Growing cannabis is an art. Many cultivators have spent their whole life trying to perfect it, and perhaps they will never finish tinkering with the process.
Learning to grow indoors means you take on the role of mother nature, supplying all the necessary ingredients to produce a beautiful product. Tweaking the parameters, including temperature, lights, humidity, and growing medium, is all a part of the experience.
So what can you do in your own indoor grow room to nurture a better, tastier flower? There may be 101 ways to grow cannabis indoors, but are there tried and true methods to making it easier? The following ideas are ways to make growing cannabis more manageable, and the final harvest more delicious.
10 Tips for Growing Cannabis Indoors
1. Choose The Right Strain
A pure Sativa strain may produce high yields, but it's not ideal for indoor growing. Indoor grows need strains with short stature and high yield. But thankfully, decades of careful breeding have created hundreds of cultivars suitable for the indoor grower.
Combining the short and bushy nature of Indicas with the tall and expansive nature of Sativas has created many lineages perfectly suited to an indoor environment. Think Northern Lights, Super Skunk, Jack Herer, and Silver Haze.
2. Get a Grow Tent
If building a grow room in a back room, closet, or basement seems like too much effort, invest in a Gorilla Grow Tent. Designed specifically with cannabis in mind, these come in all sizes for all size grows. Structurally sound and reflective on the inside, the tent prevents light seepage, prevents damage to the surrounding room, and contains everything needed in a small indoor grow.
3. Growing in Soil? Build a Living Soil
Living soil is teaming with beneficial microorganisms, like fungi, bacteria, and more. These help your crop absorb more nutrients and minerals, plus improve soil structure for better moisture retention and aeration. Thriving living soil is the basis of many organic grows and means a healthier end product. Plus, it's a relatively basic concept. Anyone can build a nutrient-dense living soil at home with simple core ingredients.
4. Automate the Grow Room
Even a small room on a budget can benefit from a few automatons. At the very least, that means automating irrigation, light schedule, and temperature controls. Cannabis plants need consistency, and as humans, we fail to create the strict schedule our plants need. A simple timer on the grow lights, or a PulseOne Monitor can do a world of difference for the grow room.
5. Don’t Forget, Consistently Water
Overwatering or underwatering can have real consequences on the health of your plants. If you are growing in soil, ideally, you'll want to deeply water well-drained soil every two to three days. But, every grow room will need individual assessment. Reduce the daily labor with an irrigation system, like the Blumat Automated Irrigation kit.
6. Measure Moisture to Reduce the Risk
Whether or not you've installed an irrigation system, you can always benefit from the reassurance of a digital moisture meter. Tucked into the soil, it provides clear, accurate readouts about whats going on at the root level. Yes, the finger test works, but it's not precise. You don't need to second guess yourself when it comes to the watering cycle — get a moisture meter.
7. Invest in the Right Grow Light
If you are growing indoors, it pays to invest in a high-quality grow light. Exposure to the right intensity and spectrum of light is the number one way to produce happy and healthy plants. Look for brands specifically tailoring their fixtures to the cannabis market, like Growers Choice and Growcraft. If you are working with a tight budget, don't skimp on the lighting components. Made in China knock offs just don't cut it in terms of performance, spectrum, and coverage.
8. Get a Grow Room Fan
After lights, the next piece to the grow room environment is air circulation. Airflow and circulation strengthen the plant itself but also reduces the risk of disease and pest infestation. Because cannabis prefers warm and humid climates, fans ensure these hot damp conditions don't also create an ideal environment for powdery mildew or other infestations. At the bare minimum, set up several fans around the canopy, and for larger situations, install an intake and exhaust dust system.
9. Keep A Detailed Grow Room Journal
Whether automated through a cloud-based grow room management platform, or an old fashioned pen and paper — keep a daily and detailed journal. Your notes will help you work out the kinks in the growing process, and most importantly, learn from your mistakes on the next harvest. With detailed notes, you can tinker with the growing conditions, to pump out bigger yields and better profiles.
10. Look Closely At Your Flowers
A jewelers loupe or a small handheld microscope makes a world of difference come harvest time. An experienced eye may be able to get the timing right, but a magnifying lens takes out all the guesswork. Using an LED loupe, get up close and personal with the trichome development to harvest at peak potency. A loupe can also help diagnose pests and disease, and in the early days, quickly sex the plants.
Take These Tips and Grow
This is by no means an exhaustive list of tips, but you'd need a thousand-page tome to cover them all. There are as many was to grow cannabis as there are cannabis growers. You'll never find a more vocal demographic, all touting the benefits of their great growing techniques.
Take a close look at your own grow room setup, and try experimenting with some of the ideas above. At the very least, they'll make your life easier, and the experience more straightforward. Which hopefully means a bigger, better final product.
