I accidentally uploaded the bonus content for everyone to hear! Hope you enjoyed it! Here's the full episode for your listening pleasure!
Maria Swansen joins me from the farm in Washington where she’s recently taken over a problem project and turned it around in just a few short months. As a friend of a previous guest Erin Lapsansky, I knew that Maria was gonna drop some knowledge on the show for all of you. She details her history with cannabis gardening and then dives right into practical advice that you can immediately put to action in the garden.
Maria grows in a 300 sq. ft. garden right now, and has 15 flowering plants in 10-gallon pots in that space which is a pretty nice space for that garden. She grows in Fox Farm Ocean Forest soil and uses only intake and exhaust to manage the temperature and other environmental factors. She grows with LED lights now and says that just reducing the temperature in her grow room after changing from HPS bulbs increased her yield 50% or more.
Maria’s advice for improving the health of your plant? Get your environment dialed in. Balance out your temperature and humidity to ensure your plant growth is optimized and protected all at the same time. We dig into it around 14 minutes, listen up. Maria also discusses VPD fairly in-depth and how to use the chart when it comes to growing cannabis at 15 minutes through 18 minutes.
At 18 minutes we start to discuss how a grower can improve their yields off limited plant counts. She first states that environment is first on the list, but then goes on to discuss other pieces of advice. She discusses the importance of scrog’ing and how manganese impacts yields and when to use it to maximize yields.
Just before 25 minutes, we start to discuss the next question and her Integrated Pest Management practices. She tries to stick with organic microbial products, and only spray things within the first 4 weeks trying to stay on top of and prevent any issues from springing up. Procidic is something she suggests using every 6 days to keep the powdery mildew at bay and then goes on to suggest getting an industrial paint sprayer to expedite and improve the task of spraying large gardens.
Maria suggests growers should keep an open mind in order to be as successful as possible. Any time she has felt confident in her abilities she seems to come across a small problem that humbles her, and she encourages every grower to be humble and be willing to learn and try new things.
Maria’s last bits of advice: Get your environment dialed in and then pay attention to your plants every single day. Once they are healthy, set a baseline and ensure that you start to react and improve if your plants start to look anything less than perfectly healthy.
Connect with Maria @mariaaajuana_chronicles on Instagram or reach out to us and we’ll help make an introduction if you’d like to hire Maria to help you improve your garden, set things up or troubleshoot any problem you might be having. If you liked this interview, and want to hear more from this week's Homegrown Helper please head over to http://thehomegrownhelpers.com/bonus and download the rest of the show!
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