Growing Cannabis in Coco Coir Slabs

Today we’re going to talk about growing cannabis in coco coir slabs. It’s quite a simple growth method and has nothing to do with hydroponics; in hydroponics you need to strictly control your plants, their roots, the water temperature, and many more things.

Here’s a short list of the things you’ll need to begin growing in coco coir slabs:

• Draining tray or flowerpot for 1 meter slabs
• Coco coir slabs
• Irrigation supplies
• Complete indoor kit.
• SCRoG mesh to hold the weight of the buds.
• Fertilizers
• Indoor grow measuring instruments

When growing in slabs the first thing you need to know is that you’re growing in an inert medium. This means that it doesn’t contain any sort of nutrients or food for the plant, so your plants will be ready to accept whatever nutrients that you decide to give them.

There are growers that say that working with flowerpots and coco coir substrate is better than growing in slabs, but I disagree. Working with slabs has more advantages than disadvantages, as the slabs give your plants’ roots’ more space to grow compared to flowerpots; slabs offer more space even if you place more than one plant in a slab due to it being one big slab rather than a tiny separate flowerpot.

Another advantage is that when watering, all you need to do is prepare your fertilizing mix, stabilize the pH and check the resulting EC levels. Either way, you can forget about watering your plants one by one which saves a lot of time and effort.

I advise any grower that’s planning their first coco coir slab grow to pick a top quality water pump, an anti-obstruction filter, one or two airstones and their corresponding air pump so that the water in your pump is constantly oxygenated.  You should also get some drip irrigation pipes with 12 outlets, which are the key to a successful slab grow.

As well as all of the advantages that we’ve already talked about, you’ll get much more yield, increasing the grams per watt ratio, obtaining more abundant yields of higher quality in around as much time as a hydroponic grow; you don’t have to pay as much attention as with a hydroponic grow but you can get similar results. Of course, I don’t want to discredit hydroponic growers here, I’m simply stating that it’s an easier method that offers similar results.

Something that you’re going to need to stay on top of is the height of your plants as they grow quire fast in slabs; the best way to control the height of your plants and the weight of the buds is by using a SCRoG mesh once flowering begins; you’ll manage to keep the height under control and increase the weight of your yield even more.