In our last article, we discussed the reasons why you would transplant your cannabis plant from a small container to a large container. Those reasons included starting in a small container to save space, or encourage vertical growth early on.
Again, you don’t have to ever transplant your cannabis plant. You can plant a seed in a 10-gallon pot if you’d like. This is perfectly fine and there may be reasons for doing it.
But if you start in a really small pot, you will definitely not want to finish in one. We tried that in our red solo cup challenge and the results were terrible.
So if you started your plant in a small pot or cup, here are some guidelines for transplanting your weed plant.
When to transplant a cannabis seedling or clone
For transplanting seedlings and clones, the advice is pretty much the same. You will want to make the switch as the plant grows and as you can see the limitation of the small container on the plant’s growth potential.
Here is how we do it:
- Seedlings – when we plant seeds, we use red solo cups. We will allow our seedling to grow to about 6 inches or so, and then we will transplant into a half-gallon container. After four weeks in the half-gallon, they are transplanted into our standard 2-gallon or 3-gallon pot.
- Clones — There are several ways to do this. One is to take your cutting and plant it in a small rockwool cube. As it develops roots, you can transplant it into a larger rockwool cube, or straight into soil or coco soil. We use aeroponic EZ-Cloners to develop our roots, and then we place our rooted clones into half-gallon pots.
As you can see, we are really focused on saving space, so we always start our seedlings or clones in red solo cups or half-gallon containers.
If you started in a small cup or a small pot, you can basically transplant at any time. You can go by height or by weeks of growth.
Transplanting during Veg
During veg, we will transplant from our half-gallon pots into 2-gallon. We have used 5-gallon and 7-gallon in the past, and those are great options. We ran 3-gallon pots for the longest time, but recently switched to 2-gallon pots.
We found basically no difference in growth patterns between 2-gallon and 3-gallon, but the differences in saving space have been tremendous. The more space we save, the more plants we can run. And we like to run a lot of plants every batch cycle!
Now, if you were wanting a larger plant, go with a larger pot. Your potential for a large plant will increase with the size of the pot. Choose a five, seven or ten gallon pot for really large plants.
Is it bad to transplant during flowering stage?
Yes. Capital Y-E-S.
Transplanting is a major stress event. That is why we do all of our transplanting in early stage veg, when the plant has a lot of time to recover.
But you may find yourself saying, “Oh shit,” when you realize your pot size is not big enough. You are already four weeks into flower. What do you do?
The amount of root development between Week 2 and Week 5 is tremendous. So you do need room for these roots to grow. However, you do not want to subject your plant the stress of a transplant during this peak time of flower. Instead, you will have to ride it out.