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Vegetative stage length: 3-16 weeks The Spring Equinox is a good reminder that it’s time to kick off the outdoor growing process and start germinating your cannabis seeds. If you’re growing outdoors in the Northern Hemisphere, growers usually get their seeds between February and April, and you should start your seeds by the end of April. Some growers will start their seedlings inside in a more controlled environment because seedlings are more delicate, and then put their seeds in the ground outside once they’re a little bigger. If you’re growing clones or autoflowers, you have a grace period of another month or so. Plants usually need to be outside, in the ground, by the end of June. Seedling stage Everything should be cleaned up, dried, and curing well before the Winter Solstice. Now’s a good time to make your own cannabutter, topicals, or tinctures with all that trim from the harvest. Kick your feet up, relax, and hunker down for the cold, it’s been a long growing season! Within the flowering stage, there are three subphases: Marijuana light cycle: 16 hours a day The biggest variability in how long a marijuana plant takes to grow will happen in the vegetative stage—after the seedling phase and before flowering. Flowering generally lasts 7-10 weeks for indica and hybrid photoperiod cannabis strains, while the more Sativa dominant strains can take 10-14 weeks to fully ripen into primo head stash. Once you confirm you’ve got a ripe marijuana crop on your hands it’s time to break out the trimming scissors and get harvesting. After two weeks slow drying in paper bags or hung up, at room temp and approximately 50% RH, you’ve got a stash. It’s always best to evaluate if a cannabis plant is ready to harvest by taking a closer look at those resin dripping buds. Using an inexpensive scope to zoom in on those resin heads to make sure they are milky and amber rather than clear removes all the guess work. STAGE 3: VEGETATIVE PHASE — 2–8+ WEEKS Cannabis plants will first give you an indication of their sex in the early phase of bloom. Typically within the first two weeks of flowering females will develop pistils or “hairs” to confirm their femininity. Earlier on in the flowering phase, trichomes will appear translucent, meaning they are still developing and should be left to mature. When approximately 60% of the trichomes develop a milky look, they are ready to harvest. It's at this stage where they will produce the most significant high . However, some growers wait until up to 90% of trichomes move past this milky look and become amber, as this will cause the buds to develop a more stoning and sedating effect. Photoperiod strains are induced to bloom by the hours of light they receive; indoors the grower changes to a 12-12 light-dark cycle to artificially promote flower growth. You can trim your cannabis plants in one of two ways: wet or dry. Both have their own advantages, and each grower will differ in which one they prefer. Wet trimming refers to trimming off the sugar leaves surrounding the buds immediately after harvest while the plant still has a high water content and feels “wet”. This method is the most common, and arguably the easiest, as it doesn't require a large room to dry out plants beforehand. However, wet trimming is literally sticky business. The resin from the flowers will cover both your hands and your scissors, but there is an upside to this. By scraping the resin from your scissors every now and then, you’ll quickly build up a supply of “scissor hash”, allowing you an early taste of your harvest. Let me conclude with a personal warning: try to curb your enthusiasm! Of course you’re proud of your results, and you should be! Still, avoid the mistake of telling taal tales to your friends. Keep your hobby to yourself, just like back when you started out. Oh and another thing: you now probably have more weed lying around than ever before. Don’t go and smoke your brains out now; handle your harvest responsibly. Well-cured cannabis will last for a long time. Enjoy your crop, but enjoy it responsibly. The next step is transferring them to the full-sized grow tent. Time to repot ad\gain: choose a flower pot that matches your approach and available space. In my case, that’s 18 litres. That’s why I prefer to trim first, and then drying the buds in a drying net in the same room where I grew them. I allow fresh air into the tent and keep it flowing to cut mold risks. The buds take two to three weeks to dry. Curing Your First Cannabis Home Grow After drying, I carefully remove all the buds from the nets and place them in glass mason jars to cure. The buds cure gradually, improving their taste and ‘maturing’ them until they are perfect for smoking. Curing buds is a straightforward affair: simply stick them in a jar and wait. Give them time to ‘burp’, though: open them for a few minutes to refresh the air inside and return them to their dark storage location. How long you cure is matter of personal taste. I personally cure my weed for one month before that sweet day arrives: time to smoke those fabulous Amsterdam Genetics! Let’s not kid ourselves here: this is what we’ve been working so hard for, isn’t it? My biggest mistake ever was leaving the lights on after flowering in the room where I set up my tent. Sadly, the tent wasn’t light-proof, so my plants got stressed out and turned into hermaphrodites. The result: a whole harvest full of seeds that was no use at all… Fourteen weeks of work down the drain! I also made the mistake of pumping out my entire 60L nutrient mix tank in one go once. Pretty bad for plants capable of handling 10 litres at once max… There’s all sorts of techniques to keep plant size under control. Nibameca. Reference: https://bowling.auction/community/profile/terradrnathy6/ https://pbase.com/johnathanmendez/image/171475553 https://www.madeweb.it/laboratorio/illegal-to-have-cannabis-seeds/ http://128.199.42.197:8080/2013/06/12/is-cannabis-seeds/