We know. There’s nothing like watching your plants grow in the sun, with the breeze caressing their leaves and that wild aroma that makes you feel part of nature. Yes, we admit it, outdoor growing would be like a hippie-country dream come true. But between treacherous storms, nosy neighbors, pests, and harvests that seem straight out of Russian roulette… maybe it’s time for you to discover another growing method that, we assure you, can bring you great joy: indoor growing.
And no, we’re not saying you should give up on your outdoor adventures. On the contrary. Today, we want to suggest something even better: complement them. Because growing indoors isn’t just an alternative. It’s, with the sun’s permission, the smartest way to ensure your harvests and achieve high-quality buds all year round. We’ll explain it in detail below.
Indoor Growing: Your Own Cannabis World
Growing indoors is like having your personalized microclimate, a bubble where you’re in charge and don’t have to worry about the whims of the weather. Want 18 hours of light a day? You’ve got it. Want 50% humidity and not a single bug around? You got it, too. It’s like going from the Amazon rainforest to a laboratory clean room, but with cannabis plants as the centerpiece.
Setting up an indoor grow room isn’t as complex or expensive as it seemed a few years ago. There are complete grow tents at reasonable prices, efficient LED lighting, and control systems that allow you to have everything ready with just a couple of clicks. In fact, if you take a look at this blog, you’ll find many articles that will help you better understand this method of growing, and above all, how to do it correctly.
The best part? You don’t need acres of land or to attract the attention of neighbors, police, or thieves… With a small space in a corner of your home or garage, you can get a more than decent harvest without anyone noticing and with the advantage of being able to harvest high-quality buds several times a year. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and move on to the main advantages of indoor growing, especially when it comes to cannabis plants.
10 easy-to-avoid errors in your first indoor grow
When we start growing cannabis indoors, many doubts may arise regarding the different parameters that we need to control. Today we talk about the 10 most common mistakes that inexperienced growers tend to make so that your first crop can be much easier… and more productive!
Security: No one will know you have cannabis plants
Do you have neighbors with the hearing of a bat and the nose of a bloodhound? Do you live in an area where having a plant in the garden is equivalent to summoning the local police or the typical lowlife who prefers stealing rather than growing his weed? Indoor growing is the solution. Hidden behind four walls, no one sees, no one smells, no one suspects. With a good activated carbon filter and a closed cabinet, you won’t even realize how good it smells inside. Plus, if you’ve ever had to deal with someone “borrowing” your outdoor plants, you’ll know what we’re talking about. Indoors, the only hands that touch your flowers are yours. Period.
As if that weren’t enough, indoor growing allows you to spread your production over several harvests per year, eliminating the classic risk faced by outdoor growers who must provide enough buds for an entire year with a single harvest, and are therefore forced to manage a relatively high production… Why go through the hassle of growing more than a kilo of weed to be self-sufficient when, during the year, you can make several harvests of, for example, 300 grams? You can be sure… anyone who has been to court and knows what the matter is about will always prefer to answer for 300g of weed than for a kilo!
Independence: neither climate nor seasons stop you
Any outdoor grower knows that they depend heavily on the solar calendar and the weather forecast. Indoors, you depend on your desire to improve the environment for your plants, as you can provide them with the ideal conditions for their development. And when we say ideal, we mean it literally. Temperature and humidity, CO2 levels, ventilation, daily light hours… all of these are parameters over which you can have complete control in your indoor grow, which translates into perfect conditions for growth and flowering, with the excellent results that this brings.
All of this also means you can harvest three, even four crops a year. Regardless of whether it’s snowing, pouring, or there’s a biblical plague of locusts. You control the three fundamental aspects of the crop: photoperiod, temperature, and humidity. There are no pauses, no waiting. No storms, no unsuitable temperatures. Want to plant in January? You can. Want to harvest in April and plant again in May? You can.
And this is where outdoor growers often say timidly: “Hey, this indoor growing stuff doesn’t sound that bad…” Well, let’s keep giving them something to think about!
Growing clones instead of seeds: savings and strategy
This is where the strategic factor comes in. By growing indoors, you can maintain mother plants and create clones, which means a considerable saving on seeds. But you can also use those clones for outdoor cultivation. In other words, you can prepare your arsenal indoors and then go out into the field with a head start. Indeed, many growers keep clones of their best plants in their indoor grow rooms until June (Northern Hemisphere), when they can take them outside without fear of flowering. The result? By the end of summer, they have an outdoor garden with selected, top-quality plants, uniform in size, quality, and harvest time, with all the advantages this entails.
This way, if you like how a particular strain performs, you can reproduce it indefinitely, both indoors and outdoors. No genetic surprises or plants that go their way. Here, everything depends on your planning. Many growers keep their mother plants throughout the year to supply their indoor crop with cuttings, and take them out to the outdoor garden when daylight hours allow. Thus, they begin their outdoor crop with plants of a considerable size, while during the summer, they maintain clones of these plants indoors that will, in turn, become new mother plants. The circle closes, and the bud jars are filled to the brim with excellent genetics. What more could you ask for?
Growing cannabis cuttings
Cannabis is an excellent plant for asexual reproduction. It roots very easily and is an ideal plant species to perform propagation by cuttings. We only need a small greenhouse, scissors, rooting hormones, a small amount of substrate and fluorescent lights. Of course, we also need a quality motherplant to take the cuttings from. Let’s see which is the process and the needed temperature and humidity levels to successfully root our marijuana cuttings in 10 easy steps.
Pests and diseases: goodbye botrytis, goodbye dramas
If you have to dance to the Gods every October to prevent botrytis from wiping out your buds… You need to grow indoors. Outdoors, pests and fungi are part of the landscape. Indoors, if you maintain clean and stable conditions, most won’t even make a splash in your grow. Whether we’re talking about small insects like whiteflies or thrips, fungi like botrytis or downy mildew, or animals like wild boars, moles, or cats (why do cats love vegging cannabis plants so much??), you can forget about the vast majority of them if you grow indoors.
Thrips? Spider mites? Sure, they can appear. But here you have complete control over eradicating them before they can do their thing, plus you can prevent them much more easily than outdoors. And best of all, you don’t have to rely on harsh chemical treatments or praying to the patron saint of plants. If you do things right, these pests won’t be a big problem, and they certainly won’t threaten your annual bud production and compromise your smoking reserves for the next 12 months.
By maintaining hygiene in your indoor grow and using a few preventative measures to help you control pests, you can forget that feeling that plagues many outdoor growers every night: Will my plants be okay tomorrow morning? Yes, they’ll be fine, just relax and keep calm.
Appearance of buds: density and resin
Yes, we know, beauty isn’t everything. But let’s face it: When you see a rock-solid bud, perfectly trimmed and covered in glistening trichomes, a smile comes to your face. The controlled conditions indoors favor that catalog-ready look we love so much. And, as a bonus, they tend to have more potency and, in many cases, better flavor. It’s not just a pretty face.
Indoors, you won’t experience cloudy days, harsh rain, or having your flowers covered with dust, mud, or pet hair. They’ll have had perfect conditions for their development every day of the grow, and this is evident in both their appearance (bag appeal) and their potency.
Ideal for breeding: make your hybrids
If you’re a breeder at heart or curious about playing with phenotypes and homemade crosses, the indoor environment is the perfect laboratory for you. In this environment, you can fully control pollination, isolate male and female specimens, and preserve genetics uninterruptedly. Plus, an indoor grow allows you to perform countless tests without compromising your bud supply, which, for outdoor growers, must last a year. Can you imagine having to smoke half-pollinated weed or a cross you didn’t like in terms of flavor or effect for 12 months? More than a pleasure, it feels like a punishment!
Resin extraction has gone from being a hobby or a way to take advantage of sugar leaves to almost an art form. And if you’re looking to extract top-quality BHO, Rosin, or hash, the indoor material makes all the difference. More resinous buds, fewer impurities, and much higher yields.
With outdoor material, you can easily extract your plants, although the plants often produce slightly less resin and, of course, are much more likely to get dirty and produce lower-quality concentrates (with more impurities) if you’re not careful and don’t wash the plant material before extracting. But if you want to compete in the resin concentrate championship, it will be much easier to do so with indoor flowers.
You see? Growing indoors isn’t about giving up the charm of outdoor cultivation. It’s about giving continuity, depth, and greater control to your passion. It’s like taking another step in your evolution as a grower, a step that also opens up dozens of possible paths.
Do you dare to turn on the lights?
