Summer Marijuana Grow Room Success Strategies

Some marijuana growers take the summer off, but many of us keep on running our marijuana grow rooms, even during summer heat.

Let’s take a look at success strategies so you better manage the challenges of a summer marijuana grow room:

• Armor your plants with potassium silicate.

Potassium silicate is present in rich soil, but not often present in indoor grow ops using soilless mix, rockwool, deep water culture, hydroton, coco coir and other hydroponics root zone materials.

When you feed the right type of potassium silicate to your crops, it armors your plants’ cell walls and strengthens internal systems.

This helps your plants resist drought, excessive fertilization, spider mites, aphids, thrips, other pests, and diseases.

Potassium silicate has an added grow room benefit: it strengthens resin gland stalks and resin heads, so your plants’ valuable structures that manufacture and store THC and other cannabis compounds are sturdier.

The only reliable potassium silicate product we’ve found is Rhino Skin.

• Chill your hydroponics nutrients water.

A chiller is a device that’s paired with a pump and cools your reservoir water before it’s distributed to your marijuana plants.

Ideal temperature for nutrients water is 67-68°F.

Even if your grow room ambient air temperature is higher than it should be, if your nutrients water is at the right temperature, it mitigates plant stress.

• Most grow rooms are cooled by a whole-house air conditioner, but some are cooled by a room air conditioner.

I used to recommend portable room air conditioners, but after seeing studies showing that they’re very inefficient and energy-wasting, I no longer recommend them.

New studies and an understanding of a grow room environmental factor called vapor pressure deficit indicate you can run your grow room several degrees warmer than traditionally believed.

A cannabis grow room without added carbon dioxide (C02) can be run as warm as 78-80°F.

A grow room with added C02 can run as hot as 86-88°F.

Look here for important information about vapor pressure deficit (VPD), because VPD has big impact on your grow room success.

• In grow phase, run your lights 17 hours a day instead of 18, and in bloom phase, run them 11 hours a day instead of 12.

You can also consider switching to LED grow lights instead of HID (high intensity discharge), if only for summer growing, because LED puts put at least a third less heat than HID.

• Give your plants vitamin B complex.

Vitamin B is a known stress-buster for plants and humans.

It’s especially useful when your plants are processing hot temperatures.

The preferred hydroponics vitamin B product is called B-52.

Another way to keep your plants cool during the hottest times of the day is to shut down the lights and spray the plants with a combination of B-52 and Rhino Skin at pH 5.7, 130 parts per million, with the foliar water cooled to 72-74°F.

Don’t turn the lights back on until most if not all the droplets of foliar spray water have evaporated.

Now you have time-tested tactics that lower the cost of operating your summer marijuana grow room while boosting the health, growth rate, yield and potency of your crops!