Choose the Right Cannabis Strain

The cannabis strain you start with has a huge effect on how your plants will grow.

A cannabis plant's style of growing is mostly determined by its genetics so you will want to try to choose a short, bushy marijuana strain when you're first starting out.

While you can get different strains to display different characteristics, I would say 50% or more of the characteristics of cannabis are determined genetically by the strain you're growing.

However, I believe you can grow bushy, manageable plants with just about any strain... it'll just be way easier if you start with a strains that is already proven to grow exactly the way you want.

Some short, bushy marijuana strains (which produce killer buds) that I personally have grown myself include:

• Northern Lights
• Aurora Indica
• White Rhino

Whenever you're buying cannabis seeds online, you can often read about the different grow styles of different strains. This allows you to particularly choose strains that tend to grow short and bushy.

There are three main types of cannabis, indica, sativa and auto-flowering.

• Indica plants grow short and bushy.
• Sativa plants grow extremely tall and lanky.
• Auto-flowering plant usually start flowering within a month and will go through their whole cycle in 2-3 months, which means they only get to be about 1-2 feet tall.

Strains such as indicas and hybrid strains which are more close to being indica than sativa tend to grow short and bushy, so that's what I lok for.

Autoflowering cannabis strains do not depend on light periods to tell them when to start flowering, which can be convenient.

GrowWeedEasy.com does not recommend beginners grow auto-flowering strains of marijuana, in most cases

One thing to keep in mind about growing auto-flowering marijuana plants...

Unfortunately for us, the ancestor of today's auto-flowering strains had next to no THC or useful cannabinoids in the wild, so all the auto-flowering seeds you get today have been hybridized with another strain (usually an indica) to give them potency.

Due to this recent hybridization, auto-flowering strains tend to be less potent than non-auto-flowerings strains, which can be a downside for some growers. They also are low-producers.

I personally avoid auto-flowering strains because I would rather control when the plant starts flowering, and because I want the most potent buds.

I believe the "auto-flower" strains are popular because they seem like they will make your grow easier, but I honestly believe auto-flowering strains are a just a gimmick that often end up being more inconvenient than they're worth.

Why I don't use auto-flowering marijuana strains:

• You have next to no control over the size/shape of the plant
• Auto-flower strains cannot be cloned (the clones will die off around the same time as the mother plant, no matter what you do)
• Auto-strain plants are tiny and low-producing
• Buds are less potent than regular strains of marijuana

So even though I would like to grow short and bushy cannabis plants, I look for the non-auto strains of cannabis that tends to grow short and bushy.

Give Your Cannabis Enough Light

If your marijuana plant has no problems or illnesses, then the biggest factor that affects your yields is the light intensity provided.

Basically...

More Light = Bigger Yields

After choosing your strain and starting your grow, one of the first things you want to do is ensure that the plant is getting enough light.

During the vegetative stage, cannabis plants which don't get enough light will tend to 'stretch' up toward the light with a lot of space between nodes or "branches." This is not usually a good thing, because tall lanky plants are hard to give proper light coverage in flowering.

During the flowering stage, light intensity is what drives the production of buds. For the best results, you want all your buds directly exposed to strong light. This seems to cause them to swell up much more than when the buds are hidden from the light.

The rest of this article is going to cover all the different ways to get your plants to grow in a way that makes it easy to expose all the buds evenly to intense light.

If you believe your plant may need more light on the sides, you can cheaply supplement the amount of light to the plant buy purchasing some cheap 'Soft White' (2700k) or 'Cool White' (6500k) colored CFLs (compact florescent light bulbs) from your local hardware store and using them to fill in any shadowed areas on your plant.

Learn more about different grow lights that work for growing weed

Get the Right Sized Container or Pot for Your Cannabis

Keep marijuana plants small by growing them in a smaller container like this solo cup

When your cannabis roots don't have room to expand, it will tend to keep your cannabis smaller.

I have grown cannabis from start to finish in a Solo Cup, and the plant stayed very small, under a foot.

Basically...

Smaller pots keep plants smaller.

Some people worry about their cannabis getting root-bound, but that will likely only happen if you try to keep the plant alive for too long.

For example, if you're going to keep a plant in the vegetative stage for years, then you'll definitely need a bigger pot.

But if you're growing a marijuana plant plan to harvest it within a few months, then it's unlikely your plant will be affected by being root bound.

Even if you get a one gallon pot or smaller, when you get your cannabis to start flowering within a few months after the beginning of the vegetative stage, it will never have the time to get really root-bound.

For example, I have grown several plants from seed to harvest in a solo cup container.

The plants are fine even when spending their whole life in this small container, the biggest problem is just that the solo cups tend to tip over.

Because of easy tipping, I recommend weighting the bottom of solo cups if you use them, or upgrading to one-gallon containers.

The downside... When your cannabis is kept in a smaller container, you will notice that you have to water your plant much more often than if you kept your plant in a big pot.

As long as you're vigilent and water your girls often enough, then keeping your plants in a small pot is another simple, easy way to control the total size of your plant.

Keeping plants in tiny containers is especially important when growing in a very space-limited grow space, such as growing in a computer case for stealth reasons.

However, there are even more powerful growth control techniques explained below that allow you to grow big high-producing plants, but keep them nearly as short as if you restricted their growth with a small container.

Therefore I encourage you to read about all the other growth control techniques before making a decision about what do to with your plants.

Force Your Cannabis to Flower Early To Keep Her Small

Another technique you can use to force a cannabis plant to stay short is to turn your lights to the 12/12 cycle early on to get your plant to start flowering right away.

I have personally changed several cannabis plants over to the flowering stage when the plants are only 2-3 weeks old, which is as early as I'd recommend.

But like this extreme girl to the left demonstrates (less than a foot tall and grown under CFLs in a computer case), I've also experimented starting the plants on 12/12 directly from seed to keep plants REALLY small.

Some people say that cannabis that is forced to flower too early will not make any buds, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Even plants flowered from seed immediately start making buds when you change over to the 12-12 light schedule.

The one problem I've had with forcing cannabis to flower early is that since the plant is much smaller, which equals smaller yields.

The other disadvantage to overly small is their inability to recover well from problems: you have fewer leaves as a 'buffer' so the plant can't bounce back when something goes wrong such as a pest attack.

That's why I recommend letting your young marijuana plants get a minimum 2-3 weeks in the vegetative stage before changing them over to flowering. You can control their height with other grow methods.

Growing extremely tiny marijuana plants is fun, but honestly you'll get the biggest yields by instead investing a little more time in the vegetative stage to train your plant to grow into the exact shape you want.