10 Essential Tools for Cannabis Cultivation

What tools do you need as a home grower? Commercial operations have their grow-game on lockdown, with high performing equipment and extensive technical know-how. Home growers rely on trial and error, typically experiments one harvest at a time, and advice from friends. What tools do you need to make each cannabis crop better than the last?

Harvest by harvest, you'll want to progressively improve your technique, to hone your craft. What tools can help you on your journey as a do-it-yourself amateur cannabis farmer? 

The following ideas are perfect additions for any small scale operation. The focus here isn't on massive investments and complicated new cultivation systems. These 10 essential cannabis tools were chosen to boost the quality and quantity of your yields, but without the need for advanced cultivation techniques nor a significant financial investment.  

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Harvest time for an amateur cannabis cultivator can be a bit tricky. When harvest time approaches, how do you know when it's time to cut and dry? Professionals rely on experience, but if this is your first or second grow, you'll want to have a 30x/60x LED illuminated magnifier in your back pocket.

Having a magnifying glass on hand, or better yet, our of our LED loupes, makes inspecting trichomes easier. Using the magnifying lens, you can peer deep into the fresh flower to see how far along the hairs and resin have come. Daily checks on flower development with this small handheld accessory will have big payoffs on the quality of your final harvest.

Grow room lights are notoriously bad for human eyes. Although cannabis loves the UV spectrum of light, this frequency can cause serious damage to human eyes, especially after repeated exposure. Plus, intense grow room lighting can make it difficult to see evidence of disease and pests on your plants - even if you are looking for them. 

To protect your eyes, while improving your vision under grow room lighting, you’ll want to have a pair of Grow Room glasses handy. There are two options available, one with a green lens for LED grow lights and a blue lensed version for the harsh spectrum of an HPS system.  

Knowing the pH of your soil has a direct impact on the health of the harvest, so why wouldn’t you prioritize it? The truth is many growers put off the pH testing because it’s a hassle. Mixing up soil and dabbling with testing strips is messy and cumbersome. Do yourself a favor and make monitoring pH a quick and mess-free procedure. 

With a surprisingly minimal investment, you’ll never need to look at another pH kit again. An automatic pH reader slips into the soil requires no setup, and provides instant results. Your cannabis plants will thank you.

Depending on your approach to growing, you may struggle to keep your cannabis plants positioned for effective use of space within a grow tent or grow room. After all, plants tend to grow upwards and outwards, sometimes impacting the plants growing in the near vicinity. 

Plant YoYo’s, spaced around the upper edges of your grow tent or room gently reorient the direction of growth, keeping the cannabis stalk upright and out of the weight of its neighbors. Plant YoYo’s are reusable over and over again, and a gentle way to correct direction without damage. They are a highly versatile tool for any method of cultivation you are working with. 

One plant or 20 plants, you need to have total control over the indoor environment. Professional operations rely on custom automated systems, which always come with a hefty price tag. For the home grower, the many options are pricey, complicated, and confusing.

The Pulse ONE Environmental Monitor is a complete all-in-one system that is both affordable and straightforward to set up. The system connects to local wifi to send a constant stream of environmental data straight to a mobile (or desktop) control dashboard. This works to provide feedback and alarms on pre-set environmental conditions. Keep up to date on light, humidity, and temperature even when away from the garden.

There are several reasons to have a macro lens in your grower's tool kit. First and foremost, just like the LED Loupe Light, it’s an excellent tool for bud inspection. Identify disease and pests before they spread to the rest of the crop, or bring it out as you near harvest time to inspect trichome development.

Secondly, the Nug Shot can capture more than the microscopic aspects of your crop. It can work for the bigger picture, as well. Snap images of your indoor grow room with a 180 degree, 0.67x wide-angle fisheye shots. 

Finally, the Nug Shot documents all your hard work with beautiful nug shots through a 10x magnification. Because the Nug Shot works through your mobile device, you’ll find yourself with more than a few images worthy of sharing with friends and fellow growers.

Home growers using soil face a tough choice during the set up of their space: automated or manual watering? Manual watering is a frequent chore, and if neglected has an immediate impact on the harvest. Automated systems are complicated to install (as they may require a professional), and require a substantial initial investment.

A Blumat Irrigation System makes automatic watering feasible and affordable for amateur growers. With no technical knowledge required to set up the system, small scale growers can take a day off from watering thanks to a simple series of sensors, drip irrigation hoses, and the Blumat watering “carrots." Blumat is a well respected and well-established irrigation system used by gardeners around the world.

Home growers can face a dilemma come harvest day. Where do you find the space in your home to properly dry the harvest? This harvest season set yourself up for success with a multi-tiered bud drying rack. 

Made from mesh material, and available in multiple sizes, this is an essential tool for all at-home grower.

Following harvest, spread the freshly trimmed buds across the bottoms of each rack to ensure even air circulation. Most importantly, for non-harvest times, this dry net is collapsible during storage.

What do trimmers look for in trimming scissors? Functional, affordable, and ergonomic. The smartly designed Curved Tip Trimming Scissors take all these into consideration. 

Wet or dry - this pair of scissors makes trimming feel good, even after long hours crunched over a harvest. The blades stay sharp, they are coated to avoid build-up, and the handle bounces back after each snip.

Outside of the grow room, what is a final cannabis tool every grower should own? It's the kief collector tray (paired, of course, with curved tip trimming scissors). 

A kief collector tray ensures none of the valuable crystals are lost during trimming. The tray sits comfortably on lap or tabletop, making the long hours spent polishing your harvest convenient and even enjoyable.

Trichomes (which are the crystal coating covering your buds) are potent yet delicate. During the trim process, the crystals dust off to scatter across your work surface. You’ll make a sticky mess and lose out on this valuable product. 

Why not save yourself the headache by catching the trim, the kief, and your tools in the kief collector tray. When it comes time to clean up, the tray separates and filters the kief through a fine micron sieve. The trimmed flower sits in one tray and the kief in another - both easy to collect.

Just because you are growing from home doesn't mean you need to compromise on quality. Little tweaks during each grow, plus the addition of one or more of 10 essential grow-room tools, will help produce a really powerful product.  

It's not always about massive investments in infrastructure, although commercial growers would have you believe otherwise. Sometimes affordable and simple solutions can have a similar impact. You shouldn't need to break to bank to improve your grow room.