Once you’ve harvested your plant that’s the end of its life cycle, right? Wrong! It is actually possible to regenerate a plant after harvesting. This can save growers a lot of time and money while also allowing them to continue the life span of the plants they love. Regenerating will give your plant a new life and allow her to blossom all over again. She’s served you well and she deserves the love and attention, so let’s learn how to regenerate a cannabis plant.
What Is Regeneration?
We all know that when our plants get older and their hormones change they move from the vegetative period into the flowering period. This is when she will start to produce the harvestable buds. This is as a result of the lighting which tends to trigger the move from vegetative into flowering. This isn’t the case in autoflowering plants so that may be a trickier option for regeneration. Basically, the plan is to alter the lighting again and therefore trick the plant back into its vegetative stage. This will allow her to move back through the flowering stage and create more buds. It sure sounds easy, but if it were just that simple I reckon everyone would be doing it.
Benefits
There are a few benefits to regenerating a plant rather than just growing a whole new one. Of course, if you wanted to have the exact same genetics from the same mother usually you would need to clone her. This is not only quite a tricky undertaking but it will need more time and will likely take up more space. This way your mother plant is your clone and you don’t have to worry about keeping her alive separately. This leads us to the next benefit which is continuing a preferred genetic line. If you have found your ultra plant and you don’t want to lose her it can be upsetting to have to throw her away. Your next crop might not be quite so impressive and even a clone can get damaged or can grow differently if you don’t manage to perfectly mimic the growing environment. Regenerating is also much faster since your plant has already experienced the growth aspect of the vegetative stage. By regenerating you could have another crop in no time rather than starting again from the top.
Negatives
As with anything, there are going to be a few negative aspects to regeneration. First and foremost, it’s really hard. As I said earlier it’s easy to make it sound easy, but that’s not the case. I would absolutely only recommend this technique to advanced growers. If you are experienced enough to do it you will need soil-grownwn plant, and even then it is extremely easy to stress or damage your plant. If you do hurt the plant by accident it can take months to come back to a growable state. There is also no guarantee that the plant will be as good as it was on the first harvest.
How Does It Work?
This really depends on how you want to go about it. There are a few ways that people achieve regeneration in their plants. If you like you can just whack it down to the stem and let it regrow from there. Though this may be technically easier it is far less efficient and I wouldn’t recommend it. There are a few different methods available and they largely depend on whether or not you are growing indoors or outdoors.
Indoors
This is the easiest way to regenerate plants by far. When you grow indoors it is a simple process of altering the lighting and environment to push the plant back into vegetation. You just need to crop the plant correctly after harvesting by removing the top third from the main stem. In the middle third remove the buds but leave as many of the leaves as you can. Then on the bottom third, you want to remove the buds at the tip of the branch and leave some side buds. The plant will use these sites to start growing new buds. After that, you have to make sure your plant gets plenty of nitrogen and move the lighting back to the vegetative cycle instead of the flowering one. In a couple of weeks, you should notice some new buds sprouting.
Outdoors
The main issue with outdoor growing is that you can’t control the environment. So when you are doing this outside you best hope you live in a country with a long growing season. So anywhere that changes temperature drastically or has daylight savings might not be a great idea. So you can use the same method and make sure your plant gets lots of sun and nitrogen. This method of regeneration is definitely only for the seriously experienced.
Autoflowering
As I said earlier doing this with autoflowering is extremely difficult. A lot of people even say it’s impossible, but it has been done. With an autoflowering plant, you need to wait for the central cola to develop. Like with the other styles of growing you give this a snip, but you leave a good number of buds. Autoflowering plants do not go through a vegetative stage, so it has nothing to revert to. However, it may still produce new buds and improve your yield. In a lot of ways, this is more similar to topping than regeneration but it’s about as good as it gets. There is nothing to suggest that these new buds will be as powerful or flavourful as the first harvest. Most think of regenerating autoflowering plants as a bit pointless and at most just a fun little experiment so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a mature auto flowering plant handy that you don’t mind messing with.
So in summary regeneration can be an extremely fun and exciting experiment for an experienced breeder. If you are new to growing maybe have a play with cloning or other slightly more intense pruning.
Newsletter Sign Up
Make sure you never miss another Vault promo – sign up for our newsletter at https://www.cannabis-seeds-store.co.uk/the-vault-newsletter
Remember: It is illegal to germinate cannabis seeds in many countries including the UK. It is our duty to inform you of this fact and to urge you to obey all of your local laws to the letter. The Vault only ever sells or sends out seeds for souvenir, collection or novelty purposes.
Photo by GreenForce Staffing on Unsplash
Very useful article. I’m on an extremely tight budget and have been considering keeping my gals cos we are attached.
I’m not after a massive crop or a mega strength on as my crop is mainly for pain relief (arthritis)