Cannabis Balance Issues during the Early Vegetative Stage

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Are your seedlings falling over? Don't worry 😉

Going through all these balance issues with 2 of our plants we decided to do a quick piece on balance issues with marijuana plants during the early vegetative stage. Hopefully this will help some of you that have the same issue, or to avoid having it in the first place.
Here’s what we’re going to cover:

Cannabis plant balance issues - Table of content

Why do marijuana plants get balance problems

How to avoid balance problems during the early growth

How to fix balance problems

Why does Marijuana get balance issues

Generally a plant gets a balance problem when the direction of the light source pushes it to grow in an un-natural fashion. Either too fast, or at an angle that it cannot sustain in the long run.
This can be generated by:

A light source to far from it’s Apex: The plant will grow so tall the stem won’t be able to hold the weight of the top anymore.
A light source too far to the side. Try to keep your light source as centered as possible to all your plants. If you can’t then get it a little closer (without giving them light burn)

In our case, during its very early growth the light we used was too far from them and not strong enough.
The 2 earliest sprouts just grew straight up to get as much light as they needed.
Once they we’re tall enough they started growing leaf mass, but its weak stem cannot hold all that weight, and after a little growth the plant falls over.

Now, plants are pretty well built, she will adapt in order to face the light source, but we will all agree that a horizontal stem isn’t the most optimal for a plant. You can see this right here on the picture. Found her like that one day, she had fallin over and stayed that way a couple hours so she adapted, facing up.

Lets get to how to avoid these situations early on, and then how to fix it.

How to avoid balance issues during the early vegetative stage

As we said earlier, the Cannabis plant will have issues with balance if the light source isn’t strong enough or not aligned with the plant. Here are our tips to avoid these issues all together:

If you don’t have your sprouts in your grow room during the first 2/3 days after sprouting, keep the light source about 15/20cm (6 inch.) over the apex of the plants
Get your plants in the grow house tops 3 days after breaking ground or if the sprouts are over 5cm (1.5inch.) high
Keep your light source aligned with the top of your plants. If your using desk lights, add a second light source

Just by getting your plants into your grow room quickly you can avoid any issues, here’s an example between 2 of our plant that had the same conditions, except one of them spent much more time out of the grow house after breaking the ground than the other.

First we will show you a plant that broke ground earlier and had balance issues, the one on the right broke ground about 2 days later without any problems

Plant experiencing balance issues

Day 2 – I need light!

You can see the she’s been focusing on growing high in order to reach for the light source. You’d think this is cool to get a nice big plant, but at this point it’s not really what you want, you want leaf mass.

Day 4 – All the light I need, lets get some leaf

By day 4 of this early bloomers life they were in the grow house. This one is the first that broke and the tallest out of them all.
Growing in height got her late in leaf production, which isn’t really the best thing here, especially that these are auto-flowering seeds so there’s no control over the length of the vegetative stage

Day 8 – Top heavy and falling over

The entry into the grow house was on day 2 for this one, you can see that appart from a little burn to the new leafs due to the change in lighting being so abrupt. I should of eased her into the new environment by doing a 12 hours in/12 hours out of the grow house during the first days.

Apart from that it’s all going great for this little one

Day 10 – Starting to stabilise and growing

By the 10th day you can see that she’s pretty much stabilise, although she still can hold up on her own.

Soon enough she’ll be holding up just fine, although all of this will have used up some energy!

Day 14 – Tall and now Balanced

By Day 14, the plant had finally gotten strong enough to hold on their own. I’m still leaving the stakes in just in case but I’m going to get them out of there real soon.

I’ve got the fan blowing on them for the past couple days which got the stem to start strengthening which is a good sign

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Plant not experiencing balance issues

Day 0 – Hello World!

This little one’s just coming out of the ground and discovering the world. Her 5 sisters have been out for a while now, this is really the late bloomer of the batch.

Day 2 – Ah in the grow house with some nice lighting

Apart from that it’s all going great for this little one

Day 6 – Chillin’ and growing leaf mass

Apart from that it’s all going great for this little one

Day 8 – Growing 3rd stage of leafs

You can see that by day 8 this plant almost looks like the one from day 10, why’s this? She didn’t have to waste any energy on growing up vertically, so she’s shorter but already has a strong source of energy to get her growth going! I’ve got a feeling this one will be the diamond of the batch

Day 12 – Short but growing strong

This one’s just nice, she’s short, with some very tight knots which is a good sign to get a nice and dense plant. She’s short but her stem is already nice and strong, much wider than her sisters. The 3rd stage of leafs is already growing! Kind of confirming the idea that this will be the nicest one of the batch (don’t want to jinx it though ^^)

As you can see, just a difference within the first 2 days of growth you can have a strong impact on the early days of the vegetative stage, so it’s important to be careful as soon as you get your seeds going.

Lets get into how to fixe balance issues

How to fix Marijuana balance issues

Here you have 2 objectives:

Keep the stem as straight as possible
Get the stem stronger so that it can hold itself up

Let’s go over the ways to accomplish these objectives

Keeping the Marijuana stem upright

Get a long piece of wood, it should be at least the height of your stem, if not a little longer
Get the stem into the ground near the base.
careful not to brake any roots!
Get the stem to lean onto the wooden stake, allowing her to stand upright
If need be, get a second stake on the other side of the stem in order to hold her up.
Don’t hesitate to use the leafs to balance the plant out
Get your fan to blow just over the top of the Apex, so that it’s moving a little, this will get your stem to strengthen.
If you can’t because your plant keeps falling, wait until it’s a bit stronger to do this

Alright that’s it for this one folks, we’ll be posting about day 15 to 20 of these Critical + 2.0 and fruit babies in the upcoming days,

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Hope you found everything you needed you the article, if not don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Until next time,
Be safe and grow easy

About the author

plant-lover

Plant Lover is Free the Tree's founder and a passionate grower of plants. Mostly from the city, I work on my computer all day so about 4 years ago, on my off time, I started growing to have some more green in my life. I never imagined I would fall in love with botany and discover so much about this plant. Since then I keep learning everyday, meeting new awesome people of our community and which keeps me growing constantly You can always get in touch with me on our Instagram!