“Its easy to get confused by the endless array of nutrients, cannabis grow systems, new grow room technology and different opinions on the best way to grow cannabis. But what about the easiest way to grow cannabis, with minimum complexity, minimum effort and cost?”
For outdoor growers, cannabis growing can be as simple as ‘plant it and forget it for a few months’. Indoor growers usually have a little bit more complexity than that, but even indoor growing can be largely maintenance free if you choose the right technique. Some cannabis growers have the time and dedication to spend hours tending their plants, often visiting them several times a day to inspect progress. But other people often have to leave their plants for days at a time. With the right planning you will find cannabis can be grown with very little input or experience. Remember cannabis has grown naturally in the wild with no help from humans, its easier than you think to harvest a free crop of cannabis with virtually no effort.
Lets start with outdoor growing. Easy outdoor growing The two main outdoor options are feminized automatic varieties or feminized photoperiod varieties. The automatic varieties will take around 3 months from germination to harvest, whereas the photoperiod varieties take 5-6 months but will generally grow larger and yield more per plant than an auto. The autos have the advantage of being fast, meaning you can select the warmest, sunniest 3 summer months to grow and avoid the worst of the early/late season weather. One of the easiest ways for a fast, easy outdoor grow is to grow AutoFem seeds with the roots planted directly into the ground. This gives you the advantage of not having to worry about watering and feeding a container-grown plant. You need to find a warm, sunny outdoor location for the plant to grow.
If possible germinate the seedlings indoors under artificial light for a week or two before you plant them out. This allows the plant to develop safely while it is young and vulnerable. The plants can be planted outdoors usually in early summer. For best results you can dig the soil over before you plant the auto, this improves the soil structure and introduces oxygen. You may wish to add compost or fertilisers/soil improvers (worm castings, bat guano etc) if the soil quality is low. And most people would then simply scatter slug pellets around the plant, and protect it with some wire fencing to prevent the bunnies from munching your plants. The wire fencing can be held in place with tent pegs. You could grow outdoors in your garden, a greenhouse, polytunnel or the countryside. Auto’s often stay around a metre tall, so they are easy to hide in the corners of fields, forests, riverbanks, unused waste land etc. A single outdoor auto can easily yield 50-100g, so you only need to think of a suitable local place to plant them and you can be enjoying plenty of top quality stash. And all for the price of a good quality auto seed, roughly the same cost as a burger.
Its so easy to over-complicate the art of indoor cannabis growing. But in its simplest form it can be very simple indeed. Indoor growers usually choose feminized photoperiod or feminized auto seeds. Feminized photoperiod seeds are usually started on a light cycle of 18/6 and forced into flower with a 12/12 light system (12 hours of daylight and 12 of darkness).
Feminized auto seeds are usually grown from seed to harvest under a 20/4 light system. Seeds from the more established auto breeders such as Dutch Passion can be grown under 24 hour light from seed to harvest. Auto’s are often recommended to novice growers, they are often said to be a little easier to grow with and perhaps a little bit more forgiving.
Perhaps one of the easiest ways grow indoors with minimum ongoing effort is to get a large container of supermarket compost, maybe 30 litres, and plant your auto seed in it. The advantage of a large container is that you will not need to add extra nutrition, this simplifies things immediately. A large container will not need watering as often as a small container either. If you make the container large enough you may only have to water 1-2 times a week. The plant can be left on the same 20/4 light schedule from start to finish and will survive without specialist nutrition. All you need is the standard indoor tent, light, carbon filter and fan. And all you will need to do is visit every few days to see if the plant needs water. It’s an ideal system for busy people that work away from home, or people that lack the time to make regular grow room visits.
Growing in soil may not give the same explosive growth rates available to experienced hydroponic growers. But growing in soil is simple, easy and it makes few technical demands on the grower. Its a great way to grow top quality cannabis with minimum hassle. Indoor growing can be simplified further with a simple auto-watering kit, or a holiday plant watering system. These can be bought online or from many garden centres and use different ways of adding water to the soil. If you wish, you can add a light nutritional feed to the water. But if you have a large enough container of soil then extra nutrients may simply be unnecessary.
Source: Dutch Passion in weedworld Magazine issue 122
