Your Guide to Successfully Watering your Cannabis Plants

If only watering your cannabis plants was as easy as giving them some water once a week.
Unfortunately, it isn’t, so get the watering element of your plant care wrong, and very quickly you’ll have dead or dying plants.

It might surprise you to learn that it is easier to overwater your cannabis plants than underwater them.

However, before you start thinking that watering is seriously complicated, it isn’t, you just need to follow a few basic rules.

First off there is pot size. For your seedlings, you want a small pot with a light and airy growing medium. You want to be able to get the growing medium nice and moist, but still well drained so that it will dry out.

If you put seedlings in a large pot, invariably the soil will never dry out to any extent, and the roots will begin to rot.

Once transferred to a large pot, you want to make sure that the soil, or growing medium, drains easily. The idea is for the soil to be moist, not soaking wet.

The pot should have holes in the bottom so that excess water can drain off, and the pot should be slightly raised so that it doesn’t stand in any excess water.

If your soil remains too wet, it will encourage the growth of mould and bacteria on the surface.
In a good set-up, the surface of the soil should dry out between watering – this stops mould and bacteria forming.

When you water the soil, it should take roughly two or three minutes for excess water to drain through. If it takes a lot longer, then the soil is too heavy and will remain too wet and compacted around the root system.

Adding perlite to soil is a good way to encourage healthy drainage.

While you can’t tell how wet the soil is at a depth of greater than six centimetres, sticking your finger in the soil is a good way to check if the plant needs watering. If it is dry all the way down, chances are it needs watering.

If you can feel that the soil is damp, leave things alone.

Often a good way to tell if a plant needs watering is to lift the pot – if it feels appreciably lighter than it did when it has just been watered, it’s time for a top-up.

The only other thing to keep an eye on, is the pH of the soil, as too much water can change it from the optimum 6.3-6.8.

So remember, cannabis plants are not the same as goldfish, so they don’t need to be immersed in water 24/7!