Then I started paying closer attention to what they were doing that I wasn’t doing and quickly saw three things I could do that didn’t cost much money or hassle, but make my marijuana yields go up. Here they are:
• Support Your Plant Structure. Marijuana plants grown indoors often have weak stalks and stems, even if you send fan wind onto them to make them stronger. Outdoors, your marijuana plants can grow way over your head and have multiple branches that are several feet long.. In those cases, providing support for budded branches increases your yield and deters the possibility that a branch full of buds will break off the main stalk.
My favorite plant support methods are using plant cages, plant stakes, or trellising. These cost next to nothing, and once you get the hang of it, you see that providing plant supports helps your marijuana plants give you larger, heavier buds. Some of my favorite marijuana strains have branches that are naturally weak, and when I forgot to use plant supports, the branches broke from the weight of heavy buds.
You can get marijuana grow books that explain plant support, but when you go to a hydroponics store and see trellis netting, plant cages, and stake supports in person, you’ll know what will work best for your particular set-up and marijuana strains.
• Increase the size of your marijuana root zone. A few years ago, it was my first time feeding Roots Excelurator, Voodoo Juice, Piranha, and Tarantula to marijuana plants I was growing in 5-gallon pots. Those products all boost marijuana root size and function.
I was used to growing in that size pot when I was not using those products. This time, the roots got much larger faster than in previous grows, and started coming out of the bottom of the pot. They became rootbound, which means your marijuana plants can’t get enough water, oxygen, and nutrients so growth and growth rate are stunted.
Even if you don’t have rootbound plants, if you increase your container size and give your marijuana plants time and space to create bigger roots, you will get larger yields and healthier marijuana plants.
Try Increasing your marijuana plants’ container size by double (go from five to ten gallon pots, for example) and add a couple of weeks in grow phase, and you’ll see way phatter harvests.
• Change Your Feed Program. One of the simplest and easiest things I ever did to increase my yields was to change out the brand and type of hydroponics nutrients I was using.
I substituted Sensi Grow and Sensi Bloom pH Perfect base nutrients instead of Botanicare base because I was having problems with Botanicare, just like a lot of other growers are. I called Botanicare help line but as soon as I said was a medical marijuana grower they cut me off cold.
Along with switching to Sensi base, I started using Big Bud and Overdrive instead of a Hesi P-K supplement.
You can’t know for sure if a change in hydroponics nutrients is the sole cause of crop improvements until you’ve run a couple of crop cycles using clones from the same mothers. Not only did I see happier plants and more grams per watt after I switched, I also saw a happier marijuana grower (me) because the pH Perfect base nutrients made it easier for me to rely on pH and get the hydroponics nutrients delivery efficiency my marijuana plants needed.
The total cost of these marijuana fixes was less than $85 each, and I got increased yield and ease of growing that was worth far more than that.
There are times you look at your marijuana grow room and think if you replace lights, get a new type of irrigation system, or make other major, big $$$ improvements, you’re going to see a big increase in yield. In some cases, if you invest in the correct upgrades, a big money changeover pays for itself in 1-3 crop cycles.
But sometimes you can spend hardly anything or a few dollars more for grow room upgrades, and get more marijuana and more potency. It’s a good return on your investment.
