The easiest and most successful way to germinate seeds is on an airy soil. It doesn’t matter what kind of soil you use, as long as it isn’t too wet. The soil has to be humid and airy so that the plant can arise easily. If you put the pots in a closed little greenhouse, the soil will stay humid and you won’t have to rewater it and you immediately create an ideal climate for the plant.

The best measurements you can use for pots are 7x7x8 cm or 10x10x9.

In these kinds of pots the plant can grow for around 2 or 3 weeks after which you can hoard them easily to a larger size of pot. This way you can convalesce the plant easily and you won’t have to replant them within a week (with e.g an easy plug) when the plants are still vunerable, because in most soil there’s enough nutrients to make the plant grow for 3 weeks. It’s also much easier with these pots with soil to get the wished humidity compared to a small plug that dries out every day and has to be rewatered reguarly.

If you don’t have a greenhouse, you could cover your pots with  transparent plastic foil to create a greenhouse effect.

In theory, you can now place your pots in the windowsill or in the sun, or any other warm place (24c to 26c) and your seeds will germinate within 2 to 4 days.

If you put them in the dark you should really pay attention to them because when they hatch they will surch for light and they will grow really fast. This is the most common problem with beginners. Plants who grow too fast and will get a very long and thin stalk which breaks easily because it can’t carry the weight of it’s topleaves. The purpose is that the just hatched plant doesn’t grow in height to much in the first days, but instead grows a steady stem that can carry more leaves and  eventually gives a bigger and more stable plant.

You can easily solve this problem with 1 TL tube with the color Cool White. As soon as the plants are 3cm large you can put them very close underneath a TL tube and let  this burn for 24 hours a day. The maximum distance between the top of the plant and the TL  tube can’t be larger than 5cm. If you make the difference 10cm you stimulate the plant to grow in heigth because plants always grow to the light if there’s room for it.

By placing the TL tube closer to the plant, it will grow less in heigth and more in width, giving you a much stronger stem. After one week to 10 days you will have a plant of 10 to 15 cm with a steady stem with the first 4 to 8 leaves already developping. At that time you can put the TL 10 cm from the plant to stimulate them to grow in height  because it can now carry its topleaves because of its steady stem

After 2 to 3 weeks you can put the plants outside and they can endure pretty much every kind of spring to grow into a nice plant, or you can put them inside beneath a HPS 400 or 600 Watt without burning them.

Beneath HPS it’s important to stick to the right height (40 cm for 400 watt and 60 cm for 600 watt)during all phases of the grow and the blooming  but the first week under HPS 20 cm higher than the normal height to let the plants get used to the strong light intensity.

Now your seedlings will start growing steadily and they will definitely grow to steady plants who produce big, thick and heavy tops much easier.

If you want to germinate seeds on rockwool or plugs, it’s very important that you soak these in water with a pH value of 5.2 and an EC of 1.0 for at least 24 hours. If you remove them from this water after 24 hours, the rockwool will have the correct pH value of 6.0/6.4 and the right EC for seedlings  of 0.8/1.0.

We strongly recommend not to use cottons or tissues when germinating seeds because then they can suffocate, and then you have to repot them in the most vunerable phase of germination in which they damage very easily and have to get used to a new medium again. It might seem to go faster in cottons but in soil it goes just as fast, you just don’t see that. But you don’t have to repot them and they can root in the soil from the start. So don’t take any unneeded risks with pregerminating because there’s nothing to win with it and all to lose and it will only cause misery that will influence your results  heavily.