Cultivating The Best Buds: The Power Of Cannabis Grow Journals 

Maintaining your mental health is as important as your physical well-being. If you visit a therapist, most often, he/she will tell you to track your thoughts so you can dive down into your feelings and emotions and understand more about yourself. Yes, a personal journal will do wonders even if you’re healthy. Like a diary where you pour your thoughts and everything else you can't share with others. 

The same rules apply to your cannabis plant, too. Of course, we are not asking you to track your plant’s feelings for its neighboring plant. Instead, you need to maintain a journal about your plant’s growth and how external factors affect its growth. You can refer to your dairies in the past occasionally and find out where you're growing wrong in your present project. 

But what is a grow journal, what should you track in it, and how do you do it? Great questions, and we’ve got the answers. In this article, learn everything you need to know about maintaining a grow journal for starters. 

What is a Cannabis Grow Journal?

Just like how you maintain a personal journal, you can also maintain a cannabis grow journal. Essentially, this diary will act as a database of your cannabis operation, including specific behaviors of a strain or your plant. 

Ideally, your cannabis journal should perform two functions. One, it should track the growth of your plant, i.e., its progress over the weeks, including factors like size, watering, pests, deficiencies, nutrients, observations, etc. The more photos you take, the better you'll be able to track your progress. You can write it down too, but it often works better if you have a visual guide. 

Two, it should act as your grow calendar. You can track your plant’s growth and when it needs watering, et al., and if things are progressing as per your predictions, you can track or anticipate when your cannabis plant will be ready for harvest. 

While this is helpful during your plant’s growth, it becomes doubly useful for future harvests. For example, if you face a problem with the plant you’re growing currently, you can quickly look back at the journal to figure out what problem your plant is dealing with and how you can potentially fix it. In short, it acts as an insurance. 

Not many growers maintain a cannabis journal, but if you do, you can benefit from it. There’s a reason why most experienced growers you meet will have a journal of some sort where they track their plant’s progress. 

What Should Your Cannabis Grow Journal Include?

A cannabis grow diary or journal tracks your plant’s growth, but that’s too vague. What does it do and how do you maintain it? With your grow journal, you can track your plant’s progress and make observations over time, and it also helps you organize your thoughts and plants. 

Here are some of the things you can include in your cannabis journal. 

• Germination Method Used 

One of the first things you can track is the different germination methods you use to start your cannabis seeds. This will help you understand which methods work best for your strains and specific conditions. 

Heck, if you track everything properly and employ different germination methods, you can even figure out which germination method produces the best harvests for you months later. 

• Nutrients and Water Supply

In the grow journal, you should also consider recording when you add nutrients and in what ratios. Then, you should also observe how your plant reacts to it in terms of its growth, quality, and yield. 

Doing so will give you a terrific insight into how nutrients interact with your plant and the results it produces over time, of course. Give it some time and the journal will reveal secrets that work for your plants. 

You should also track the pH and EC levels of the nutrient water, especially if you change or fix the pH over time. This will allow you to pinpoint what steps you must’ve taken for the pH or EC to fluctuate. 

• Light 

Similarly, you should also track the light supply. Sure, this isn’t as crystal clear as you’d think, but it’s pretty good. You can figure out how your cannabis plant reacts to different kinds of lights and spectrums, light schedules, and distances. This will help you fine-tune your lighting setup for the best results. 

• Temperature and Humidity 

Speaking of things that influence your plant’s growth, temperature and humidity are nearly at the same level as the light supply. Here, you’ll track how your plant grows under different conditions, and which one seems to encourage the most vigor. And if your plant suffers from any issues, especially mold, you will know at what range of humidity that problem occurred. 

• Pests and Diseases

Speaking of mold, you should also track all the diseases or pests your plant suffers from. You can track how quickly the issue spread, what was the cause of it, the common symptoms, and how you fixed it. 

At first, it may look boring, but once you have a decent database built up, you’ll know exactly what happened to your plant if the problem occurs in the future — all thanks to your grow journal. 

• Growth of Your Cannabis Plant 

Apart from tracking everything around your plant, track the plant’s growth as well on a daily or weekly basis, depending on how much time you have at hand. For example, you can track how long your plant takes to flower or mature, which weeks are the best for it, when it starts producing resin, etc. 

You can also track different phenotypes your plants may exhibit along with the results of various training methods to use. Many growers take this a step further and even mention their personal feelings about the plants — which one is easy to grow, which one is fussy, and which one is stubborn. All of this information will make you a better cannabis grower. 

• Grow Calendar

Once you get a hang of growing cannabis and tracking its growth, you can start predicting its growth in future harvests and start preparing in advance. For example, when you know your plant will produce buds in the 7th week and mature by the 10th week, you won’t have to scramble to find pruning scissors and containers. 

You can then figure out when is the best time to give more nutrients or reduce them, and when you should be ready to take the buds off the plant. Of course, this will work even better if you’re growing the same strain. If not, it still gives you a good idea of what to expect. 

Don’t underestimate this one. It will make it very easy for you to grow cannabis in the future. 

• Quality and Yield 

Finally, you should also note down how you felt after consuming your fresh harvest, the kind of effects it produced, what you liked it about, the aroma and flavor profiles, and the best storage conditions. 

Over time, you’ll know exactly what you like and what conditions produced those specific results. For example, did compost bring more flavor, or did adding an extra light make buds bushier? You won’t know unless you track such details about the quality and yield of your plants in a grow journal for cannabis. 

Should You Use Paper or Digital Journals?

Welcome to the modern world where we have so many options, that it’s often confusing to pick one. When was the last time you DIDN’T spend 30 minutes looking for the right movie on Netflix? 

So, which one should you choose? Paper or digital? Let’s go over each’s pros and cons. 

1. Paper Grow Journal for Cannabis 

Paper is the most obvious choice for many old-school growers. It’s tried and tested, and you cannot go wrong with this. 

Here are its pros:

• More private and discreet
• Portable and you don’t have to rely on electricity 
• You don’t have to worry about losing them to malware 
• Feels great, to be honest 
• Quite resistant to gardening abuse — imagine dropping your iPad in the reservoir! 
• Very cheap 

And here are its cons:

• No backup, so if you lose it, you lose it 

2. Digital Grow Journal for Cannabis

On the other hand, you have the digital option. This comes in many flavors, but we recommend trying some of the online ones rather than doing it on an Excel sheet. Yes, try Growdiaries too! 

Here are its pros:

• Can be shared with your friends 
• Allows you to upload pictures so you can track everything easily
• You can have access to your data anytime, anywhere 
• Much easier to find information and edit it 

Here are its cons:

• Your iPad won’t likely survive a pruning scissor falling sharply on its screen 
• You have to rely on electricity or the internet 
• Easy to lose if something happens to your computer and you forget to back it up 

Summary: Cultivating The Best Buds: The Power Of Cannabis Grow Journals 

See how amazing it can be to maintain a grow journal? So what are you waiting for? Do it today. Whether you download an app or get a pen and paper, you won’t go wrong either way. Just pick one and start journaling. 

Remember to note down everything that you think is important, and don’t worry if you miss out initially. Take lots of pictures because they truly speak more than words. Do it enough and you’ll start understanding what’s important for you and what’s not.