How to Prep Your Garden
Welcome to Preparing Your Garden with Emily Gogol, PhD, Head Gardener at Grow It From Home. Emily has years of experience growing all sorts of plants in urban gardens and is an expert on growing hemp and cannabis at home.
With a home grow, you’re also able to cut the cost of homemade edibles, topicals, tinctures, capsules, and other finished products significantly. The Ardent Nova and FX maximize the potential of your yield and keep you fully stocked in between harvests. Grab your own Ardent device to decarb, infuse, and bake in any space with an outlet.
Getting your garden ready for growing cannabis is just like getting it ready to grow tomatoes. Let’s walk through the steps together!
Where would you like to grow your plants?
Will you be growing in the ground or in a container? Whatever you decide, be sure the plants will get full sun. If you would plant a tomato there, you can plant your cannabis there. Cannabis does really well in containers, and we recommend a 3-5 gallon pot or larger. These can be plastic, terra cotta, or fabric. We have a detailed guide available on growing in containers on our website.
How much room do I need?
If you are growing in the ground, and will let the plants grow to their full size, please give them about 4 feet of space to grow. You can always cut them back in July to keep them smaller, but a good rule of thumb is to allow your plant 4 feet of space. If growing in a container, the plants will likely be smaller, more in the 3-4 feet height and width range.
What does it mean to prep your soil?
In my experience it is best to prepare your soil and let the plants do their thing throughout the season. No additional amendments, teas, side-dressings, etc. When growing in the ground, prepare your bed as you would for tomatoes and in a container, use a high quality potting soil.
To Trellis or Not to Trellis?
If you are growing our high CBD hemp plants there is no need to trellis or stake your plants. Our plants are vigorous and sturdy even when heavy with flowers. However, if you are growing in a container on a windy patio you might want to add a tomato cage to your container to help support your plants. Note that many varieties of cannabis, like the THC producing ones you might find at a dispensary, have traditionally been grown indoors and can be quite wimpy (to put it mildly) outdoors. When in doubt, put a tomato cage around your plant.
To Prune or Not to Prune?
Again, there is a lot of misinformation online about both trellising your plants and pruning them. You do not need to do any fancy pruning or trellising with cannabis. By simply preparing the soil, and starting with healthy vigorous plants, you will be rewarded with up to 1-2 pounds of dried finished flower per plant. Fancy pruning techniques are for indoor growing where they are trying to maximize what they can do indoors - just think of how hard it would be to grow a tomato in a closet! It is the same for cannabis. If you are growing it outdoors, no need for any fancy pruning or trellis.
However, you can use pruning to limit the final size of your plant. If you want to keep your plant smaller, give it an aggressive pruning in July. July is a safe month for pruning because your plant hasn’t set any flowers yet and will have plenty of time to “grow into” the haircut you gave it and reach a healthy final size for flowering.
This Thursday, 6/3, tune into an Instagram Live with Emily Gogol!
Join us at 7 pm EDT, right on IG Live! RSVP for event reminders here.
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To connect with Emily, feel free to email her at: emily@growitfromhome.com