Low Cost Growth Hacks to Increase the Yield of Your Cannabis Plants

How to Increase the Yield of your Cannabis Grow with Grow Hacks

growth hacking cannabis

They say that smoking weed isn’t addictive, but growing it is! While there is no physical addiction to growing weed, there is a sense of wonder and discovery through the entire process. However, for most people, the ability to grow weed is restricted due to legal limits on how many plants you can possess at a time.

In these cases, finding out how to increase your yield can be crucial, especially since you have limited real estate to grow your crops. Thus, today we’re going to be looking over some of the easiest tricks to help increase your yield per plant.

In order to make this article as relevant as possible, I’m going to be focusing on “home grows” as opposed to commercial grows.

What does this entail?

Home growers usually don’t have access to powerful light sources
Home growers might be growing in soil or outdoors
Home growers don’t have all the tech available for industry growers
Budget restraints

Fortunately, most of the methods I’ll be discussing won’t require you to get a lot of tech. Rather, patience is the key to making your crop grow big and lush.

Start by Training

As a first time grower, I’d recommend that you only let the plant grow without too much interference. You don’t need to do anything special the first time around. Your goal is to simply crop out. However, if this is your 2nd or 3rd go at it, then perhaps it’s time to start training your plants.

There are a couple of methods you could implore;

LST (Low Stress Training)
Lolli popping
SCROG (Screen of Green)
CO2 Boosting

Below I’ll explain what each of these means and how to do them.

LST (Low-Stress Training)

Low-Stress Training requires a delicate hand and can significantly increase the yield if it’s done right. Essentially, you’ll be tying down shoots in order to create more horizontal growing space. What this means is that you bend the shoot outwards allowing more light to hit the nodes. This will promote further development of buds when it comes to flowering.

It’s important to understand that LST can’t be done late in the flowering cycle. Rather, this method is reserved for the initial vegetative stage where the shoots are still very malleable. You need to be careful to only bend the shoot and not break it.

Nonetheless, if you do break it, you can tape the wound back up and it should heal as long as you didn’t completely break the shoot off the stem.

It’s also important that doing it once is not enough. As the plant grows, you’ll need to continue to adjust your shoots and perhaps even tie-down secondary shoots over time. The trick is to always let the shoots be pulled “away from the main stem”. I prefer to use symmetry as well, creating a balance in the method. This allows the plant to remain strong as it continues to grow and doesn’t topple over to one side.

Lollipop

The next method is rather geared to making a few massive buds on your plant. If you simply let the cannabis plant growth, you’ll see little nugs appear all over the plant, however with the Lollipop method, you focus all the growth on a specific sector (the top).

Essentially, you’ll strip away all the smaller shoots at the bottom that will only take energy away from the plant when flowering. You want to eliminate smaller buds and focus the growing on the top buds that receive the most light.

This could be used in combination with LTS to create a few major “tops” which will be your “lollipop”. Simply use some sterilized scissors and cut the bottom shoots off at a 45º angle. This will allow the plant to heal quicker.

Don’t overdo it in the beginning. You need to allow the plant to grow to a decent size (about 3 weeks after germination) to start with the lollipop. There are plenty of tutorials online you can review. I’m just here to inform you that the technique exists.

SCROGGING

The next technique utilizes LTS and essentially weaves the shoots into a screen to create a canopy of buds. You’ll need a screen with 1-inch squares to pull this off. When you start training the plant, you’ll direct the shoots into each respective square. The rest of the shoots beneath the square will be clipped allowing all the bud production to focus on the top.

It takes some time to pull this off and you’ll probably lose between 2-3 weeks to finally get all of the shoots weaved into the screen, however, once you have achieved it you’ll have a “sea of top buds” which will be bigger and have more resin production. It’s a brilliant way to maximize grow real estate and make the most of your space.

CO2 Boosting

The final trick is more related to producing bigger more resin-covered buds. To do this, you’ll need to add additional CO2 into the flowering cycle. You can utilize dry ice and simply leave it in the grow box next to the buds during the flowering stage. You’ll want to do this when the light cycles are on as the plant absorbs more C02 during this stage.

This will increase resin production and allow the buds to become slightly bigger. Utilizing this with any of the techniques above will surely increase your yield.

And there you have it, some sure-fire ways to increase your yield!