How to Protect Outdoor Cannabis Plants From Weather, Pests and Animals

To take care of an outdoor cannabis plant, you need to protect it from four main threats: extreme heat and frost, strong wind, heavy rain, and pests or hungry animals. Covers, stakes, a simple greenhouse, companion plants and a wire fence handle most of it. Out in the open, there's a lot that can go wrong, and because your plants are exposed, bad weather can hit them hard.

You can check the forecast for the next couple of weeks, but a storm can still come out of nowhere. Too much rain, heat, cold or frost can turn your plants into the perfect target for pests and bugs, so even if you check on them every day, it's smart to have some protection in place. Here's how to look after outdoor cannabis plants.

What to keep in mind when caring for an outdoor cannabis plant

Protecting plants from frost and the elements is easier than it sounds. With a bit of work you can build a small greenhouse to keep plants safe from bad weather, add companion plants to fend off pests, or put up a wire cage to keep critters out. Bigger animals like moles, cats and dogs can go after your plants too, so the right protection saves you a lot of worry.

Cannabis stresses out easily when conditions stay bad for too long, and when that happens, the plant can slow its growth, start showing signs of stress, or even turn hermaphrodite, and all of that can hurt your harvest.

Cannabis plants get stressed when they get too cold or too hot, or when insects or larger animals eat parts of them.

The most common threats to outdoor plants (and how to deal with them):

In Argentina, as in any big country, climate and growing conditions vary a lot from region to region, so figuring out how to care for a plant where you live can be tricky. Keep these threats in mind and you'll know how to protect your plants, frost included. Here are the big ones:

Heat or cold:

When your plants sit in too much heat, the leaves curl up to hang on to whatever water they have left; if that goes on too long, they can yellow, turn crispy and die. In extreme cold, leaves can freeze, and when temperatures drop too low the plant's metabolism slows way down, so growth crawls or stops altogether.

To protect plants from frost, especially overnight frost, the move is to cover your grow on any night frost is forecast in your area. Just like with a passing rain shower, any kind of plastic works, but take it off in the morning so the sun can dry the plants and balance out any moisture that built up overnight. 

Wind:

Cannabis plants need some wind to build strong stems and branches, but strong gusts can snap branches or even rip the whole plant out of the ground, and outdoor container plants aren't safe either.

To keep outdoor plants safe from the wind, try these techniques:

1. One of the most common tricks is to tie your plants to stakes driven into the ground.
2. In really windy spots, you can build a simple fence out of rope and poles to give your outdoor plants extra support.
3. It also helps to plant near hedges or shrubs that break the wind, or to put up plastic windbreak panels.
4. Move your containers closer to walls so the plants are more sheltered. 
5. Keep your plants low by training and topping them. That keeps them from getting too tall, and growers report yield gains of around 10-20% by encouraging the plant to grow sideways. Just wait until the second week of the vegetative stage to start.

From then until the second week of flowering, you can use a range of techniques, from cutting about 10 cm (4 in) off the top of the main stem to bending branches so the plant fills out. The key is to prune in a controlled way throughout the grow instead of doing it all in a few days, so the plant can recover between cuts and doesn't get too stressed.

Rain:

Rain raises humidity, and in the right (or wrong) weather your plant can end up with insects or mold. Pests like whiteflies, spider mites and fungus gnats can rot or kill a plant pretty easily.

The best defense is to cover your plants. Use a tarp or plastic sheeting whenever big drops in barometric pressure in the forecast point to heavy storms. The material and how you build it will depend on whether it's a temporary setup or something that stays up until harvest.

If it's only for a little while, use any plastic or tarp you've got on hand and keep it more than 30 cm (1 ft) above your plants so there's good airflow and moisture doesn't take over your grow. If you want something permanent, you'll need to build a greenhouse.

If your container plants have taken a soaking, space them out a bit so air can move between them and they dry out quickly.

Pests:

Lots of insects feed on cannabis. Some are easier to get rid of than others, but they all damage the plant, and cannabis can get moldy too, so keeping your plants protected is a must if you want a successful harvest.

Animals:

Growing outdoors also means watching out for animals. Moles, rabbits and even cats and dogs love to munch on cannabis plants, so you'll need to take the right precautions.

Depending on the problem, there are simple, effective ways to protect your plants, from building a greenhouse to putting nature to work for you. Over the years, growers have figured out how to grow top-quality buds outdoors, along with a few tricks for keeping plants safe from the cold.

Tips for protecting outdoor cannabis plants

• A greenhouse is pretty easy to build, and as a covered structure it's the ideal frost protector, shielding plants from rain, snow, wind and bad weather in general.

• Another option for outdoor plants is companion planting, which means adding other plants to your cannabis garden. Plants like lavender, basil and mint produce compounds that can help keep insects away.

The strong scent some of these plants give off sends insects looking for something else to eat, but be careful: some of them spread like crazy and can crowd out your cannabis, so it's better to keep them in containers.

Some insects attack your plants, but others actually protect them. Bringing in beneficial insects alongside your companion plants is a great natural way to get rid of pests.

• If there are animals around, you're probably wondering how to protect your plants from dogs, cats, rabbits and the like. The answer is a wire fence, which is ideal for keeping larger animals from eating your outdoor plants. Lots of them are drawn to cannabis plants, and because of their size, they can kill a plant pretty fast.

• Diatomaceous earth is a natural sedimentary rock that comes as a fine white powder. It's made almost entirely of diatoms, the fossilized remains of tiny aquatic organisms. Mixed into your soil, it offers several benefits, with water retention, nutrient uptake and pest control being the big three.

Outdoor grows in particular benefit from the fine, abrasive texture of diatomaceous earth, which makes it a great insecticide-free option. It works by slowly wearing down the pests' exoskeletons, so the insects dehydrate and die. Since it works mechanically rather than chemically, insects can't build up the kind of resistance they sometimes develop to chemical pesticides.

• Growing outdoors has lots of perks, but there are some basic precautions you need to take so you don't end up without a harvest. Depending on your space, you can combine several of these methods to keep your plants safe the whole season.

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