing, like watering systems, adjustable cable suspensions for lights and branches, automation devices, and other stuff that might be useful to save some time.
2. CONSOLIDATE TRAYS AND CONTAINERS
Before starting a cannabis grow, the shrewd grower will consider which tasks will be most annoying or time-consuming during the operation. One common example is dealing with runoff water from growing containers. Most pots are affixed with a tray underneath to catch runoff, but these need to be emptied frequently and can spill without much disturbance. Emptying the trays after each watering is really a pain. A nice time-saving hack is to put more than one pot on a long tray, which is faster to empty compared to many small ones. The tray can be slightly inclined so all the runoff drains to the front, making it even easier to empty.
The ideal size and type of container that’s most efficient is up for debate. Bigger containers can absorb and retain more water, thus the busy grower would pick them instead of smaller ones. However, overwatering/underwatering, soil oxygenation, and nutrient issues are more common in larger containers, especially when the pot is too big for the size or age of the plant. A bigger container can save time, but it requires some caution, and perhaps some trial and error. In any case, avoid pots made of fabric or with holes on the sides because these kinds of containers let the soil dry out too quickly for the busy grower.
3. CHOOSE THE RIGHT GROWING MEDIUM
Some growing techniques and substrates are more time-consuming than others, depending on your setup, skills, goals, number of plants, and more. Hydroponic systems are probably not the best choice for a beginner, but they can certainly save you time. The water reservoirs of hydro setups hold enough for a long period, even for weeks, and there is no runoff to worry about. Assuming the grower is willing to learn the hydro skillset, and all the pumps, tubes, nutrients, pH, and everything else, a hydroponic grow is much more human-independent than any other domestic setup.
Soil growers, don’t worry. There’s room for optimisation even in the most traditional pot and soil grow. If you grow in soil, you probably use some fertilisers. It’s really hard to tell which brand or product line renders the best results, or if you really need bloom enhancers, flavour boosters, and so on. Many growers spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out the best combinations of nutrients, even if the plants would probably do fine with just a few of them. Sticking to a couple basic fertilisers specifically designed for the vegetative and bloom periods should be enough for your plants to stay happy. And you automatically save time by not having to test, measure, mix, and water in other products. Mineral nutrients can save even more time since the mix can be prepared in advance and stored for some time—but please, grow organic!
For those willing to learn how to make it, the most time-saving soil method is super soil, which is a term used to describe a nutrient-rich, enhanced soil made with compost. Super soil is like a big community of living creatures that slowly produces all of the basic nutrients your cannabis plants need for their entire life. You don’t need to mix fertilisers or excessively check pH levels. Just add water.
4. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR LIGHTS AND FANS
A proper lighting, cooling, air extraction, and humidity control system should be in place. Just one environmental parameter not properly set and maintained might translate to hours of time spent trying to reach the optimal conditions while plants sit there suffering.
CFL bulbs are considered a waste of time by most growers. Busy or not, if you are serious about growing cannabis, avoid CFLs and use MH and HPS lights instead, or a decently big LED plate that further simplifies things, producing less heat than MH/HPS setups.
5. SELECT TIME-SAVING STRAINS
Not all cannabis strains require the same amount of care, or the same amount of time to mature. Modern cannabis breeding has gifted us with a massive array of strains that are resilient and don’t require too much maintenance or attention. Some strains can handle slight nutrient and pH imbalances, while others thrive even in the face of temperature and humidity fluctuations, or minor grower error. Others still are speed-demons capable of going from seed to harvest in only two months.
Autoflowering strains are particularly speedy, and don’t require a change in light cycle to induce bloom—talk about easy! They are also shorter and bushier, and this can translate to fewer setup and maintenance requirements. A great example of a super-hardy and fast auto that requires no expertise from the grower is Quick One. In only 8–9 weeks from seed to harvest, 50cm-tall plants are capable of churning out an impressive 100–150g/plant. On the other hand, taller and slower-growing photoperiod strains will obviously require more maintenance and time. However, if you want to grow feminized photoperiods that still require less time and energy, consider market-leading indicas like Fat Banana. With a THC level of 25% and a flowering phase of only 7–8 weeks, this fierce hybrid is potent weed for the rushed grower indeed.
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