I planted a seed in my garden about a month ago and the plant is now too big for where it is. I decided to transplant it into a pot. I tried to take as much soil as I could with it but it kinda all fell off the roots. Now the plant looks really bad. Could it survive at all?
You were lucky this time No Scope. Yes, Cannabis is a very hardy, strong plant. A lot of people think Cannabis originated in southeast Asia but scientists say it definitely began in Afghanistan! And you know what Afghanistan is like from all the war footage on the news. Its a lot like Alberta, Canada—hot dry summers in the south and cold dry winters in the north. Alberta only gets more snow because of the rain shed from the Rocky Mountains. So Cannabis “grew up” in very harsh conditions and it can take a lot of abuse. But there’s one thing it can’t take very well and that’s harsh transplanting procedures as you did with this one. But now you learned your lesson: it takes great care to transplant one out of sandy native soil. When I was living in Alberta for a while before moving to BC, I had a (rented) house (that I kept growing in!) in the country next door to a tree farmer. In the winter he worked on the oil rigs in Alberta and in the summer when he was home, he worked his tree business. Transplanting trees in Alberta’s sandy soil is a lot like what you had to deal with. But you didn’t know what you were doing the first time. You planted that seed in your sandy soil garden and it did fine outside even in all those harsh conditions but when you transplanted it, you almost killed it. I’m glad it pulled through from your updates, but next time, if there ever is, you gotta know that a plant even that little size already has roots laid out several inches out in all directions so you gotta transplant it the way my tree farmer transplanted his trees.
After we became friends, I told him he could make more money with his secluded land by adding a few Cannabis summer greenhouses to his tree farm. He smiled and said he’d liked to but would be too tempted to smoke it and would get fired from his job on account of all the piss testing they do for guys working on the rigs. Lots of guys he worked with could giver cranked up on coke cause its like alcohol and passes through your system quick but not weed. I told him he didn’t have to smoke it to grow it, and I’d help him sell it after. He laughed and said he’d try after he got laid off from the rigs. This eventually happened and I hear he’s doing great now with his own MJ greenhouse/tree farm. He showed me one day how he transplants his baby trees he sells. He has a backhoe with a special rig on the end of the arm. It’s shaped like a pyramid with the tip pointing down. When he goes to take a tree out of his soil that pyramid shaped thing opens up like a flower with four triangular sides. He lowers the thing opened up over the tree and pushes the points down into the soil around the tree and then closes the sides. This cups a shitload of dirt about 3 feet in all directions around the tree’s roots after he closes the sides around the dirt back into an upside down pyramid. This way he damages as little roots of the baby tree as possible so he can pop it back into his customer's yard and it starts growing easily again after.
So next time you can do the same thing with a couple of little shovels and lift your garden girl(hopefully!) out by keeping the dirt around her roots tight. It’s when the dirt falls off the roots that damaged your baby. Then you just drop the cupped soil around the roots into a nice big pot you have waiting and it works great with sandy soil too.
When people trim their Buds this “deadening” process happens to a lot of them. They don’t realize that the trimming process no matter how delicate you handle the Bud, strips a lot of the trichomes and resin off cause it just sticks to your scissors and gloves. When our operation got big we couldn’t even hand-trim anymore and had to get automated trimming machines. These F#$%@! our Buds even worse cause tons of our beautiful resin and tri’s would stick to the blades. When we switched to Tom’s Tumble Trimmer, this didn’t happen any more cause it doesn’t use blades but a patented non-stick food/medical-grade mesh to trim the leaves off the Buds as they tumble spinning in the non-stick mesh. Our customers love our Buds because not only are they all grown organically, our special TTT machines leave way over 90% of all the good tri’s and resin on the Buds and trim.
In our operation we never transplant and just plant the seedlings and clones into the big pots they will flower in. But a lot of if not most commercial growers fart around transplanting their plants from small to bigger pots. I’ve learned why they thing this is better than the way we do it, but be get great results this way and save TONS of time. And time my bros, is money! Before we got our greenhouses going we started growing Gurellia style in nice virgin BC soil, and winter coming, we’d dig up those plants the way I showed you so we could easily transplant them to keep growing in big pots in an old abandoned mine shaft we found and retro fitted with heat and lights for the winter and they didn’t miss a beat. Of course we don’t have to do that anymore with our greenhouses, but if you transplant a plant with the proper care, it will always kick in and do just fine in its big pot until it goes to harvest. I never feel bad about killing our thousands of plants at harvest time because in nature they’d just die off anyway after harvesting and this way its better cause they have a peaceful painless death and then get re-born into the people who smoke them and use all their amazing CBD oils!
