Medical marijuana is rapidly becoming an important tool for helping to heal disease and reduce the effects of symptoms. For those folks who grow their plants, there is an endless quest for the best and healthiest crops. The need of humidity for medical marijuana is essential. One of the most important keys to success in growing medical marijuana is humidity. Everyone hears about humidity every day on the weather report, but in the context of growing great cannabis crops, it is something that you can and should control.
Now that the cannabis industry has become a more lucrative market thanks to marijuana becoming slowly legalized, generating healthy crops has become a top priority. While you’ll probably find a lot of online tips about how to grow cannabis, never underestimate how important humidity is to a healthy crop.
Finding the right humidity control for cannabis plants determines how much water your marijuana plants drink. Basically, if the air becomes overly dry, your plants are going to start drinking more at their roots.
When this happens, it’s equivalent to a human drinking excess levels of water. In other words, the cannabis plant usually ends up getting excessively high levels of nutrients.
This only leads to what’s known as nutrient burn, and you’ll know when the plants turn yellow. However, keep in mind nutrient problems occur when humidity goes too low as well.
Here’s the proper humidity levels for cannabis plant stages and how to control it with the proper humidifying equipment.
Why is Humidity Important?
Proper humidity has many benefits for your cannabis crops. All plants ‘drink’ water not only through the roots, but also through the leaves, the buds, and even the stalks and trunks.
Improved plant quality – Your plants can grow more uniformly. Proper humidity allows each leaf and bud to grow to its fullest potential.
Faster plant growth – Because the entire plant is able to drink water, like humidity, water suspended in the air, it can allow every part of the plant to grow more quickly and more easily.
Uniform temperature – Everyone who has ever been to someplace that is humid knows that humidity can make it feel uniformly hot. This same principle can help to keep your plants warm and prevent hot spots from lighting or heaters.
Eliminate crop blights – A blight, a plant disease, spreads most easily when plants are weakened, often from being too dry or too moist. Well-regulated humidity can make sure that this doesn’t happen to your plants.
Increased germination – Healthy plants have one goal in life: to make lots of little healthy plants. Using proper humidity, your plants will be healthier and therefore will germinate more robustly, giving you more seeds and an increasing crop.
Reducing overall plant stress – Consistent temperature and humidity can reduce the stress on the plants and allow them to grow to their fullest potential.
Choosing the Right Humidifier
In nature, the sun and the wind evaporate water. The water hangs in the air as humidity. In your grow room, it will be harder to control this type of evaporation. But with a humidifier you can simulate it. One of the keys is to choose a humidifier that creates a mist that is small enough to stay in the air. The state-of-the-art is 4.2 microns. This gives you a natural humidity that is excellent for plants. You also need a machine that controls humidity accurately. Using electronics, we can do this will astounding accuracy. Another thing to watch for are nozzles that might clog.
The minerals in water can make a mess of things, but well-designed nozzles won’t clog. You also want a machine that uses low pressure. A high air pressure system can be dangerous if something goes wrong. So, humidity for medical marijuana growing is required and should control to ensure healthier plant.
Using Humidity
Use humidity to keep your plants healthier and stronger. It will increase your yield and improve your plants’ overall healthy. Of course, the same applies for any cash crop, like indoor tomatoes or herbs.
How Should You Measure Humidity When Growing Cannabis?
You’ll find numerous methods for measuring humidity in growing plants, including terms like “absolute”, or “specific.” Relative humidity is a term you’ve no doubt heard a lot, and it’s the most common method for measuring humidity in grow rooms.
It’s important to focus on the percentage levels of RH during the various stages of cannabis growth. These have specific ranges during the cannabis life cycle you need to pay close attention to.
Your only challenge is maintaining these percentages with a reliable humidifier. At Smart Fog, we have innovative technologies available to maintain these levels without costly errors.
Relative Humidity for Young Clones
When a cannabis plant is in its earliest stages, they need as much humidity as possible to create more successful rooting. It’s why all marijuana growers say RH needs to hover around 70%-80%during the young cloning stage.
At this early process, it’s the highest humidity range you’ll need to assure your cannabis plants manage successful growth.
Using a humidifier that has a smart automated process helps keep this level high without sudden drops or continual monitoring. One of the features we pride ourselves on at Smart Fog is our precise humidity control using intelligent algorithms to determine a room’s temperature.
Humidity Levels at the Vegetative State
Once you see leaf mass on your cannabis plants, it’s time to reduce the humidity somewhat. Generally, the percentage should stay between 40%-70% to allow for your plants to fully develop roots. This isn’t to say overly high humidity can’t cause problems, like wet spots on the leaves.
To prevent this, we’ve designed a feature using a de-correlation process, eliminating condensation on surfaces and leaves of your plants.
Again, using intelligent control of humidity during this growth stage prevents humidity from getting below 25%. Any humidity below this rate creates dry air and inhibits cannabis plant growth.
Humidity for the Flowering Stage
Maintaining an RH at around 40%-50% is appropriate when your plants start to flower. One reason for keeping humidity slightly lower here is you don’t want mildew or molds from developing on the leaves.
It’s worth noting molds can stay hidden inside the plant buds, hence misleading you into thinking a plant is healthy. In a case where you keep humidity lower, it’s important to keep air circulating. That’s one reason why we provide an in-duct humidifier option for better air circulation.
Final Weeks of Flowering
Gradually lessening the humidity in the final flowering stage is essential to maintain leaf and bud quality. With our humidifiers (whether in-duct or open-space), you get low pressure operation so you don’t have to worry about overheating. Plus, our products have complete energy efficiency. You can turn them on and leave them on without fear of breakdowns or causing injury.
Contact us at Smart Fog to learn more about our humidifier options and how they’ll turn your cannabis plants into a thriving business.
