Fox Farm Feeding Schedule

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If you’re in the process of growing your first marijuana crop, you’re probably starting to learn an awful lot about the importance of growing your crop in the right soil. Though there are plenty of different options out there, many growers rely heavily on the blends from Fox Farm.

In fact, the Fox Farm Feeding Chart is pretty close to a holy text for many growers, and learning how to make the most of this useful blend is always a good idea.

Before you get started, though, it does pay to learn a little more about feeding and how to get the most from your soil choices. Fortunately, most of what you need to know is fairly straightforward.

When to start feeding?

You’re not going to have to start with the Fox Farm from day one, especially if you’re growing your cannabis in the right kind of soil. Though there is a lot of information out there that can give you arguments for starting earlier, it’s usually thought that high-quality soil is going to give your plants everything that they need to grow for about the first month.

Fox Farm - cannabis weed

Once you get past that point, though, you’re really going to need to start feeding your plants to increase your yields.

Nutrients for the Vegetative Stage

So we now know that you should start feeding your plants about a month into their growth cycle. You should be into the vegetative stage by this point, which means that you are really going to start looking at the necessary nutrients to start ensuring that your plants grow in the right way.

While you’ll almost certainly be using a blend here, you do want to make sure that you have the right basic ingredients on-hand.

Nitrogen is the absolute go-to nutrient for your plant during this time, followed by phosphorous. Magnesium, Sulfur, and Calcium are also important, as are Zinc, Iron, Manganese, and a whole host of others. As you might imagine, the easiest way to get these nutrients is to buy a nutrient blend that is specifically designed to help plants in their vegetative state grow.

Nutrients for the Pre-Flowering and Flowering Stage

Once your plant exits the vegetative stage, you’ll need to switch up your nutrients a bit. Your plants are growing in a new way, and thus are going to require new blends in their soil to really take off.

Again, your blend is going to do the heavy lifting but you should take the time to learn what’s going to do the most work.

Marijuana. Marijuana and Cannabis growing indoors. Marijuana Grow Tent with lights. Medical and Recreational Cannabis plants.

You’re looking at the NPK nutrients again here – Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium. In this case, though, you’re going to go much more heavily on the latter two elements. Eventually, you’re going to step down the amount of Nitrogen and start building up the amount of Calcium that your plants get. Getting the right proportions is going to have a huge impact on your eventual crop.

When to switch to bloom nutes?

So, with all that in mind – when do you make the switch? Theoretically, you could immediately switch to the lower Nitrogen “bloom nutes” as soon as you make the flip from vegetative to flowering growth.

In reality, though, your plant is still going to need some Nitrogen through the early phases of flowering, so try to make sure that you’re able to keep up a fairly high dosage of nitrogen over the first one to three weeks of flowering. Once you get past that, though, you can go all-in on the more Calcium heavy nutrients in order to get more out of your plants.

Things to Watch Out For

Nutrient overfeeding

One of the most common mistakes made by new growers is overfeeding their plants. The basic idea here is at least sounds – nutrients are good, so they figure that more nutrients must be even more good.

As you can tell from what we’ve discussed above, though, nutrient mixes have to be fairly precisely controlled and those who choose to overfeed their plants are going to end up overwhelming the plants’ systems. This means that you can essentially poison your cannabis plants, leading to poorer yields and, in many cases, plant death.

Nutrient underfeeding

Underfeeding is the flip side of the problem above. When you underfeed a plan, you’re not giving it quite enough nutrients to grow to its full potential.

Given that the whole goal of growing cannabis is getting a useful yield, those who underfeed their plants are setting themselves up for a poor experience. Underfeeding could cause your plants to die before blooming, but in many cases it really just causes you to have a subpar yield.

Baby Weed In a Cage

This means that all of your tough – and often expensive – labor could leave you with basically nothing to show for all of your effort.

Basic Questions About Fox Farm

How much Fox Farms nutrients do I feed to my marijuana plants? (in soil)

Fox Farm’s official guidelines are actually pretty good, but they do tend to be more than a little strong if you’re growing marijuana in soil. It’s usually a good idea to use about half the amount that the company recommends on their feeding chart as a starting point.

If your plant isn’t growing strong, it might be a heavy enough feeder to warrant getting the full dose as recommended by the company; if not, you’re much safer if you’re just choosing to use the half dosage.

Do I mix all three nutrients in one container or do I add one at a time?

Under no circumstances should you mix the nutrients. Add each nutrient directly to your water.

This is the safest way to make sure that your plants get what they need.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for ways to increase your yields, Fox Farm’s nutrients are a good place to start. They’re not going to do it all, but they are going to simplify a process that can be very complex.

Make sure that you pay attention to how your feeding your plants so that you don’t overwhelm them, but try to follow the directions as best you can to get the results that you need.