Vegetative Stage

The fun begins.

This is the stage where your seedling or rooted clone begins to grow. Growth in this stage promotes leaves, stem, roots, and branching.

Lights

Suitable light in this stage can be found inside and out. Nature's choice: the sun. Early to late spring, depending on climate conditions, gives the natural light that Cannabis enjoys most during the vegetative stage. Hours of light increase during spring, from 12-hours to 18-hours telling Cannabis to grow it's infrastructure (stem, leaves, roots).

Alternatively, you can always promote vegetative growth indoors. If so, you'll need a strong enough light source. In the beginning of veg stage, you can choose fluorescent lights designed for growing and keep them real close to the leaves.

When your plants are taller and wider, it's time to switch to a high-powered grow light. Ideally, you'll want a metal halide bulb inside of a 250W, 400W, 600W, or 1000 watt* system. Keep the lights just far enough from your garden so that they do not burn the leaves after prolonged exposure. Tip: leaves are as hardy as our hands, so if your hand can take the distance, so can the leaves.

(*Consult with a professional whenever using electricity and never be cheap when buying powerful electric components.)

Cannabis needs at least 16-hours of light per day indoors but feel free to leave the lights on consistently 24-hours per day.

Water

Cannabis can consume a great deal of water. However, in order to grow best, Cannabis also needs time to dry the root area so the roots can absorb more water and nutrient.

How to find the perfect balance? If the leaves are drooping, too much water. If leaves become dry and crunchy, too little. Perfect hydration can be seen when the soil is slightly moist and the leaves have a bouncy uplift to them.

Nutrients

ALL MEDICAL MARIJUANA SHOULD ONLY BE GROWN WITH CERTIFIED ORGANIC NUTRIENTS

If you're growing outside, you may have all the nutrients needed right in the soil. However, chances are that you'll be adding nutrients periodically. Inside, you will definitely add nutrients to your water often.

A common reference when talking about Cannabis nutrients is called the NPK (macro-nutrients: Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium )ratio. However, keep in mind that this ratio is just a starting point to understand what is really going on. Please research soil micro-organisms and soil electro-conductivity to develop your knowledge deeper.

We don't necessarily need to know this in order to grow Cannabis because nutrient companies have done the research for us and offer complete nutrient systems with instructions from start to finish.

Generally, you'll find that vegetative nutrients have a larger amount of nitrogen in the ratio. This can be found naturally in certain bat guanos, fish, and green manures.

Pay good attention to micro-nutrients as well. It takes a village to raise a child and so it takes the whole environment to raise a crop. micro-nutrients include iron, cobalt, chromium, copper, iodine, manganese, selenium, zinc and molybdenum. Certain bacteria and fungi are also micro-nutrients to be aware of.

One progressive practice is the use of aquaponics as a nutrient system. This is basically a hydroponics system where special bacteria is colonized (6) on the grow medium and water from a fish tank (2) is used as nutrient for your plants. It's always nice to promote natural systems when growing medical marijuana. Which nutrients the plants get is determined by what you feed the fish.

There are two points of danger to know about: overfeeding and underfeeding. When a certain nutrient is used too much, it causes what is know as nutrient lock. Nutrient lock blocks the flow of nutrients and essentially makes the plant starve itself. When Cannabis cannot receive nutrients or receives too many, it will begin to look sick. A sick plant grows slower, is more susceptible to disease and stress-related effects. Luckily, Cannabis gives us a visual indication to what nutrients it's lacking or has too much of. For instance, when the leaves begin to yellow, there is likely a lack of nitrogen. We will get into this more in a later section.

Lastly, be aware of root-lock in potted Cannabis. Root-lock happens when roots run out of room to spread and so they turn inside and begin to choke themselves making it difficult to transfer water and nutrients. It's time to transplant into a bigger pot!