5 ways to "INCREASE" your yeild indoors!! We all want bigger yields for less money, time and effort.
In this post I am going to tell you "5" ways so that you can increase your yeilds!!
1.) Increase Light Intensity
If your marijuana plant has no problems or illnesses, then the biggest factor affecting your yields is the light intensity provided.
Light is like food for your plants. It's how your plants get energy to grow and produce buds.
As a general rule of thumb...
More Intense Light = Bigger Yields
After you've germinated your seeds (or rooted your clones), one of the most important things to do right from the beginning is ensure that your plants are getting enough light.
During the vegetative stage, marijuana plants which don't get enough light will tend to 'stretch' up toward the light with a lot of space between nodes or "branches."
Example: A seedling will stretch upwards because she's not getting enough light. She's trying to "reach" up towards what she thinks is the sun.
This stretching is not usually a good thing, because tall lanky plants are hard to give proper light coverage in the flowering stage.
During the flowering stage, higher light intensity is what drives the production of buds.
For the best results, you want all your buds directly exposed to intense light. Being in direct light seems to cause buds to swell up much more than when buds are hidden by leaves or far away from your lights.
If you keep increasing the light intensity in your grow room, you will eventually reach a point where you actually max out on the light your plants can use. If you think of light like food for your plant, this is like putting so much food on the table that your plants just can't eat any more.
When this happens, you can give your plants the ability to use even more of that light (and increase your bud yields even further) by increasing the CO2 levels in your grow room during the flowering stage. This is like if you could give your plants a way to stretch their bellies and eat even more food than would normally be possible.
Just remember that it takes a lot of light for your marijuana plants to hit this light saturation point. so unless you've got a 1000W grow light (or multiple 600W grow lights), your plants are probably able to use all the light they're receiving. Yet if you are working with high-powered lights, you may want to look into supplementing CO2 to increase your yields even further.
Learn more about CO2 and it's relationhip to light intensity and marijuana yields here:
http://growweedeasy.com/co2-marijuana-yields
Learn about grow light options, so you can pick the most intense light possible for your grow space.
Next, you'll learn how to manipulate your plant so that you can get more light coverage to your bud sites, using the same grow lights you can already have.
2.) Manipulate plant (bend, net, top, etc) so it gets more even coverage of light
Manipulating your plants is a basically free way to increase your yields, without needing to change anything else about your setup. You don't need to buy expensive nutrients or get a new grow light for this to work for you.
Manipulating the plant this way is often referred to as "LST" in the marijuana growing world, which is short for "Low Stress Training."
The idea with LST is to manually force your plant to grow flat and wide, as opposed to tall and thin.
A variation of LST is when growers use a screen or net to actually force plants to grow flat. This technique is known as ScrOG (short for "Screen Of Green").
In order to use ScrOG, you will need to invest in a screen, and take time during the vegetative and beginning of the flowering stage to train your plant to grow along the screen.
Next , learn how using less nutrients can actually result in bigger yields.
3.) Don't overdo it with too many nutrients
Your plant needs nutrients, no doubt about it. But how much nutrients do you give them?
People refer to nutrients as "food" for your plants. It intuitively seems like giving more "food" would result in bigger buds, but is that really the case?
As we learned earlier, the real "food" for your plants is light. Light is what your plant turns into energy through photosynthesis, and this energy is what fuels vegetative and flowering growth.
Then what do the nutrients do? They're like little helpers that give your plant what it needs to carry out the process of photosynthesis and growth.
I like to think of nutrients like vitamins for humans. While humans need to get certain vitamins to survive, I want you to consider that people do not continue getting more and more benefits if you feed them multi-vitamins like candy. In fact, if you give people more vitamins than their body can use, they will actually get sick.
Nutrients are important to healthy growth, but it's important to understand that going overboard can actually do more harm than good.
While many growers are trying to raise nutrient levels as high as possible, I have gotten better results (yields) when I take the opposite approach.
My plants seem to produce the best yields when I keep nutrient levels low; I try to give just enough nutrients to prevent nutrient deficiencies throughout the grow.
That means I often use half or even less than the suggested amount of nutrients listed on the label. I only ever raise my nutrient levels when I notice that the lower leaves are starting to turn yellow and die (especially in the vegetative or early flowering stage, though it's normal to start losing leaves the last month before harvest). Otherwise I keep nutrient levels as low as I can.
Slightly lowered nutrient levels seem to be especially important to bud production during the last 2-4 weeks before harvest time.
It's natural for the plant to start losing leaves as the plant puts all energy into making buds, and unfortunately many growers respond by ramping up nutrient levels late in the flowering stage.
Yet if you keep nutrient levels low and allow the vegetative growth to die away during those last few weeks, the buds seem to swell up dramatically compared to a plant that is kept green all the way to harvest.
Lowering overall nutrient levels and letting the leaves yellow and die as harvest approaches has seemed to improve my bud yields compared to when I use full levels of nutrients until harvest.
4.) Wait until the right time to harvest
For most strains of marijuana, there is a 2-3 week window during which buds can be harvested.
By allowing your buds to ripen fully, you will maximize your overall yields. I've seen buds gain up to 25% adiitional size (at least visually) in the last 2-3 weeks before harvest. If I'd harvested these buds early, I would have dramatically lowered my overall yields.
Another benefit of waiting until the right time to harvest is you can choose to harvest your buds when they have the exact effects you're looking for. Harvest earlier for a more buzzy high, and harvest later for a more relaxing experience. Learn how to tell when your buds are ready for harvest:
http://growweedeasy.com/how-do-i-know-when-to-harvest-marijuana
And while your buds are fattening up during those last few weeks...
5.) Provide a source of sugar (blackstrap molasses works great) towards end of flowering stage
By supplementing with extra sugar towards the end of flowering, you help improve the flavor of your buds while also fattening buds up.
This is especially effective for those growing organically, as this works synergistically with the beneficial microbes in your soil
There are many commercial supplements that claim to fatten up buds and improve flavor, but most of these work by adding simple sugar.
If you're growing in soil and looking for a cheap yet effective alternative to those expensive supplements, you can add a little bit of regular blackstrap molasses (a teaspoon or two per gallon) to your water every time you water your plants during the second half of the flowering stage.
***Please Note: It is not recommended to use molasses in a recirculating hydroponic system as it can clog up your tubing. Don't say I didn't tell ya so!! ****
That's it really. Follow those 5 easy steps, and I promise you, you will have a much bigger yeild your next go around, & your plants will also LOVE you a lot more!!