How, When & Why to Transplant Marijuana Plants, Part 3

We’ve had two previous articles on how, when, and why to transplant marijuana plants, and this is the final article.

Transplanting is a time when damage or benefits can occur for your cannabis plants and especially their roots.

Damage can happen if you pull your marijuana plants out of their container by yanking on the stalk too hard.

If the entire root ball hasn’t been loosened ahead of time, when you yank on the stalk, you detach the main roots from the stalk.

This massively impacts root health and your marijuana plant’s potential.

Before you remove plants from a container, lightly squeeze the container on all sides to loosen the root mass within.

Have a catchment underneath the area you’re working so you can turn the container at an angle and ease the cannabis plant out of the container using GENTLE pulling on the stalk, as well as gravity.

Some soil will fall out off the root mass and out of the pot, and that soil should be discarded in favor of freshly-mixed soil.

When you step up your pot size, the chance to use freshly-mixed soil gives you the ability to customize your root zone.

If I’m growing in soil, for example, I transplant clones and seedlings into one-gallon pots filled with a starter mix that’s light on nutrients.

When I transplant into a three-gallon pot a few weeks into grow phase, I use richer soil such as Fox Farm Ocean Forest.

When I mix fresh soil or other root zone media such as coco coir, Pro-Mix, or even rockwool, I add powdered or liquid beneficial microbes such as Voodoo Juice, Tarantula, and Piranha, and a small amount of Microbial Munch or Bud Candy.

Beneficial bacteria and fungi, fed by carbohydrate boosters such as Microbial Munch or Bud Candy, protect and enhance your roots.

Along with the beneficial microbials I build into the root zone material as I transplant, I add beneficial microbials and carbohydrates as I water my plants.

I do this from the start of grow phase and I don’t stop until my cannabis plants reach peak bloom (midway through bloom phase).

When you transplant marijuana plants, make sure your root ball is slightly moist before you take it out of the pot it’s in.

If your root ball is dry, the soil will crumble and sometimes too much soil will crumble off your roots and your root mass falls apart.

Assuming that you have well-aerated root zone material (I add COARSE perlite to my root material no matter how well-aerated it looks when I unbag it), when you transplant marijuana, pack the material rather firmly as you put it into the bottom of the new container and as you fill in the sides around your root ball.

One of my early mistakes in transplanting marijuana was to leave the new material too fluffy.

Even when I watered in my material before I transplant marijuana plants into new pots, later on when I watered, the new material settled, so that my cannabis plants sunk into the pot.

Or, when I watered, little pockets of open space deficit would open up where there must have been empty pockets in the interior of the root zone inside the pot.

I needed to get more soil and fill in from the top.

I want to emphasize that if you’ve properly aerated your root zone material, you don’t worry that firmly packing it in will make the material too dense for your roots to penetrate.

The main reasons marijuana growers get root zones that are dense, heavy, waterlogged, and feel like a brick are that they use thick materials that aren’t aerated properly, and/or they overwater.

One more tip before we close out our series on how to transplant marijuana plants is about how to water in your plants during transplanting.

The best tactic is to use reverse osmosis water with B-52 vitamin B fertilizer booster and a very low dose of nutrients appropriate for the phase your marijuana plants are in.

Vitamin B has long been used as a tonic that reduces shock and stress for plants and people.

When you transplant marijuana plants (or any plants) use B-52 to minimize shock and get your plants off to a healthy start in their new containers.

Check out the marijuana videos included in this series of marijuana transplanting articles.

Now that you’re read our professional data, you’ll be able to transplant marijuana plants like a master marijuana grower!