Here I will give a basic overview of my growing style, and practices. There are as many S.O.P.s as there are cultivators and I do not claim to have the “correct” one. There is no “best” way to cultivate cannabis because everyone has different set of goals, and a different set of constraits within which they are able to work. I understand that not everyone has the finances, or space to emulate my style exactly, and that’s ok. I am simply presenting what works, and has worked for me.

The basics:

Pots

Two gallon fabric pots. I buy them as cheaply as possible on Amazon. If I’m doing a larger pheno hunt, I’ll use one gallon pots. Pot size should take in to account your veg time, environment, fertigation schedule, and chosen medium.

Medium

70/30 coco/perlite mix. I should add that I only fertigate (water with food) once every 24 hours. A setup geared towards more ideal production would have more numerous, shorter fertigations throughout the lights-on cycle, with controlled dry-backs in between. Because I only fertigate once a day, I can afford to let my medium take a longer time to dry-out.

Food

I use Jack’s 3,2,1 system. This is: Jack’s 5-12-26, Magnesium Sulfate, and Calcium Nitrate. Three dry ingredients. That’s pretty much it. During up-potting I will sprinkle some powdered mycorrhizal bacterial inoculant in the coco, and I occasionally use a bacillus amyloliquefaciens inoculant in my main feed reservoir.

Apart from that, it’s strictly the three parts of the Jack’s feed. Because of my perpetual grow setup, it is much more convenient for me to have a single reservoir for all stages of growth. This means that all of my plants; vegging, beginning, middle, and end of flower…they all get the same exact feed water. The only exceptions are the water with which I soak rooting plugs, and the water I use to sprout seedlings. Once a plant is about two inches tall from seed; it gets the same, full-strength feed as everything else. Some people might benefit from the addition of silica; I don’t find it necessary currently but I’m open to having my mind changed.

This “same mix seedling-finish” approach IS NOT IDEAL. I do this because I have a perpetual grow and don’t want to keep several different reservoirs. If you’re doing one grow at a time I’d strongly recommend tailoring your feed to the stage of growth, and to what the plants are asking for.

My mix rates are roughly (per gallon):

3.3g/gal Jack’s 5-12-26

1g/gal Magnesium Sulfate (epsom salt)

2g/gal Calcium Nitrate

These are weighed with a small scale and a small stainless steel bowl. They are mixed in the order I listed, I always make sure to let each dissolve completely in my reservoir before adding the next. I use a small pump in the bottom of my reservoir (a 44g trash bin) to stir and aerate. Note: I don’t leave the pump stirring in the bottom 24/7, it will heat your reservoir if left on for too long.

Once this is mixed, I measure the PH with a GOOD, and WELL MAINTAINED PH probe. I can’t emphasize enoough that a cheap, $15 meter from Amazon is a poor choice. I use a Apera Instruments AI209. It’s maybe $50. Buy solutuoion with which to calibrate it, and buy AND USE PH probe storage solution at all times.

For coco, the ideal PH of your feed water is somewhere around 5.6-6.2. Different nutrients are absorbed at different PH’s so it is beneficial to allow different batches of feed to have slightly different PH’s. I usually shoot for a PH of around 5.8, and if I find I added too much PH up or down, I’ll feed with it anyway so long as it’s within the range I listed. The brand of PH up or down doesn’t matter too much. They are all varying dilutions of a small set of acids and bases. If you pick a brand and stick to it though, you’ll eventually get a good sense of how much you’re going to add to each reservoir; assuming the PH of the water from your tap remains the same year-round.

I should add that my grow space is fed by a well and so I don’t have to worry about chlorine. If your water is chlorinated then you will want your reservoir to sit for 24 hours before use, to allow the chlorine to evaporate.

Lights

Light is one of the most important factors in determining your success. Too little light is the most common issue I see on reddit or instagram grows where the grower ends up dissapointed in their results. Too much light is of course possible, but if you can afford it, do invest in poper full-spectrum LED lighting, and a lot of it. I use three, 450-500w full-spectrum bar-style LED lights for each 4’x8’ tray. I’m phasing out some older “quantum board” style LED panels which I’ve found to have too poor a spread. The model I’m currently using is Hyphotonflux HPF4000. I’m not particularly committed to this brand, but they are cheap and have served me well so far.

CO2

I run a sealed room with a mini-split AC and tightly sealed doors. This allows me to take advantage of elevated CO2. I Have a CO2 tank, a regulator, and a CO2 monitor/controller which keeps my room atmosphere at ~1200ppm CO2. Regular atmospheric is ~400ppm. Increased CO2 has a greatly beneficial effect on plants which are otherwise healthy, and have an abundance of light. You can grow perfectly dank and lovely cannabis without supplementing CO2, but all else being equal; plants growing with added CO2 will grow faster and larger.

Fertigation

I use a 44g trash bin, filled from my well. I have a large pump which sucks water from the bottom of this reservoir and pumps it though a Netafim watering system with 6.6 gph drip emitters. This high flow rate drip emitter allows me to water to runoff each night within only a minute or two. I water to runoff almost every day.

My basic procedure from seed

1. Fill 4”x4” plastic starter pots with coco

2. Saturate the coco with plain water PD’d to 5.8

3. Use the blunt end of a closed Sharpie to create a 1/2” indentation in the soggy coco

4. Drop a seed in each pot

5. Cover the seed/fill the indentation with equally soggy coco, tamping LIGHTLY

6. Spray down the area where the seed is planted in each pot with a little more of the same water, just to make sure that the seed casing is wet beneath the surface

7. Set the planted pots in a warm area (74-85f) under low-moderate LED lighting

8. With newish, healthy seeds, you’ll see them sprouting within 3—7 days. Older seeds might take some time longer, just be sure to keep the medium damp, and the environment both warm, and humid

9. Once the coco looks or feels like it’s drying out a bit, add a little plain PH’d water (~5.8)

10. Once the seedlings spread their cotyledons (primordial, rounded leaves) and produce their first set of true leaves (more traditional, jagged-style cannabis leaves) the plants may seem to stall for up to a week without much apparent growth. There is generally nothing to worry about, the plant is simply concentrating its energy on growing roots, rather than foliage. Once the plant has maybe two sets of true leaves, I’ll be watering with my full-strength feed water as described above. (I use a half-strength mix once the cotyledons are open, and until there are two sets of true leaves)

11. I allow the plants to continue their growth in these small starter pots until they have several sets of true leaves and are about five inches tall, with their leaves spreading wider than the edges of the pot. Once the plants have reached this size, I’ll fill a three gallon fabric pot with coco, make a cavity in the coco big enough to accept the root ball of the small plant, sprinkle some mycorrhizal bacteria inoculant in the cavity, and up-pot the small plant into the larger pot. I water the newly potted plant in fairly well, concentrating on the outer edges of the pot in order to encourage lateral root growth. Make sure you fill your fabric pots up almost entirely! I’ve seen far too many newcomers fill their pots only half-way or so.

12. Once the plants have three or four nodes, I top them once. This means plucking or cutting off the apical (very top center) node of the plant to encourage lower branch growth thus giving you a more even canopy. After topping I let my plants grow until their lower side branches are large enough to make good cuttings (clones) and then I take three sizeable cuttings from each plant to act as back-ups for that pheno. I will discuss cloning practices in a separate section. After taking my three cuttings, I sttrip the plant of ALL side branches below the top two that spread from the area where the plant was topped. This is a rather extreme practice and I don’t recommend it for every grower. I do this because as breeder, I want to maximize the number of plants I can pheno hunt at a time. Each plant having only two main branches means that I can stuff more plants in to a tray and still get a good idea of the properties of each. Doing this much violent pruning before flower will inevitably increase your rate of hermaphrodism as it stresses the plant greatly. This is desirable in my case as I’m seeking plants for breeding and want to be shown even the slightest unstable sexual characteristics so that I can avoid including them in my cultivars.