How You Give Your Favorite marijuana Plants An (Almost) Immortal Life What do you do when youre really in love with specific marijuana plants, or maybe you have marijuana plants nearing harvest time and lack easy access to seeds or clones, so you want to harvest those nugs but also keep your cannabis plants alive afterwards.
The answer is to re-vegetate them. Some people call this rejuvenation. Re-vegging means you partially harvest your marijuana plants, then put them back into grow phase so they revert to vegetative growth and you start all over again with a new grow phase. Heres the way you do it:
When you want to re-veg your marijuana plants, you dont harvest the same way as when youre ending their life. Instead you leave 10-20% of foliar and floral growth on your marijuana plants. Yes, this means you leave some small buds. From these small buds and leaves, your plants will grow new vegetative growth.
After youve done your partial harvest, flush your plants root balls, do root pruning to remove brown and/or defective root strands, shake your marijuana plants to dislodge unattached portions of whatever root zone media theyre growing in (unless its impossible to do root work, such as with aeroponics or DWC), and transplant them into fresh media and larger pots as needed. Add beneficial bacteria and fungi to the root material.
Put your plants under high-output grow phase fluorescents or other grow phase lighting and leave the lights on 20-24 hours per day until your cannabis plants are totally revegetated, at which time you go to 18 hours HID lighting per day. Early intensive doses of constant light encourage your plants into reverting to veg phase growth faster.
Youve flushed your marijuana roots and your plants are in a grow phase environment again, so now use grow phase base fertilizer, adding Vitamin B such as B-52, Roots Excelurator, potassium silicate, Bud Candy, and beneficial microbes to the mix. Go light on fertilizer elements for the first 1-4 weeks. Your plants are in shock from being harvested and transplanted. They dont have many leaves. Its hard for them to take in hydroponics nutrients, and they need gentle feeding.
If your cannabis plants are able to handle the re-veg process, theyll start showing signs of new growth within 2-6 weeks. The new growth will at first look like mutations. The leaves will be twisted, smoothnot serrated like regular marijuana leaves. Within a week or two, the mutated growth will shift to normal marijuana leaf formation.
Continue to feed grow phase nutrients and the additives, especially Roots Excelurator, B-52, and Bud Candy. You want your marijuana plants to grow new and better roots during re-vegetation.
Within 3-8 weeks of harvesting, your re-vegetated marijuana plants will show lots of tangled, dense new growth. Much of the growth will be spindly, twisty stalks and leaves. Before you flip your plants into flowering again, trim back about 50% of the ugliest of the new growth. Shape your plants to have a wide canopy and several sturdy growth stalks. After this trim, wait at least ten days before you flip the plants back into flowering (the trimming causes shock, and you want the plant to add new growth in the trimmed profile before you go to 12-12).
If youre doing motherplants, you can leave your re-vegetated plants in grow phase indefinitely while youre taking clones. Once your re-vegetated motherplants are established, give them about 16 hours of light and a mild grow phase nutrients solution.
If youre going to flower your re-vegged plants, be sure to flush the root zone before you flip them, and then start in with bloom phase fertilizer, along with early bloom additives such as Bud Ignitor.
Your re-veg plants might be stronger or weaker than the first time around. You might get a better harvest, or a weaker one. It depends on marijuana plant genetics, root health, and how well you treated them during re-vegging.
Some marijuana plants are too damaged before harvesting or by harvesting, so that they wont re-vegetate. About seven out of every 10 marijuana plants Ive tried to re-vegetate has handled the challenge well.
How many times can you harvest and re-vegetate? Ive seen growers get 2-5 harvests off of one marijuana plant. Most often, growers are re-vegging so they can do motherplants.
Whatever the reason youre wanting to put your harvested marijuana plants back into grow phase, re-vegetating is a method that preserves your favorite plants, and may even save you money and time.
Instead of having to buy new cannabis seeds or clones, you can rejuvenate existing genetics that already have substantial root systems. And you already know exactly what kind of marijuana those plants will give you. Have fun making your marijuana plants almost immortal.