Anyone working with high investment should optimize their results to work more economically on average. This applies not only to indoor cannabis cultivation, but outdoor growing as well. You can plant the plants indoor and outdoor in pots and when they grow larger, space them apart. If they stay small, you simply turn off a few lights indoors. However, those working with just one lamp naturally don’t have these options.
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How do I optimize my results in marijuana cultivation?
Cannabis is a plant genus that forms many individual varieties. Each variety has its own characteristics. Sativas often shoot up from 15 cm to over one meter in height from the start of flowering and can fill one m² with just four or even one plant. They need longer in flowering and are more sensitive. Indicas, on the other hand, grow more compactly and should enter flowering at about 25 cm or more in height to reach one meter tall.
However, this is very general. There are individual strains that enter flowering at 20 cm and don’t grow taller than 30 cm. Others grow as a single stem and even with meter-tall plants, there should be at least 9 cannabis plants per m². However, there are also plants that grow wide and have little room with four or even one cannabis plant per m². Then there are growers who keep the plants quite small and therefore even go with 36 cannabis plants per m². They even cut away the side shoots so that only one bud forms per plant. There’s less work at harvest.
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You can’t simply answer this question with 4 or 9 – you must know the respective cannabis plants well to be able to say how many will properly cover the m².
Achieving optimal results with cannabis plants
If a plant grows over two meters tall and forms buds from top to bottom, then it also gets light from top to bottom. However, if the cannabis plants stand closer together with no gaps, then under artificial light or sunlight you can essentially count on a maximum of the top 60 or even just 40 cm to produce over 90% of the marijuana buds. If the plants are then taller than 80 cm, their lower leaves die off due to lack of light and you cannot improve results through more height.
Would modern agriculture spray the grain in the fields short if it would hurt the harvest results?
However, if the plants grow too densely with too many shoots, you will have less harvest weight and unfortunately also have to factor in much more time for harvest work. This means that indoors you should always calculate so that the plants grow 60 to 100 cm tall and after the first third of flowering you cannot or can barely see the floor from above. The leaves always orient themselves to get light and close the gaps. For this to work, the plants are stabilized with plant yoyos, plant stakes, or with nets they grow through, as they would otherwise sometimes buckle under their own weight.
After this first third of the flowering phase, the plants have finished growing in height, but when the buds form and get thicker and the side shoots also bend, they still spread outward and close the very last gaps. If you can only see the last spots of floor from above after half the flowering time, that’s optimal. Those who cover the area less or more will fare worse not in quality, but in quantity. Those growing in pots can of course still move them further apart or together if the situation allows.
Cannabis plants must be well cared for
When it’s said so generally how many cannabis plants you should grow per m², you must first clarify not only how the plants will likely grow in order to determine it for yourself. You must also create very good conditions for the grow and take good care of the plants throughout the entire time.
Those who plant super seedlings but don’t provide optimal care naturally cannot expect optimal results.
Those who grow cannabis plants with good growth vigor outdoors or in greenhouses and can continuously care for them can even choose a planting distance of two meters or more with some strains. In remote areas, most plants develop less well and here the distance can be smaller. However, those growing autoflowers know how large these can maximally become and can thus determine appropriate plant spacing for the strain. With regular plants, it depends very much on how large they are when flowering begins.
If the plants are probably still somewhat small indoors to optimally cover the area during flowering, you should wait a few more days before initiating flowering. However, growers are often running late. Then you should even cut out individual weak shoots so that the remaining plant mass can grow vigorously with optimal results. If the plants get too tall, it’s always painful to cut the valuable growing tip. You can of course also tie it down.
One should not do things that are considered illegal, even if criminalization of cannabis prohibition seems unjustified to many.
In California, they repeatedly manage to pre-grow plants very early with some artificial light in hoop houses to get them over 5 meters tall. However, in that case, uninvited harvest helpers would be even less avoidable than with smaller plants.
