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A Complete No Till Living Soil Cycle with Calendar & Feeding Schedule

Alright, alright, you’ve all been asking for this since we started publishing tips and tricks on growing cannabis, so here it is a full cycle calendar for growing cannabis our no-till living soil way!

Remember, organics is very forgiving and these exact amounts don’t need to be followed perfectly. A lot of times we use the handful method.

Preparing Your Pots:

Before we begin, you should know that you will want to use 15-gallon pots or larger. Personally, we prefer 30-gallon fabric pots or beds.

Now, fill those pots with your soil and water them. You will want to water in about a gallon and a half of water into each 15-gallon pot. An easier way to look at it is to use 1 gallon of water for every 10 gallons of soil you have (this is a general “rule of thumb” and may vary).

Grower Tip: Peat Moss can be difficult to fully dampen, to help with this you can add aloe and yucca to the water. Then, simply mix and water in.

Soil Preparation:

With all the pots filled, you will want to add the following to the top of your soil in each 15-gallon container:

  1. Sow 1 tablespoon per square foot of cover crop
  2. Add in ¼ – ½ cup of alfalfa meal
  3. Spread a ⅓ cup of bokashi per plant
  4. Lay 1 to 3 inches of barley straw mulch

We prefer to let all of this sit in the pots for a few days (even weeks at times). Basically, allow for the cover crop to sprout some prior to transplanting seedlings into these pots.

Before Flowering Your Cannabis Plants:

Now that you have your pots ready and plants transplanted into them, you will need to care for your cannabis plants to prepare them to go into flower. Whether you start your cannabis plants from seed or use clones, you’ll want to get your plants big enough to be flowered and strong enough to produce the scrumptiously delicious buds you’re looking to harvest too!

Grower Tip: If you have any type of height constraints, remember that the plants will stretch once put into flower. For this reason, be sure not to get the plants too large in veg, as they will end up roasting on your indoor lights or being squished against a greenhouse ceiling.

Week 1: Seedling or Rooted Cuttings

For this first week, your plants are probably pretty small, especially if you started them from seed. Either way, you will want to take care of them accordingly.

Personally, we simply add one-application of the following the first week:

Then for the rest of the first week, just be sure your soil remains hydrated.

Light Schedule: 18 hours on and 6 hours off

Week 2: Vegetative State

At this point, it’s time to get the cannabis plants big enough to enter flower! Again, depending on your setup, be careful how large you get them in veg.

During this stage, we apply two different applications. One at the beginning of the week and another 3 to 4 days later. The applications are as follows:

Again, we add the first application once at the start of the week. Then, 3 to 4 days later, you apply application #2. This is continued up until a week before putting the plants into flower.

Light Schedule: 18 hours on and 6 hours off

Grower Tip: You can always prune the cannabis plant back some. Many do this to hold on to special strains or keep what we call “moms” around to easily grab clones from. Therefore, avoiding having to start from seed and sort the males from females every time that you want to flower out some plants.

Week 3: Vegetative State

For best results, we want to inoculate the soil with microbials every 2 weeks. The below instructions are for small amounts of soil. If you are using multiple yards of soil, you’ll want to use 10 grams of Rootwise Mycrobe complete per yard (1 heaping tablespoon).

Light Schedule: 18 hours on and 6 hours off

Week Before Flower: Pre-Bloom

The week prior to putting the plants into flower, you will want to alter a few things to provide the plants with an extra boost. After all, they’re about to put in a lot of work to produce those big and beautiful buds we all love so much!

So, for this week, you will want to add the following items:

Usually, we will add a nice thick layer of compost to the top of each plant at the start of the week. Then, water in the Bio-Phos and alfalfa tea right after applying the top dress. This is also a great time to do another foliar application of neem oil as done during week 2 of veg.

Additionally, this may be a good time to remove any lower branches that will not be getting much light during flower. This will help promote larger buds and faster growth up top.

Light Schedule: 16 hours on and 8 hours off

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Flowering Your Cannabis Plants:

And, we made it to the flowering stage! At this point, your light schedule will change to the standard 12 hours on and 12 hours off until the plants are ripened and ready to harvest!

Weeks 1-4: Bloom Transition (a.k.a stretching phase)

During the first few weeks of flowering, your plants will stretch. Some strains stretch more than others, so hopefully, you listened and didn’t get the plants so big in veg that the buds turn to crisp against the light bulbs.

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4 – Flower

Light Schedule: 12 hours on and 12 hours off

Weeks 5-7: Flowering

While the plants stretch, you will begin to see the first hairs and buds starting to form on the plants. At this point, you may enter your grow room and do a little happy dance at the sheer beauty of these ladies.

On week 5, you will want to begin applying a one-time application of the following to your pots each week:

Again, you will only add the above amounts once a week during this time and stop this schedule after week 8 is complete.

Light Schedule: 12 hours on and 12 hours off

Weeks 8+: Ripening

You should have an idea on the overall flowering time of the cultivars you are growing. Some finish at 8 weeks, if this is the case, you may want to cut out the week 7 feeding. Most of the cultivars we grow flower 65-70 days. We like to feed only water the final 3 weeks. You’ll need to use some judgment on when is the best time to harvest. Smell the flowers, look at them carefully each day. Are the calyx’s swollen? Are most of the hairs dark? Are the trichomes cloudy?  You should be able to tell when they cease focusing on their buds and are ready to be harvested.

At this time, you will simply water the plants each day, or as needed. Continue this until the plants are ready for harvesting. If desired, you can add the freeze-dried coconut water once a week, but it is not totally necessary.

Light Schedule: 12 hours on and 12 hours off

Harvest & Curing

When it comes time to harvest your cannabis plants, you will want to be sure that you do it the right way! If you decide that you just can’t wait for it to dry, we promise, you will be sadly disappointed as rapidly drying cannabis negatively impacts the terpenes and overall quality of the finished buds.

We strongly recommend that you follow the below instructions when harvesting and curing your cannabis.

Finding a place to cure your plants

First, find an area where it can remain dark for the duration of the curing process. You will be hanging your cannabis plants in this space. In addition to a dark space, it should remain around 60 degrees Fahrenheit with roughly 60% humidity in the room. Moreover, there should be moving air in the room. If there’s not, it could cause mold or rotting in your cannabis plants to occur.

The timeframe for curing your plants

Now that you have your curing area all set up, you will want to let your plants dry over a two week period. By doing so, you can preserve many of those tasty terpenes, which otherwise would be lost by a rapid dry. With the environment setup mentioned above, you should be well on your way to the perfect drying environment.

Remember, don’t cut away only some of the fan leaves at this stage. You can wait until the cannabis is fully cured to cut most of this away. Just let it hang out in its natural form, using a clothes hanger works well for this.

After the plants have dried, you will want to cut the branches from the stalk and place in a container/tub or brown paper bag. You will trim the plant from these containers. Once done trimming, place the buds into a glass jar, like a Mason Jar. Every few days, you will likely need to let air out of the jar. This is also known as, burping the jar. You will do this until the moisture you desire is reached.

Depending on where you live, you may find your buds remain moist for a very long time. However, if you live in a less humid climate like we do, you may find it slightly more difficult to get your cannabis not to dry out rapidly. Therefore, some may need to burp their jars more often than others, take note of how humid the climate you are in is and decide.

If you want a quick cheat sheet, simply download this PDF calendar here.

Remember, there’s definitely not just “one way” to do this by any means. And, you too may find that you prefer slight variations of this method as you make your journey growing cannabis in this way.

Alright, have fun and be sure to tag us in your grows @growing_organic – we love seeing what everyone is up to!

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