How to Grow A Healthy Weed Plant

Starting a marijuana plant from seed

Starting a weed plant from seed is easy. All you really need is water. What’s cool is that cannabis seeds contain a complete mini marijuana plant inside them—including a root, stem and leaves. There’s also enough food inside each seed for each little weed plant to survive its beginning stages of life. It’s all in there, so you don’t need to add any nutrients.

The simplest way to start your new marijuana plant is to just drop that seed into clean room-temperature water. If you use tap water, let it sit out for a day to allow the chlorine to evaporate. Once the seed takes on enough water it’ll swell and split open. This usually takes only a day or two, however it could take up to seven. Once the seed opens out will emerge a small tap root. Don’t worry if it takes longer than seven days to happen. Your little cannabis plant won’t drown—in seed form, your marijuana plant can survive underwater for two weeks. If it hasn’t popped by then, toss it. We like to wait until the tap root is about a half inch long before we move on to the next stage. And since we’re looking for healthy marijuana plants here, we suggest using organic soil. Here’s a great organic soil recipe to get ya started on growing weed organically.

Moving seedlings into soil

We suggest using Happy Frog Organic Potting Soil. But you can use any potting soil you’d like. Just make sure to look for soil that’s made specially for seeds and clones. They’ll contain very few nutrients. Your new weed plant is very fragile and susceptible to nutrient burn so be careful about what soil you choose.

Fill your seedling pots about halfway full of soil. This will allow you to add more soil as your marijuana plant grows upward. This is an important tip because at this stage weed plants are likely to fall over if they stretch too much. Also critical is light placement, but we’ll get to that.

Here’s how to plant weed seeds. Make a small hole about a ½ inch deep in the soil and gently drop in the seed. Try and get the tap root facing down. Then cover the seed with soil and keep the container in a warm dark place. Use a spray bottle to wet the soil. At this stage you could easily uproot the future cannabis plant by flooding it with water so be careful. In fact be super cautious about watering your precious weed plant during this stage. The soil needs to stay moist at all times. If it dries out, it’s toast. And it can’t get too wet or you’ll invite disease and bacteria. Check on your cannabis plant at least 3 or 4 times each 24-hour period spraying with water when necessary. Yep that means you might have to get up at night—we never said starting a baby weed plant from seed was going to be easy, dude.

If you did everything correctly, your new weed plant should sprout from the soil after a few days. Now’s the time to place it under lights. To prevent your new weed plant from over stretching make sure to place it right below your lights. We like to use a bank of T5’s set to 18 hours on and 6 hours off. T5’s emit enough light for both the seedling stage and vegetation stage of marijuana plants. Keep things slightly moist and add soil as needed and keep burying the stem as your cannabis plant grows upward and you’ll be ready for vegging your new marijuana plant in no time.

Vegging your weed plant

Your newly emerged weed plant uses light for food. So you should keep it as close as a couple inches away from your light source. Continue spraying your marijuana plant with water a couple times each day. Its leaves can absorb water. Soon your little weed plant will establish a sturdy root system and develop large green leaves. Then things start to get really interesting.

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When the initial internodes start to form on your baby weed plant you can begin adding root-stimulating nutrients by foliar feeding. Start with a very small dose then gradually increase as you marijuana plants develop a larger root mass. They should grow quickly—about half an inch per day. You can begin to add a growth simulator that’s high in nitrogen at this stage. If you give them nutes make sure to inspect your weed plant each day for signs of burn. Keep on babying your little weed plant until you notice roots growing from the bottom of your container. Then your weed plant will be ready for the next stage of growth.

Transplanting your marijuana plant

At this point you should have strong healthy marijuana plant that’s ready for transplanting into a single gallon container. A healthy weed plant will be less susceptible to bacteria, disease, pests and weather extremities. Healthy marijuana plants can better absorb water and nutrients too and they’ll develop a faster metabolism—leading to better and bigger yields.

Once transplanted you can veg your marijuana plant for a couple weeks. Then drop it into a larger container, veg for a week to 10 days to ensure your weed plant doesn’t undergo any stress then begin flowering. We like to use Subcool’s Super Soil as a base layer in our flowering containers and then use Roots Organics Soil for the rest. Here’s how to set that up. We usually grow indoor and accidentally grabbed bag of Roots Organics Formula 707 specially designed for outdoor marijuana plants. We grew some really nice weed plants using it indoors.

Anyhow there you have it—growing marijuana plants 101. Good luck on growing your first healthy weed plant. Let us know how it goes in the comments below?