Outdoors, when you grow cannabis there are air currents that can cause heat to dissipate and help avoid serious issues in your plants. If you plan on growing indoors, you’ll need to create these air currents as well as renew the air; extract hot air and replace it with cooler, fresh air in order to properly grow your plants. Ventilation in indoor grows is essential in order to maintain the right humidity, temperature and air quality in the room or tent.

Ventilation in Indoor Cannabis Grows

Ventilation is essentially renewing and/or recirculating air in an indoor grow; the air in the room or grow tent needs to have certain humidity, temperature and CO2 levels for plants to grow correctly.

On the one hand, you’ll need to get rid of the hot air using an extractor or various extractors, pushing in cold air using an AC unit if needed or an extractor that’s taking in air from outside. You’ll also need to use fans to create air currents within the room so that the conditions are similar to outdoors, avoiding hot pockets of air and keeping your plants happier.

Ventilation with the lights on

The first question that all cannabis growers ask themselves when they start growing cannabis indoors is, well, how to set up an indoor grow. There are many reasons to want to go with this method; the low quality of cannabis found on the street or the high prices are some of the reasons to start growing at home. Other advantages of growing cannabis indoors include having access to particular strains, as well as knowing exactly what goes into the plants, and therefore, your body, when consumed. Organic growing is always highly recommended. However, before we get into the more technical aspects, let’s have a look at planning an indoor grow.

What to Keep in Mind Before Growing Cannabis Indoors

Before you start getting any ideas, it’s important to keep in mind a few basic factors. A little planning is essential to guarantee a successful harvest – let’s have a look at some of the main things to consider.

Do I Have the Right Conditions to Grow Cannabis Indoors?

There are some factors that come into play here:

Available space: where to set up the grow tent or room – for example, a room with high ceilings and a window provides more possibilities than a small area without a window. Personal needs: the amount of cannabis that you consume will also come into play when deciding how much space you need. Budget: in this post we’re going to try and get the absolute best for our money; a low budget will obviously have an impact on the quality and quantity of your harvest.

Choosing the best growing medium for indoors is one of the best ways to work towards a successful cannabis grow indoors, as your plants will have the ideal home to grow their roots in indoors. A good growing medium also gives your plants the right conditions to absorb nutrients easily, and have your plants reach their maximum potential.

Growing Medium Characteristics for Indoors

Cannabis plants need a growing medium which features the following two main characteristics:

Water retention capacity: the amount of time that your plants’ soil or loam stays humid. Aeration: cannabis roots need humidity and oxygen, as well as and airy and spongy substrate that isn’t going to get weighed down, which allows them to grow fast.

However, sometimes it can be hard to combine these two conditions in one product; when a growing medium and retain a lot of water, it’s usually less airy, and if it’s more airy it tends to dry out a lot quicker and need more water. However, there are some materials that are ideal for growing cannabis indoors – lets have a look at their characteristics.

You’ve probably taken hours or even days to choose the right seeds for your grow before. This is actually quite expected, and luckily there’s an endless amount of cannabis strains. Do you know how to choose the right cannabis seeds for indoor growing?

Out catalogue includes strains from some of the best seed banks, high quality strains that were created thanks to the work put into crossing and selecting by breeders; strains chosen due to their exceptional characteristics and transfer these traits to their descendance.

Nowadays, after decades of breeding, quality standards have set quite the bar, which is why you should always choose a strain that adapts to your needs. Let’s have a look at a step-by-step guide in order to make the process easier.

Cannabis Seeds for Indoor Growing: Types of Seeds

When it comes to indoor growing, the idea is to simulate and even improve upon the environmental conditions found in nature in order to grow cannabis. In order to do this, you’ll need to replace natural sunlight with artificial lighting and create air currents using extractors and fans etc. The only factors these two types of grows have in common are the substrate (if using soil), fertilizers and seeds.

Materials Needed for Starting an Inside Grow

Just like we explain in another post, before you start growing cannabis indoors you’ll need to decide if you want to use a grow tent or an entire room. We recommend grow tents because they make the entire process much easier, especially if you’re just starting out.

Step 1: Choose a Grow tent

If you’ve never grown cannabis indoors and you’re still wondering if you should use a grow tent, let’s have a look at the benefits of growing in a grow tent.

Benefits of Grow Tents Indoors Grow tents can create the ideal environment for your plants and are isolated from the rest of your house or room. This allows you to easily adjust the light and dark periods. It’s much easier to create a microclimate in a grow tent than a grow room; it’s easier to ventilate and renew air. Growing in an indoor grow tent allows you to grow without needing to make any holes in the walls or do any work on your house. There are grow tents that cater to all types of needs; from small grow tents that should be used with low energy lighting or LED panels to large grow tents designed for more demanding needs. Grow tents allow for many different options such as using different lighting. Other characteristics The yield obtained from your grow tent will depend on the type of lighting used, the conditions your plants are in and the strain grown. Having more plants in your grow tent doesn’t necessarily mean larger yields; you want to fill the grow tent while making sure that there’s enough space for the flowers and leaves to get enough light.

LED is an English acronym that stands for Light Emitting Diode. A diode is an electric component that has two terminals and allows for electric currents to pass in just one direction. By applying the right tension. the electrons recombine in order to release energy in the form of photons (electroluminescence).

This electroluminescence-producing phenomenon was discovered in 1907 by Henry Joseph Round in Macroni labs, and then 20 years later Oleg Lósev manufactured the first LED un the Soviet Union. In the 60s they started being used in highly expensive systems as they were originally incredibly expensive and difficult to make.

Thanks to recent developments over the past few years, LEDs now cost less to make and have become more popular. Plus, they’ve also been adapted for indoor cannabis growing.

One of the most popular types of lighting for cannabis grows that’s gained popularity over the past few years is LED lighting. The first prototypes of LED lighting weren’t the best in as far as quality, especially when it came to flowering cannabis plants. Nowadays there are certain models that provide amazing results.

Like we were saying in our post Growing Cannabis with LEDs, Blooming LED panels allow you to give your plants the exact amount of light they need. This allows for more successful growing and flowering periods; you can easily adapt the light to your plants different needs in each stage of both growth on flowering. In this post we're going to focus on flowering here.

LED Flowering – Flowering Stages

For a successful flowering period and in order to make the most of your light, you'll need to adjust your LED lighting as your plants grow. This is especially important during the various different flowering stages of cannabis plants.

First Flowering Stage