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What you need to know: Lighting up your grow

Turn On The Cannabis Bright Lights! What You Need To Know!

Ever wondered what you need to know for lighting up your grow? Plants need UV light to grow. You should know this if you’ve passed Grade 4 science. If you haven’t you’re probably too young to be on this website! Get off this site young Johnny!

Right, so, your cannabis plant needs light. But how much? Does it differ from outdoor to indoor? And does the ratio need to change at certain periods of its growth cycle?

In short, yep. You need to be aware of all these things. So let’s turn on the cannabis bright lights! Here’s what you need to know before jumping into lighting up your grow for outdoor and indoor grows.

Lighting up your grow: What you need to know about Outdoor Lighting

If you’re embracing the South African natural lighting, you’ll need to place the plant in a very sunny spot. We’d suggest finding a North facing spot around the home, that gets more than 12 hours of sunlight a day. If you have a spot on the roof, this might give you the sunshine edge.

While you can plant cannabis in less sunny spots, it’s a plant that really loves the sun with its large leaves. Planting cannabis in a spot that gets less than 9 hours a day will stunt growth potential, as sunlight is a source of food. 

But the major take away when growing it outside is that Mother Nature is at the wheel. So, all you can do is relax, sit back, and let the marijuana grow.

Lighting up your grow: What you need to know about Indoor Lighting

Right, so you’ve tried playing with Mother Nature on her turf and come out of it underwhelmed. Now it is your turn to make your own moment of, “Let there be light!”

Yes, now you can tinker and tweak with lighting conditions. Luckily for you, we have the best grow lights in the world, the California Lightworks SolarSystem units. With their programmable SolarSystem Controller, timer, and adjustable light spectrums, you can be sure that you have the perfect light at all times! Yeah, Mother Nature has all the light spectrums, but she’s always just throwing them around like an overzealous mom welcoming her skinny son home from varsity.

Turn On The Cannabis Bright Lights! What You Need To Know!
The California Lightworks SolarSystem Controller

While most of us would be tempted to stick the lights on 24 hours a day to pump it up, don’t do it. Think of it as a bodybuilder who works out all day long; eventually, they’d collapse from exhaustion.

The lighting schedule for the vegetative period (when the plant is growing its leaves) should be 18 hours on and 6 hours off. This is more than Mother Nature is able to supply, so expect some shocking results.

Before changing your lighting schedule to flowering timings, you will want to leave your plants in the dark for a 24 hour period. This induces sexing of the plant. If you have feminised seeds you don’t need to worry that there’s a sneaky male in the crop.

When it comes to time for the flowering stage, this is when your cannabis bud is starting to appear. The general rule of thumb is a 12:12 hour schedule.

If you do have an epic California Lightworks setup, you might want to play around a little bit with some light deprivation techniques, where you trick the plant into reacting to shorter days. It’s something chicken farmers have used… let’s not talk about that… it’s awful…

ANYWAY!

Set your timer to turn off 10 minutes earlier each week until harvest. Not only will this help save some electrical expenses but it helps the plant.

If you do have auto-flowering plants, the schedule doesn’t really matter, they will push through on 18-24 hours of light. But remember that earlier bodybuilding analogy? Well, now imagine that they were some sort of DragonBall Z character who never gets too much training. That’s this cannabis plant’s equivalent. It never gets tired and will bloom when big and juicy!

For auto-flowering plants, you’ll want LED lighting to cut down on costs. Have we mentioned our California Lightworks SolarSystem units run on the best LED lights?

At the end of the day, cannabis loves light, so make sure to give them the best access to it.  

Zootly says, “And on the first evening of growing at home I uttered the words, “Let there be light.” And there was light, provided by my California Lightworks SolarSystem units… #HustlersGottaSell”

Words By: Andrew Macfarlane, horticulturist and amateur lighting enthusiast.   

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