What makes the perfect cannabis growing environment? What does it take to get the healthiest growth and best yields from your indoor cannabis plants?
5 Factors to Creating a Perfect Growing Environment
(from most important to least important)
- Light – Bright but not too bright
- Temperature – Comfortable for you, comfortable for your plants
- Air Circulation – Fresh air plus a gentle breeze
- Reflection – Cover your walls with a reflective material
- Humidity – Controlling humidity helps plants grow faster and can increase resin production
You need a great environment to produce the best harvest. A poor growing environment lowers both yields and bud quality!
Benefits of a great grow environment
- Plants grow faster
- Harvest bigger yields
- Healthier, greener, and overall hardier plants
- Higher bud quality (better bud density, shape, and trichome production)
- Stronger bud smell and potency (THC and smells can get “burned off” if it’s too hot)
- Plants are more resistant to common problems like over/underwatering, hermies, heat stress, light stress, bugs, mildew and bud rot.
Keep plants comfortable and they will reward you!
1.) Light
When growing cannabis, you want to give light that is bright but not too bright. The amount of light you provide is one of the major factors that will determine your yields, and with smaller grow lights your yields will be limited no matter what you do.
Light also changes how your plant grows. For example, the color spectrum of light can cause your plants to grow tall and lanky or more bushy and squat. Some grow lights like LED grow lights take advantage of a custom color spectrum to help your plants grow as optimally as possible. Some excellent grow lights: Shop
The amount of light you give your cannabis is the main factor that determines your yields.
However, it’s also possible to give your cannabis plants too much light, especially with big grow lights, so it’s important to keep grow lights the right distance away.
2.) Temperature
The long and the short of it is: If it’s comfortable for you, it’s probably comfortable for your plants.
Cannabis plants like temperatures in the 65-85°F (19-30°C) range and can start to run into problems when the plants are experiencing temperatures outside that range.
3.) Air Circulation & Exhaust
Making sure your plants always have a gentle breeze and plenty of fresh air helps them grow faster. Good air circulation also helps prevent problems with white powdery mildew, bud rot, and common cannabis pests like fungus gnats o spider mites.
Basically, you want a gentle breeze moving over, through, and under your plants if possible. If all the leaves are being gently rustled, it’s perfect. You don’t want to point a fan directly at your plants because that can cause wind burn, but you also don’t want any leaves sitting in stagnant or hot air. A small oscillating fan or two in the grow space can work wonders.
In addition to making sure there’s air moving around in the grow space, it’s also important to vent out heat from your grow lights, especially if it’s getting too hot for your plants during lights-on. For each light type, the higher the wattage, the more heat produced. If you notice the temperature is climbing above 85°F (30°C) on a regular basis, you should consider venting heat out of the grow area to keep the temperature under control. However, if the overall temperature of the entire grow room is too high, you may need to take more drastic actions such as getting an AC. Fans can move air around, but can’t lower the total amount of heat in a room.
4.) Reflection
You will get the most from your indoor grow lights by reflecting light at your plants. Instead of letting the walls of the grow space absorb extra light from your grow light, you can use a reflective material to bounce it back towards your plants. This allows you to squeeze more yields out of the same grow light without having to change anything else about your environment.
5.) Humidity
Unless it’s very high or low, humidity usually won’t cause any major problems with your cannabis grow. However, there are a few tricks with humidity to get faster growth and more resin production on your buds.
Note: The optimal seedling humidity is closer to vegetative plants than clones. Try to avoid letting the humidity get over 60% for seedlings or it can slow their growth.
Perfecting Your Growing Environment
It’s important to realize that there is no one “perfect” growing environment. Just like people, each plant is a little bit different and may respond better to some environments than others. For example, some plants can better handle the heat or cold, and some plants aren’t as picky about good air circulation. But by taking care of the 5 factors of a great cannabis growing environment, you will ensure that your plant will be comfortable no matter what the strain!