Whether you are growing for personal use, recreational or medical, your indoor plant children deserve the best life they can get. Ultimately, however, your plants will soon be passing on, leaving behind vivacious buds, teeming with terpenes and loaded with cannabinoids, allowing you to remember the plants long after they are gone.
Knowing how to achieve the biggest indoor yield can not only increase the sheer volume produced but also may affect potency. In the interest of harvesting the plumpest buds, the path ahead requires attentiveness and care, though money is also going to play a role (when does it not?). The situation is going to depend on your grow space, but before I lay out the grow tips, consider three questions:
- How many plants are you growing?
- Are they are getting natural or artificial light?
- Are they potted in soil, hydroponic, or other?
In addition to these answers, try to visualize a price range you wish to stay within. Of course, this will vary depending on the type of stuff you own already.
Table of Contents
Plant genetics
Genetics is one of the most important factors in producing a sturdy plant with big ol’ flowers. To achieve the biggest indoor yield, knowing how plant genetics can determine whether a plant grows tall or short, narrow or bushy, and flounder under improper conditions — even if the seeds are good — is a good place to start. And luckily for us, finding good seeds and clones have often become as easy as using the internet, a possible side-effect of marijuana further seeping into social acceptance.
Female plants tend to have higher levels of cannabinoids than male plants. In the wild, male plants pollinate the female plants, which causes the energy that would be used in bud production to be invested in seed production, while the two plant processes happen simultaneously. The result: less potent buds with seeds to be plucked away prior to toke-time.
As a general rule, sativa plants are taller with thin branches and large, fanning leaves. Indica plants, however, are shorter, bushier and often thrive under different light cycles than their sativa sister. While this is just general information, anticipated height and width of plant growth can give you cues on things like:
- Light positioning
- Light intensity
- Space adjustments and/or fittings
Best Climate for Cannabis
This can make or break indoor grows, possibly even in ways that affect life for you, the grower. While the origins of cannabis are, indeed, ancient, different temperatures, light conditions, and environmental factors presumably affected the plant evolution. By looking at growing marijuana through a historical, evolutionary kaleidoscope, we’ve pinpointed the climate and environmental conditions that meet — if not exceed — nature’s standard.
Learning how to achieve the biggest indoor yields requires that you mimic the natural variations of light, heat, and humidity that were necessary for the plant species to survive. Throughout the flowering stage in the plant life cycle, where bud production is in full-tilt, you’ll want your indoor plant nursery to maintain a temperature between 70 degrees and 78 degrees Fahrenheit while the lights are on, varying by only about 10% in the evening (between 63 degrees and 70.2 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively). You can achieve this by:
- Living somewhere warm that allows cannabis cultivation
- Using forced air heating
- Using a space heater
In all honesty, the lights can often produce enough heat for the plants, depending only on what kind of lighting situation you are working with.
Another environmental aspect of achieving excellent indoor yields requires consistency in the humidity of your grow room. Sure enough, marijuana plants absorb water through the root system, but it is also vital that the Co2 rich air be carrying water until the root system has matured through the flowering phase. Humidity should be maintained around 70% until the flowering phase begins, where it can and should be lowered to between 40% – 50%, stimulating nutrient absorption rather than water retention.
Also, consider the cost associated with extra electricity, and possible mold due to warm temperatures and humidity, because they are certainly real.
Lights for the Biggest Yield Indoors
Light is the vehicle that allows photosynthesis, which basically grabs energy from the sunlight to power the plant cell. A byproduct of light, when directed at cannabis, is ATP, which can supply energy for other plant processes, like converting Co2 into sugars to feed on for energy. In learning the basics of how the biggest indoor yields can be achieved, to not mention lighting would, therefore, be a huge disservice to understanding how plants grow.
For marijuana cultivation, in particular, we have carefully triangulated the sources of light power that stimulate plant growth. In general, there are two things that a lighting set-up has to be able to provide:
- Adequate light intensity
- Adequate light spectrum
If you are new to growing, familiarize yourself with these terms — they are used often with regard to marijuana growing and luminescence metrics.
If lighting is inadequate during the vegetative stage, the plant may have reached towards the lighting, like a shielded flower searching for the sun. This can disrupt all sorts of processes, as the already inadequate light energy was instead used to try to get more rather than on healthy growth. That being said, it is ridiculously important that you get the lighting right the entire plant’s life.
In general, the most effective lighting would be one that provides the correct light spectrum and intensity; however, such items can sometimes ring up a significant dollar amount. For more on lighting considerations — as there is a great many — each of these two articles can offer a bunch of helpful hints and tips: Click here or Press Here
Trim the Leaves
For the shorter, bushier plants, or strains with very leafy genetics, the leaves can sometimes block out the light from reaching the colas, where the bud production is in full swing. Prune, pluck, or trim as necessary, this tip can help even the biggest indoor yield achiever wondering how to do it again.
By exposing the necessary plant parts to the light energy source, we will have helped energy creation, fueling flower production. Once the plant enters flowering mode, some of the leaves may begin to turn yellow as energy is diverted away from the leaves function as a source of water.
Check the Nutrients, pH
Nutrients are vital to the grow, from start to finish. If you have a hydroponic system such as deep water culture or aeroponics, changing the water and adjusting the nutrients can be done with precision, not that in the soil it is all that difficult either. If the pH is off, nutrients provided in solution or in the soil will not be available to the root system, which can be detrimental if you planned to achieve the biggest indoor grow yield.
How can bud production be accomplished well if the nutrients can’t be converted to plant growth vitamins? For more information on nutrients, I find this guide helpful. For more on the pH and how to manipulate it, check this out.
Co2 Generator and Fans
The final place to concern oneself when seeking how the biggest indoor yields can be achieved lay in the air and its movement within the grow space. As we know, Co2 is absorbed by the cannabis plant and converted to energy via photosynthesis.
In an easy-to-imagine scenario, adding more Co2 could, potentially, increase the production of energy, which could be spent on plant processes, such as flower production — including all that sweet cannabinoid dense, terpene affluent marijuana nectar infused in the frosty tips of the resin pores and throughout the buds themselves.
In regards to the importance of fans: think about it, plants didn’t evolve in your closet. Many of the stabilizing functions of a plant root system are dependent upon certain environmental concessions, such as wind.
If you can build a sturdy, healthy root system throughout the vegetative stage, by the time the flowering stage comes about, the root system is nothing but an energy highway, converting a bunch of organic matter into a chemical that gets us high (and helps a lot too!), increasing the potency, density, and overall bodaciousness of the cherished buds o’ cannabis.
