How do you know if your marijuana plants are keepers? © Copyright, Steve Davis, 2015In our previous article on evaluating young marijuana plants for the purposes of breeding and creating motherplants, we gave five factors to watch for.
Some of these factors apply only to marijuana clones or seedlings, and young marijuana plants, only in grow phase.
These factors include how fast your cannabis plants are growing, how well they handle nutrients and environment, how much if any odor they put out and how early they do that, whether they have favorable structure (internodes), and their root development.
The primary reason for thorough plant evaluations is every individual marijuana plant has its own unique growth pattern and other characteristics, even if it’s part of a batch of clones from the same mother.
As an example, I grew out 20 East Coast Sour Diesel non-feminized seeds and 17 germinated.
All growing in rockwool under identical conditions, by week four I easily identified eight that were going to be males.
Of those, three had problems handling nutrients so I eliminated them. I wanted males so I could make seeds and ended up with two males to use for breeding.
The one I chose was the one with the best stats. It had the fastest growth rate, shortest internodes, stockiest structure, best smell, and no problem handling the hydroponics nutrients feed schedule I use.
I cut the other plant down.
When your marijuana plants get to bloom phase, you have new factors to monitor:
How early do they start pre-flowering? How quickly and well do the buds develop?
How good do the buds smell? How sticky and crystally with resin glands are your buds?
How much water and nutrients does each cannabis plant use?
Which plants if any are the most susceptible to nutrients problems, gray mold, powdery mildew, spider mites, and other negatives?
How long do they need in bloom phase before they’re ready for harvest?
What I always do before I harvest my marijuana plants is to look back at my data and identify 1-5 plants that were the stars of that season.
Instead of harvesting them right down to the bottom of the stalk, you harvest most of the buds, but leave the plant with enough structure so it can keep on living. (Read this article to see how to do that).
Dry and cure your buds properly (which takes at least three weeks), then carefully sample each set of buds from each plant.
You’re looking for the high, taste, and smell that you most love.
You also want to weigh up the total grams for each plant. Harvest yield is an important factor in choosing marijuana plants.
If you identify buds so tasty and potent that you just can’t live without them, you can re-grow the harvested cannabis plant that produced that dank, to make it a mother and/or to breed it.
Monitoring your marijuana plants the way we’ve described in these two articles gives you way more than just a method for identifying the best plants for making into mothers or for breeding.
It also gives you daily data so you detect problems earlier, to keep your marijuana plants healthier and on track for your best harvests ever!
