With a California medical marijuana card, you are legally entitled to grow six marijuana plants in your own home. Although this doesn’t sound like a huge amount, it’s a lot more than the one you’ll be able to grow legally without the card in 2018 when Prop 64 goes into effect. With six plants, you can produce a significant amount of weed — definitely more than enough for personal use. In this article, we’ll explore some medical marijuana growing tips for newbies and walk you through how you can start to grow your own once you have your MMJ card.
Buy Seeds
You can find medical marijuana seeds at your local weed dispensary.
Like any other plant, there are numerous ways to grow medical marijuana, and there are a lot of things that can go wrong with the growth process. If you’re not prepared and don’t look after your plants, prevent pests and nourish your marijuana plants, they will die. The first thing you’ll need to do is to procure some medical marijuana seeds. You can find them at your local weed dispensary. At the dispensary, you’ll get advice on how many seeds you’ll need and suggestions for growing methods. All you’ll need to do is decide what method works best for you.
Plant Them
Rock wool or coco fiber will help your medical marijuana grow.
The easiest method is simply to use plain dirt and grow the medical marijuana in your backyard. Since the introduction of medical marijuana cards, this has become a more common method and one that many people use on a regular basis. It is also by far the most common way for beginners to start growing their own weed. It’s important to remember that you have to have a secure backyard with a fence that locks to ensure you don’t break California law.
The main advantage for growing in dirt is that it is the cheapest way to start and you can find fertilizers from local garden stores that will do a good job. The main disadvantage is you can’t be sure of soil quality and may get a bad crop of medical marijuana as a result. If using normal soil, you’ll need to make sure that the plants are exposed to lots of natural light (luckily, California has a lot of it) and are watered on a regular basis to ensure healthy growth.
Other growers like to use rock wool or coco fiber. The best way to think about these methods is to think about growing your medical marijuana with a high-quality bespoke soil. This is slightly more expensive than using the soil found in your backyard, but you’ll face a lot fewer issues when it comes to the quality of the crop. You’ll have to find coco fiber or rock wool, but if you live in a big town or have a good dispensary nearby, you won’t have an issue with procuring either.
Try Aeroponics
A more advanced technique is to use aeroponics to grow medical marijuana indoors. Although we don’t recommend this to first-time growers, it is something that you might be able to graduate to in the future. This method consists of hanging the plants in mesh baskets in the air. You’ll be required to spray the roots of the medical marijuana with a mix of water and fertilizer on a daily basis, usually numerous times per day. This is a more labor-intensive method, and simple mistakes, such as not getting the pH just right, can ruin an entire crop. However, the results when done well are stunning. This can be the fastest and most effective way of growing marijuana, resulting in the highest yields.
Consider Indoor vs Outdoor
Once you decide on your growing method, the next most important thing to think about is whether you’re going to grow your plants indoors or outdoors. Both have pros and cons. It is common in the weed community to think that indoor growth is better, but this is largely down to the years that cannabis was strictly illegal when most people, for security’s sake, were forced to grow their cannabis indoors. This isn’t to say that there aren’t numerous benefits for growing indoors — the most common being complete control of your growing environment. This means you can control the temperature, light, carbon dioxide and humidity of your growing environment. Of course, in order to do that, you’ll need to buy all the lights and equipment. A truly effective growth environment can cost thousands of dollars.
Outdoor growth isn’t exactly free, but it’s certainly substantially cheaper than growing your weed indoors. If you choose to grow outdoors, you have to bear in mind that you are at the mercy of nature. Whether it’s flooding, drought, or a pesky animal or person stealing your plants, there is a range of issues with outdoor growth that you’ll never have to face when growing indoors.
Once you have your medical marijuana card and are experimenting with growing your own weed for the first time, try to grow outdoors first. This will allow you to experiment with low-cost materials and discover if growing your own weed is right for you. You could eventually decide to upgrade to an indoor growth environment, or you may hate the process of growing marijuana altogether. If that’s the case, you’ll have saved some money and will be able to purchase weed from your local dispensary instead. Neither choice is the wrong one when it comes to medical marijuana.