Growing cannabis involves giving your plants the best conditions possible to thrive. This means that you want to try to mimic its natural habitat as closely as possible. Cannabis plants come from a relatively humid environment, so maintaining the humidity of your grow room is important to keep your plants healthy.
This can be tricky for growers who live in particularly dry environments. Controlling the humidity in your cannabis grow room can be challenging when fighting outside influences. However, it can be done as long as you keep a watchful eye on your humidity levels.
Check Humidity
The first step to controlling the humidity in your grow room environment is by measuring the humidity. There are plenty of humidity gauges on the market, and most of them include temperature measurement as well. Your humidity may naturally remain in the good range for cannabis.
Cannabis thrives best in humidity ranges between 45% and 75%, depending on its growth stage. There are many environments around the US that stay below or above that range of humidity for a significant portion of the year. In these scenarios you’ll need to adjust your humidity.
Raise Humidity
If your humidity regularly rests below 45%, you’ll need to raise it. Low humidity can cause many problems in cannabis plants. If there isn’t enough moisture in the air, your plants will lose moisture quickly. The result will be plants absorbing much more water from their growth medium, and potentially absorbing too many nutrients, which can then cause wilting.
You can raise humidity in a couple ways. First, if you have an exhaust fan running, try lowering its speed. You may be blowing all the humid air out of the room. As long as your temperature remains within a safe range, this is a win-win, because you’ll use less electricity to power the fan and your humidity goes up.
You can also place water sources in the room to as a cannabis humidity control, such as trays of water or saturated sponges around your grow tent. The lights will cause the water to evaporate and will hopefully raise your humidity into the 45% range.
If neither of these techniques work, you can buy a humidifier with an onboard sensor. This’ll keep your humidity in the right range automatically. The one downside is that this can raise your electricity bills (sad face).
Lower Humidity
Humidity that is too high can be just as big of a problem. Lots of cannabis pests thrive in extra-humid environments. Things like white powdery mildew, molds, and root rot are much more likely to grow in humid environments.
If you want to lower your humidity, there are a few methods you can use.
Method 1. By raising the speed of your exhaust fan you can help blow excess moisture out of your grow room environment. This is especially effective if the humidity outside your room is a better humidity level than inside.
Method 2. You can also water your plants less. Excessive humidity is sometimes caused by too much water present at the top of your growth medium. Let your soil dry out one to two inches deep before you water again.
Method 3. Sometimes defoliating your plants slightly can also help, as it decreases the amount of surface area that your plants can exhale moisture through.
Method 4. Finally, a good ole dehumidifier can help lower the humidity in your grow tent.
Humidity is important for keeping your plants healthy. If you’re noticing strange problems with your cannabis plants and aren’t monitoring your humidity already, that may be what you’re missing. Cannabis humidity control will help improve your harvest and keep pests away from your plants.