Fertilizing your cannabis plants is the key to growing happy healthy plants and harvesting high-quality bud at the end of the grow. However, too much fertilizer at the wrong time can ruin your weed. Which is why flushing your cannabis plants is so important.
What Is Flushing
Flushing cannabis is the process of switching from nutrient-rich water to pure water. Essentially, you’re “flushing” out excess nutrients from the soil, forcing your cannabis plants to use the nutrients they already have stored instead. This means that those nutrients are no longer hanging around in the flowers, potentially making them hard to burn or giving them a bad taste.
Flushing cannabis is simple – you just stop adding cannabis nutrients to the water that you give them. However, knowing when to flush your plants is another matter. After all, the nutrients are important to growth, and you want them around for as long as possible to encourage growth. So, when do you go for a nutrient flush?
Nutrient Lockout
Sometimes disease, stress, or pH imbalances can keep your cannabis plants from successfully absorbing micronutrients through their roots. This can lead to your cannabis plants dying if you don’t treat them. Common symptoms of nutrient lockout are yellowing foliage, curling leaves, and stunted growth. Too many nutrients in the growth medium can cause this, as well, as the micronutrients reach a density where they interact with each other and form compounds that the plant can’t absorb.
Most of the time, the first step to treating nutrient lockout is a good water flush. This gets helps balance the pH of the growth medium and gets rid of any excess nutrient salts that may be affecting your plant. After flushing the plant for a few days, you can slowly start fertilizing again. It’s best to work your way up from partial doses back to full fertilization because you don’t want to swing right back into nutrient lockout.
Different Stages of Development
You should also flush your cannabis plant when you’re transitioning between growth phases. Cannabis needs have different nutrient requirements during the vegetative stage than in the flowering stage. By flushing the plants around the time that you switch to the flowering stage, you can move directly from cannabis nutrient mixes that are designed for greenery growth to mixes designed for flower growth, and you don’t have to worry built-up levels of the wrong kinds of nutrients – the flush takes care of that for you.
It’s important to keep the flush relatively brief here as the plant is still growing. If you flush the plant for too long, then it simply won’t get any nutrients, and you’ll stunt its growth.
Pre-Harvest
The final time when you should flush your cannabis plants is during the week before you plan to harvest. Your cannabis plants store nutrients, and many of these stores end up in the new growth – the flowers – because that’s where the most activity is happening. However, this can make your crop bitter and unpleasant.
For the week before harvest, flushing the plant forces all of those nutrients stored in the buds to move into the rest of the plant for use. Since you plan on harvesting soon, you don’t have to worry about stunting growth too much. As long as the plant still appears healthy, the water flush is just making your harvest even better.
Flushing your cannabis crop is a simple and easy way to take care of many problems you may face. It also helps your plants grow more efficiently and produces a better harvest. If you’re facing nutrient lockout or approaching harvest time, flushing your plants might be the solution you need.