A lot of indoor cannabis growers struggle with yields. It’s fantastic to grow your own weed, but you must grow enough of it! Otherwise, growing may feel like a waste of time and effort.
Luckily, cannabis yields don’t have to be a mystery. There are specific factors that cause yields to be big or small, and nearly all of them are under your control.
To really get the most out of your plant, you need to give it the perfect environment.
And that is the biggest benefit to growing indoors in a marijuana grow tent. You control everything.
You can give your plants exactly what they need and if you do, they will reward you with monster yields.
But what do they need?
Unfortunately, there is a ton of conflicting information out there. And a lot of it focuses on time-consuming tasks or expensive equipment that result in only small improvements.
That's just a huge waste. You want to focus on those fixes that bring the largest improvement. At least at first. Once you've done the big stuff, then you can focus on dialing in those things that boost yields by a small amount.
So what are the things you can fix to see large improvements in yield quality and quantity?
1.) Increase light intensity
(and possibly add CO2 so plants can use even more light)
A lot of growers ask me how to increase the size, number and density of their buds so they get bigger yields. The truth is, for most growers, the most effective way to increase bud size in the flowering stage is to increase LIGHT INTENSITY.
Learn exactly how to upgrade your indoor grow lights so you get the greatest light intensity. By the way, a full spectrum LED grow light is best recommended.
If your cannabis plant has no major problems or illnesses, then the biggest factor affecting your yields is the light intensity provided.
Light is basically food for your plants. Turning light into energy via photosynthesis is how your plants get all their energy to grow and produce buds.
As a general rule of thumb…
More Intense Light = Larger Plants & Fatter Buds = Bigger Yields
After you’ve germinated your seeds (or rooteed your clons), one of the most important things to do right from the beginning is ensure that your plants are getting enough light.
During the vegetative stage, cannabis plants which don’t get enough light will tend to ‘stretch’ up toward the light with a lot of stem between nodes and leaves.
You need to provide enough light intensity to prevent young cannabis plants from stretching or growing too tall and falling over. What's more, quantum board led grow light also is with high watts.
2.) Manipulate plant structure (bend, net, top, etc) so all colas received strong & even light coverage
The basic idea behind plant training is that bigger, wider plants with many evenly spaced colas produce bigger yields.
Manipulating your plants is a basically free way to increase your yields, without needing to change anything else about your setup. You don’t need to buy expensive nutrients or get a new grow light for this to work for you.
Manipulating the plant in a way that doesn’t involve actually cutting your plant is often referred to as “LST” in the cannabis growing world, which is short for “Low Stress Training.”
The idea of LST is to manually force your plant to grow flat and wide, as opposed to tall and thin, usually using bending.
3.) Get the Right Cannabis Nutrients
Growers often refer to nutrients as “food” for your plants. When you talk about it that way, it intuitively seems like giving more “food” would result in bigger buds, but is that really the case?
As we learned earlier in the section about light intensity, the real “food” for your plants is light. Light is what your plant turns into energy through photosynthesis, and this energy is what fuels vegetative and flowering growth.
Then what do the nutrients do? They’re like little helpers that give your plant what it needs to carry out the process of photosynthesis and growth.
I like to think of nutrients like vitamins for humans. While humans need to get certain vitamins to survive, I want you to consider that people should never eat multi-vitamins like candy. In fact, if you give people more vitamins than their body can use, they will actually get very sick.
Nutrients are important to healthy growth, but it’s important to understand that going overboard will cause more harm than good.
While many growers are trying to raise nutrient levels as high as possible, I have gotten better results (yields) when I simply try to avoid providing too little or too much nutrients.
Healthy cannabis leaves appear green and uniform. As long as your leaves look like this, without signs of spots, discoloration, curling or other problems, you have nothing to worry about!
4.) Control Temperature (and humidity)
A good growing environment is crucial to the health of your plants, as well as your final potency and yields. When the temperature (and to a lesser extent the humidity) is too high or too low for your plants, your plants will not grow properly and buds won’t fatten up no matter what else you do.
Too high temps late in the flowering stage can also reduce the potency of smell of your buds by burning away cannabinoids and terpenes.
By controlling temperature and humidity, you can actually increase the smell and potency of your buds at harvest.
If there is a particular source of heat that is harming the plant (like a hot grow light), you’ll know because the leaves closest to the source of the problem will wilt and turn a brownish color.
5.) Wait until the right time to harvest
For most strains of cannabis, there is a 2-3 week window during which buds can be harvested. When growers harvest before the proper “harvest window”, it can reduce your yields (and potency).
By allowing your buds to ripen fully, you will maximize your overall yields. I’ve seen buds gain up to 25% adiitional size (at least visually) in the last 2-3 weeks before harvest. If I’d harvested these buds earlier, I would have dramatically lowered my overall yields.
Another benefit of waiting until the right time to harvest is you can choose to harvest your buds when they have the exact effects you’re looking for. Harvest earlier for a more buzzy daytime high, and harvest later for a more relaxing, couchlock experience.
As mentioned at the beginning, there are many factors that effect marijuana yields. The 5 detailed above are the ones that will have the largest impact. Choose the best tools, like to get a best led grow light. Get them right and you will enjoy yields far larger and far more potent than the average grower.
Only then should you worry other factors: those that give you smaller increases in yield size and potency. Until you've got the big ones right, there's no point in working hard for small gains.