Read this article to get juicy buds like this from outdoor growing.© Copyright, Nigel Salazar, 2017This article is the comprehensive, extremely helpful guide to getting the biggest, stickiest outdoor harvests.
The following techniques boost cannabis health, growth rate, resistance to disease and pests, THC percentages, and harvest weight…
Customize Your Outdoor Marijuana Growing Site
Before you put your marijuana plants into the ground or outdoors in containers, mix customized, rich blends of organic soil loaded with slow and fast availability nutritional components that feed your marijuana roots immediately and in the long term as spring turns to summer and summer to autumn.
More and more outdoor growers are saving the trouble of digging into the ground by using a 100-gallon or 200-gallon cloth grow pot, as you see here.
For guidance about purchasing and prepping good soil, look here.
Depending on specific rainfall and soil moisture conditions, you might mix in water-holding crystals to help in drought situations, or an aerating agent such as coarse perlite to help if it rains a lot where you grow.
Prep your outdoor grow site by excavating holes that are 3-5 feet in diameter and 3-5 feet deep.
In those holes, place your rich customized soil.
How much of your pre-made soil is used per hole is affected by how much you were able to carry to the grow site, and how rich and aerated the native soil is already.
It’s a good idea to leave at least some native soil in the hole, but if it’s clay, get rid of all of it, don’t mix it back in.
If you see a layer of clay, either find a new planting site, or break through it and replace it with rich, aerated soil.
Clay is your enemy.
If you put good soil into a hole that has a clay pan at the bottom, water can collect in the hole like a bucket, and rot your marijuana roots.
When you provide your plants rich soil with carefully blended ingredients along with aeration and water-holding characteristics custom created by you, your plants get off to a great start.
The main thing to remember is if you’re going to all the trouble of growing at a remote site, it’s worth it to improve or replace the soil so your plants have all the oxygen, nutrition, and water they need.
If you can’t improve the soil at the site, you can mix nutrients into your water and do other things to add nutrients to the soil as your plants grow, which we’ll talk about later in this article.
For me, the ultimate soil you could grow in outdoors is “supersoil,” popularized by TGA Genetics seed breeder Subcool.
Supersoil is hard to make but it can be worth it.
Look here for a total guide to making supersoil.
Spiking, Layering, Top-Dressing Your Outdoor Marijuana Soil
You do passive root zone fertilization by spiking your soil with a convenient fertilizer product such as Jobe’s Organic Rose & Shrub spikes.
These bloom phase spikes break down on their own to feed your marijuana plants valuable macronutrients targeted for bloom phase.
Use less of these spikes than is recommended by the manufacturer, by half.
You get a lot more impact by making your own personalized spikes and using other professional marijuana soil techniques.
For information on creating your own high-powered marijuana soil mix, making fertilizer spikes, layering your soil with special amendments as you prep your outdoor marijuana grow site, take a look at the supersoil article we linked previously, along with the spiking and layering tips in the organic marijuana book True Living Organics, which you read about here.
The magic of spiking and layering on outdoor marijuana growing is your plants have a big, built-in buffet to feast on all the way to harvest time.
Spiking and layering are particularly valuable marijuana fertilizer techniques when you can’t get to your outdoor marijuana growing site often.
Just remember most marijuana growers do layering at the start of an outdoor marijuana grow when they’re putting soil into the ground or grow bags, or they do it when they’re transplanting their cannabis plants into an outdoor grow site.
If you’re growing in pots, you do layering again when you transplant into larger pots for bloom phase.
Another easy tactic for adding nutrients after your plants are already in the ground is called top dressing.
This means you scatter solid fertilizer granules along the top of the root zone around the edges of each plant’s leaf canopy.
This is done after plants are established in their growing place.
Don’t place top-dressing fertilizer granules so that they touch your plants’ stalks, or are within 2-3 inches of the stalks.
Here’s a great top-dressing fertilizer for grow phase.
Here’s an ideal top-dressing product for outdoor marijuana bloom phase.
Note that these two are organic fertilizers and that there are detailed instructions with videos on the webpages we’ve linked to.
Also note that it’s best to under-fertilize rather than over-fertilize.
You can always add fertilizers to your root zones if they don’t have enough nutrients elements in them.
But if you lay on too much fertilizer, it’s hard if not impossible to wash it out of an outdoor root zone, and the excess can burn your plants’ roots.
Water Outdoor Marijuana Plants With Nutrients, Root & Bloom Boosters, Protectors
All outdoor marijuana growing fertilizer tactics we’re talking about are affected by logistics.
When it comes to using water as a carrier for marijuana plant enhancers, you ask yourself how easy is it for me to have water at my grow site.
You might have to carry water to your outdoor marijuana site.
If you have a natural water source nearby, that’s better.
In either case, you need a container.
For my guerilla outdoor marijuana plants I mix a watering-in formula containing a pH Perfect base fertilizer, Roots Excelurator, B-52, Voodoo Juice, Rhino Skin, and Bud Candy.
Follow the dosing instructions for each product, but cut the dose by 25-50% of recommended full-strength dose if you’re growing in rich soil.
It’s great if you can safely get back to your outdoor marijuana crop on a regular basis, so you can change your nutrients watering mixture as the season progresses.
The most obvious fertilizer change comes when your marijuana plants start pre-flowering and early flowering.
The traditional approach for that transition into bloom phase is to change base nutrients from grow to bloom, and load up on P and K.
Outdoors, it’s not so easy to know when bloom phase starts, because it depends on day length, and the specific strains you’re growing.
My start-of-bloom-phase approach includes watering with a 60% strength dose of organic bloom base, Bud Ignitor, Big Bud, Voodoo Juice, B-52, molasses, Rhino Skin, and Roots Excelurator.
If you’re growing in poor soil, use a full-strength dose.
These components protect roots, enhance roots, feed root zone beneficial bacteria, increase resistance to pests, drought, stress, and diseases, make sturdier THC glands, and help your marijuana plants mature faster with more budding sites.
If I can get back to the crop mid-way through bloom, I do a watering using a dose-adjusted mixture of Big Bud, Bud Candy, B-52, Nirvana, and compost tea.
During the last three weeks of bloom phase, I sub Overdrive for Big Bud.
To protect your cannabis plants, look here for an all-natural root feed that repels mites, thrips, caterpillars, aphids, and other pests.
I might also apply “passive” soil amendments, which you read about in the previous section.
Yes, carrying hydroponics marijuana nutrients to a grow site and mixing them takes some work.
But you see a big increase in harvest weight, taste, THC and overall marijuana plant health when you provide these powerful bloom boosters to your outdoor crops.
Your sun-fueled plants will lap up these hydroponics nutrients, the root zone is huge, and you’ll see tremendously large, gooey buds!
Using the techniques described above, you take full advantage of the intense sun, wind, rain, and root size that makes outdoor marijuana growing so fun and profitable.
Keep coming back here to find more outdoor marijuana growing tips you can’t get anywhere else.
And if you’re reading this in July or early August and wondering if you still have time to put in an outdoor marijuana crop and get it harvested before cold weather, torrential rains, helicopters, hunters, and other bad things arrive, take a look here.
Watch the videos embedded in our articles for more big buds information!
