Plant Hormones for Cannabis

Hormones are something that we as humans use to help with our metabolism, the way we behave, and our development physically, but it’s actually a major part of plants too, and it’s a big part of their life cycle, helping with the development and growth of different parts of it. These chemicals that are in it are called phytohormones, and usually, it not just helps with metabolism, and morphology, but also helps with stress responses and reduces damage physically from different conditions of the weather, pathogens, and pests too. 

Plant hormones are actually very similar to our hormones, but it does work in slightly different ways. However, they do affect growth in other ways and it does interact with some of the other phytohormones that change the metabolic means of this, rather than just one plant hormone that’s isolated, and it also will change the hormone levels, and some of them can cause a variety of reactions. With that said, let’s go over some of the most popular plant hormones used. 

Auxins 

This is really good for elongating or diving cells, forming leaves, forming roots, apical dominance to help with growing vertically, developing fruit, plant growth, and also helps with photoreaction to gravity and light. This works to help with growth control, and it actually helps the way the stems are able to move and bend towards the light sources, based on the secretion of this hormone in the plant. 

Cytokinin 

This is also an important one since it helps with the element of cells, differentiation, and also the division of cells too. It also pushes for the development of axillary buds, along with adventitious roots, which help with the enlargement and formation of leaves. It also boosts the metabolic activity of seeds, breaking it out of dormancy. 

It helps with the leaves, keeping them greener for a bit longer, stimulating the morphogenesis of the tissues that are there, helping to create buds and initiate the shots, and it also helps with the nutritional signaling of this too, helping with seed transport too. 

Gibberellins 

This is another hormone that helps with elongating the cells by stimulating it, pushing for germination, inducting the flowers, improves the trichome sand buds, helping to delay senescence in a plant, helps with the development of roots, and is good for showing the sex expression, especially in cannabis plants. It’s basically a huge growth stimulator that plays a major part in vascular plants. It also pushes seed dormancy out, and imitates flowers, helps with the development of trichomes, elongates the stem, and improves the growing of roots. It also helps to mitigate environmental stress in plants. 

Abscisic acid 

This is another acid and important hormone for growth too. However, this one is for inhibiting different aspects of this. It stops the shoot growth, improves the seed dormancy, stops transpiration by closing the stoma, helps with the environmental response, stops the ripening of fruit, improves the color development, also helps to abscission the flowers and the fruit that are there, and it also helps with pushing for rooting. It basically is used to counteract the other hormones that were listed before. 

Ethylene 

Finally we have this one, which stimulates the ripening of fruit, helps with the germination of seeds, the senescence of leaves, helps with abscission of leaves, helps the plant survive flooding to too much oxygen or too little oxygen environments, helps with the internode and petiole length, helps determine the gender of the plant, and is used the development of female flowers. It’s basically very volatile, but it works with the other hormones.