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It’s happened to all of us at one point. You break up some weed to pack a bowl or roll a joint. Inside your buds, you find a small, smooth, brown, spherical object: a seed. You toss the seed aside before sparking up and think nothing of it. While this situation may be a common occurrence, it’s extremely wasteful. That’s because you can use these seeds to grow your own plants. In this post, we’ll learn how to grow cannabis from seed. It’s totally possible for anyone to learn about growing weed from seed–even those of us without a green thumb!

How to Grow Marijuana from Seed: Before You Start

Before you start growing marijuana plants from seed, you’ll need to do some research. First, you must check whether growing cannabis is legal wherever you live. Then, you’ll need to stock up on some gear to build your garden.

The legality of Growing Cannabis

Before you learn how to grow cannabis from seed, you need to hammer out any possible legal issues. First, do your state’s laws allow you to grow plants on your property? If you rent, does your lease for it? If so, how many plants can you own? Are there caps on what your numbers can be for the vegetative phase versus flowering?

Answer all of these questions before you sprout your seed to avoid any legal hangups!

Equipment and Supplies

If you’re growing cannabis from seed indoors, you may need to pick up a few key items. Some useful tools include:

• Tent: For climate control, tents can be immensely helpful to indoor growers. They keep pathogens and unwanted light out while holding light, heat, and humidity within, creating a miniature environment that cannabis plants love. You can grow in a closet or even an entire room of your house. But for something in-between, you’ll want to pick up a grow tent. You can also combine a tent with a carbon filter to reduce the smell your grow emits.
• Grow Lights: You can’t just put a marijuana plant under a normal light and expect it to grow. Fluorescent and incandescent lights don’t produce the right wavelengths to power photosynthesis. To get around this, you can grow outdoors, although again, that may be against local laws depending on your location and circumstance. If you decide to grow indoors, choose a specialized LED lamp. LED grow lamps are inexpensive and energy-efficient ways to get your plants the energy they need.
• Nutrients: While not strictly necessary when growing in soil, plant nutrients are helpful when you start learning how to grow cannabis from seed. Most nutrient companies make their own complete line of nutrients.

Growing Weed from Seed: the Vegetative Phase

Start by wetting a rockwool cube and putting your seed inside it. If you don’t have any rock wool available, you can use a wet napkin. If you do, you’ll have to transplant your seed into a pot as soon as you notice it sprouting its first root, also known as germination.

Otherwise, leave your seed in the rockwool cube. After you notice your seed sprouting from its cube, it’s off to the races! You’ve officially entered the first few weeks of the plant’s life cycle, known as the vegetative phase. During this time, your plant will develop its root system, stems, and branches that will be ready to burst into buds during the plant’s flowering phase. You’ll want to keep the rockwool extremely moist!

After your plant develops a robust root system (one that grows visibly out of its rockwool cube), you can transplant it. For the simplest method with the least transplanting, put the rooted cannabis plant directly into a 3-gallon pot. You can leave it there up through harvest day.

You’ll want to keep your environment fairly warm and moist during the flowering phase. For flowering plants, keep the temperature in your garden between 70 and 80 degrees fahrenheit. In addition, maintain your humidity between 40 and 60 percent.

Finally, keep your lights running for 18 hours per day during the vegetative (growers call it “veg”) phase.

As a cultivator, you’ll have a few responsibilities during the veg phase. They include:

• Providing Nutrients: This is one of the most important tasks you’ll have in the veg phase. Vegging plants need plenty of nitrogen. Nitrogen is the main building block of roots, stems, branches, and leaves. These are the parts of your plant that will grow fastest in the veg phase, and you need to support that growth.
• Training Your Plant: Training is another important part of the flower phase. Cultivators have created a variety of cannabis training techniques, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. If you’re going to grow a low number of plants, consider fanning out main stems during the veg phase. This will help your plants grow wide instead of tall, saving precious vertical space and providing each stem with more access to light.
• Preventing Problems: This final step can be a little vague for newer growers who don’t know what to look for. But as you become more experienced with cultivation, you’ll begin to notice things that look wrong. For example, you may notice unusual leaf coloring. This may suggest either some kind of infection or a problem with your nutrient regimen. There’s an old saying that every prospective grower should memorize: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That’s especially true with cannabis plants!

Once your marijuana plant has established itself, you’ll need to change the amount of light you’re giving your plant to 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. This usually takes between 2 and 4 weeks to grow cannabis from seed.

Growing Cannabis From Seed: the Flower Phase

In the flower phase, you want to recreate the plant’s natural outdoor conditions with as much similarity as possible. That means you’ll need to lower temperature and humidity to simulate the transition between summer into early fall.

As a result, temperatures in the flowering phase need to be slightly cooler than the veg phase (but not cold). Ideally, you’ll keep your garden between 65 and 80 degrees fahrenheit. You’ll want to dial back your humidity too. Don’t let it wander much higher than 50 percent. If you do, you may encourage mold growth.

If something is going to go wrong during your grow cycle, chances are it’ll happen in the flower phase. That’s why it’s important for you to continue providing your plant with proper nutrients. Make sure to keep a particularly watchful eye on your plants, too.

Harvest Day and Beyond

Once your plant is fully mature, it’s time to harvest! You’ll know your plants are ready to harvest once the trichomes (the THC-laden crystal structures on the flower) start turning from clear to translucent amber.

After you cut down your plant, cut off each branch individually and hang them to dry. Hang the branches from a clothes hanger in a dark closet for between 5 days and two weeks, depending on how moist your climate is. If you have a method for removing humidity from the air in the drying room, do so! Check them regularly–don’t let them dry out completely, or you’ll be left with a subpar smoking experience. The general rule of thumb is to keep 6- to 9-percent humidity in the bud. By feel, this means it has a little give when pinched and doesn’t crumble.

Once drying is done, use your snips to cut the buds off the branches and snip out any stems sticking out from the good stuff. Seal the buds in a mason jar for between 1 and 2 weeks to let your buds cure. Open your jars once every day or two to “burp” them. After that timeframe has passed, you’re ready to spark up and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

Start at the Beginning: Collect Some Seeds

Now that you know how to grow cannabis from seed, you’re ready to get to work! One of the main things you’ll need when growing marijuana from seed is—you guessed it—a seed.

One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways is by using seeds you find in dispensary flower. While there are other ways to do this, collecting from store-bought is the cheapest way to start your hobby of growing weed from seed.

Our 8-Bit flower goes by the motto, “No Sticks, Just Weed and Seeds.” This affordable product gets you what you need to get started growing (seeds) and some flower to smoke along the way. Maximize simplicity by ordering flower directly from a cannabis delivery service.