Highly successful cannabis growers achieve their greatest success by employing personal and professional strategies that reflect their intelligence, character, determination and willpower.
These strategies and qualities guide everything these growers do while they grow marijuana, and leads directly to bigger yields, lower grow-op costs, and higher quality buds.
But that’s not to say that if you don’t possess these characteristics, your garden will be a failure.
Let’s examine these principles and see how you can methodically apply them to your own grow-room success.
1. Know Before You Grow
Successful growers conduct endless research before they choose their method of growing marijuana, where they grow it, and what strain exactly they intend to grow.
This research is likely to include the following topics:
- Hydroponics nutrients
- Grow lights
- Deep water culture systems
- Air conditioners
- Ebb and flow tables
- Light movers
- CO2 generators
- Cannabis genetics
- Grow tents
You want to supplement your research with information direct from the manufacturer or seller to gain specifications and applications regarding the products you’re considering.
Bottom line? If you arm yourself with information before you grow, the less likely you’ll be to troubleshoot during cultivation and the more success you’re likely to have.
2. Choose An Appropriate Cannabis Growing Set-Up
Many growers see grow rooms other people have and mimic that approach, not fully analyzing whether the set-up will work for them.
Look at what happened to a percentage of growers when the double-ended grow lights craze hit. They didn’t realize that this kind of lighting system has to be at least 3–4 feet above the plant canopy.
Nor did they know that additional air conditioning and air movement capacity have to be added to the grow op, so as to process the extra heat double-ended bulbs generate from reflectors that can’t accommodate glass between the bulbs.
Indoor growers using rooms that have regular ceiling heights of about eight feet found their full-size cannabis plants burned to a crisp by double-ended lights. The growers who see success using this lighting system with low ceilings tend to run sea of green and autoflowering gardens in which plant height isn’t much taller than 2–3 feet.
Bottom line? Successful cannabis cultivators choose grow styles and gear appropriate for their space infrastructure.
3. Pay Attention To Detail When It Comes To Growing
People often assume cannabis is a weed and easy to grow. It’s not. I’ve cultivated other types of hard-to-grow plants — orchids, saffron, bonsai trees — and marijuana is much more difficult to grow than those delicate beauties.
To cultivate cannabis with minimal issues, you must pay attention to the little details. This includes pH, grow-room temperature, nutrients parts per million, humidity, grow light height, and your plants’ rate of growth.
Just one little thing overlooked, such as hydroponic nutrients water pH, can harm or even kill a crop. Keep an eye on the smallest details and your grow-room success will be more assured.
4. Keep Your Grow Op Clean
It makes me sad to walk into a grow room and see debris everywhere, like dead leaves fallen on the floor or on root zones, cigarette butts, dog hair, junk food packaging or dusty equipment (especially grow lights).
I won’t smoke buds grown in that room, because I know they’re polluted with trash.
Marijuana plants breathe through their leaves and so require clean air. Debris on top of the root zone or around the plants provides habitat ripe for mold, mildew and pests.
I recommend using a carbon scrubber, not just to reduce odor, but to clean the air, plus reverse osmosis to cleanse your water. Use pH Perfect nutrients to ensure the highest quality nutritional elements, devoid of heavy metals and general contamination. And always remember to flush your crops before you harvest them!
Make your grow room a clean machine, and make sure your plants are clean inside and out to ensure a successful grow.
5. Be Security Conscious About Your Cannabis Garden
One unguarded moment increases the potential for an accident. Loose lips sink ships. Better safe than sorry. Those are all good mantras for marijuana growers to repeat to themselves.
Doesn’t matter if you live in Colorado, California, Washington, Oregon, Michigan or the few other states where growing is allowed, you don’t want anybody to know you have a cannabis garden — unless, of course, it’s impossible for them not to know (your spouse who lives with you, for example, or a cannabusiness partner).
The fewer people who know you’re growing marijuana, the better. If you sell weed, tell your customers someone else grows it and you’re just the middleman.
Be sure to control the appearance, smell and ambiance of whatever building your cannabis grow room is located. Your grow house should be the most low-key, well-kept, normal-looking house on the block.
For additional reading, this post offers great marijuana grower security tips.
6. An Open-Minded, Adventurous Approach To Growing Cannabis
About 50 percent of the growers in my network have grown the same strains the same way using the same nutrients for many years.
They’re afraid to try new strains, techniques, hydroponic nutrients, cultivation techniques and unfamiliar gear because they’re likely repelled by the learning curve.
They worry that trying something new opens them up to potential failure — and they’re right to be concerned that any changes in the grow room could interrupt the orderly flow of a predictable grow-room routine.
But fear of failure can be crippling.
One of my grow buddies was always complaining how bored he was with growing Super Silver Haze and Blue Dream. Admittedly, those strains bore me, too. I offered him clones and seeds from sweet strains better than either of those two options. But he turned me down, countering that he was used to growing his two regular strains and was worried about a crop failure if he tried my new suggestions. Better the devil you know and all that. Finally, I was able to break his resolve and he successfully grew new strains, wondering why he hadn’t experimented sooner.
Going back to the topic of double-ended grow lights, one of my grower associates with an eight-foot ceiling got horny for such a lighting system and decided to ditch his regular HID grow lights.
I admired his willingness to try something new, but he hadn’t done his homework. As a result, he got nothing but problems because of too much heat and light intensity.
Because he’d spent so much money on the new grow lights, he felt compelled to use them. It took him five burned-out crop cycles, the dire consequences of a boiling-hot plant canopy, before he admitted his experiment had failed.
The good news is he didn’t go back to using the same HID single-ended grow bulbs he had before. He took my advice about research, and switched over to Lush Lighting LED grow lights. He reports great satisfaction with the results.
It’s important to be creative and adventurous in trying different seeds, grow gear and techniques backed by prudent, solid research to experience a higher chance of success in your marijuana grow op.
7. Hopefulness, Resilience & Perseverance
The qualities of hope, resilience and perseverance could each be a topic unto themselves. They’re interlinked emotionally, spiritually and practically in the life of any serious cannabis grower.
Truth is, no matter how careful you are in choosing seeds or clones, planning out your grow-room build, noticing the little things, keeping your garden clean, keeping your mouth shut so nobody knows you’re growing, and being open to new hydroponics gear and cultivation techniques, you’ll inevitably experience grow-room mishaps — even total failures.
There will be grow seasons when you do everything right, yet something unanticipated that you had no control over comes along to wreck your efforts. It could be spider mites, gray mold, root rot, power outages, thieves, police, flooding or a firestorm. It could be plants that looked great and otherwise healthy — right up until they became hermaphrodite cannabis and consequently self-seeded.
You were counting on a huge harvest. Maybe that hoped-for bumper crop was going to support you and your family — but then something bad happened and your harvest was a fraction of the size it could have been.
It’s all part of being a cannabis grower. High-value gardening is a test of your resilience and perseverance. How much energy and diligence are you willing and able to pour into that grow op? How many hours do you want to work? How will you deal with obstacles and disasters?
Those are the questions marijuana growing asks of you. What I’ve discovered is that the challenges of cannabis cultivation are echoes of other challenges in your life. How you respond to hardships, and how creative and wise you are about your growing choices, determines your ultimate happiness and success.
