People choose to get into growing weed for all kinds of reasons. Some want to have a steady supply of medical marijuana to manage health conditions, while others grow high-THC strains for personal use or generating some extra income. No matter why you want to grow cannabis, you’ve probably been asking yourself: how much marijuana can I yield per plant?
Unfortunately, there’s no cut-and-dry answer to this question. To get an idea of what to expect, you’ll need to understand the many variables that go into determining yield. Whether you’re completely new to growing marijuana or you’re an experienced grower with a few seasons under your belt, you can find out everything there is to know about what to expect in different growing conditions and how you can maximize your yields below.
What Is the Maximum Yield for Indoor Plants?
The key to growing marijuana successfully indoors is to faithfully replicate the perfect outdoor growing environment. Creating the perfect indoor grow environment requires careful attention to your plants’ lighting, water, temperature, humidity, air quality, space, and nutrient needs, avoiding pests, and changing the plants over from veg to bud at just the right time.
If you get everything just right, you can expect your plants to produce around one gram of smokable marijuana for every one watt of light per plant in your grow room or tent. In other words, you can get around 400 grams from a setup with one 400-watt HPS light, while one 800-watt light could feasibly produce twice as much bud in the same amount of space.
Of course, there are also many other factors you’ll need to consider if you want to increase your yields when growing indoors. Growers who manage to pull down a gram per watt of marijuana usually have years of experience under their belts. They’ve already figured out the optimal soil or hydroponic setup and have devoted some time and practice to developing effective trimming and training techniques to maximize light exposure.
What Is the Average Yield for Indoor Grows?
If you’re still a novice to indoor growing, it’s unlikely that you’ll achieve maximum yields in your first season. You can improve your chances of pulling down plenty of pot by purchasing high-quality marijuana seeds from a reputable seed bank like Kind Seed Co and following established light, watering, and feeding schedules. However, it will take some time to get to the point where you’re pulling down a full gram of bud for every watt of light.
In the meantime, you might want to aim for more realistic goals. The average indoor grower can expect to pull down between 1.5 and 2.0 ounces using a 200-watt CFL lamp as long as everything else about the grow runs smoothly. Growers who upgrade their lighting to 1,000-watt HPS lamps can expect a more impressive 9.0 to 18 ounces combined yield from all of their plants.
How to Maximize Light Use to Improve Yields
Just buying a more powerful grow light won’t necessarily be enough to bump up your yields. If you’ve got too many plants beneath the lamp, they’ll still be competing for limited resources and you might not come as close to meeting your goals. The plants in a more crowded setup won’t have proper airflow, which will make pests and diseases more likely to pass between them, and the leaves and colas close to the bottom won’t get as much light.
As a novice grower, your best solution is to cut back on the number of plants you have in your grow room. If you’ve already got the basics down pat, you could try learning some advanced trimming techniques like topping, fimming, or scrogging to get your plants to branch out more so they’ll have better light access. Some growers also lollipop plants grown in crowded conditions to improve airflow.
How to Maximize Light Use to Improve Yields
Just buying a more powerful grow light won’t necessarily be enough to bump up your yields. If you’ve got too many plants beneath the lamp, they’ll still be competing for limited resources and you might not come as close to meeting your goals. The plants in a more crowded setup won’t have proper airflow, which will make pests and diseases more likely to pass between them, and the leaves and colas close to the bottom won’t get as much light.
As a novice grower, your best solution is to cut back on the number of plants you have in your grow room. If you’ve already got the basics down pat, you could try learning some advanced trimming techniques like topping, fimming, or scrogging to get your plants to branch out more so they’ll have better light access. Some growers also lollipop plants grown in crowded conditions to improve airflow.
Growing Hydroponically Can Increase Yields
While setting up an indoor hydroponic system costs more than just buying a light and starting a container-based grow op, it can increase yields by up to 20 percent. If you want to switch to hydroponic growing to increase your yields, keep in mind that you’ll have very little room for error. Hydroponic systems require not just a more substantial initial investment, but also more ongoing monitoring and care.
To keep everything on track, you’ll need to monitor both pH and TDS levels in your nutrient solutions. Even a small mistake can have a devastating effect on hydroponically grown plants because their roots sit directly in the water, not in the soil, which means that high salt levels or an extreme pH change will impact them almost instantly. If all goes well, though, you can expect to harvest up to 1.2 grams per watt in an indoor hydroponic grow.
What’s the Maximum Outdoor Yield?
If you’re planning to grow marijuana outdoors, you have even more variables to contend with and some of them will be completely beyond your control. While it’s true that one large outdoor plant can yield up to a pound of weed, or more, you’ll need to get everything just right to achieve this lofty goal.
Outdoor plants need at least six feet of space, plenty of water, all the right nutrients, and adequate protection from pests and diseases. You’ll also want to buy high-quality recreational or medical marijuana seeds to ensure that your plants have good genetics. All other things equal, a plant with poor genetics will never produce as well as one that’s been bred for high yields.
Tips for Increasing Yields Outdoors
The key to pulling down a great yield in an outdoor marijuana garden is to make sure your plants have everything they need to grow and thrive. Unless you’re growing in a greenhouse with supplemental lighting, you won’t be able to control light levels. That said, you can control all kinds of other factors. Try these tips for increasing yields:
- Use pots that are at least 15 gal in size.
- Adjust your feeding schedule according to what strains you’re growing.
- Try out some advanced pruning techniques to increase cola formation.
- Make sure your plants are getting plenty of water.
- Improve soil drainage to reduce problems with root rot and other diseases.
- Keep a careful eye on your plants to make sure you catch pest and disease problems early.
- Buy seeds that will grow into high-yielding strains.
- Invest in decent soil that’s modified to accommodate cannabis growth.
- Don’t go overboard with nutrients and soil amendments, which can cause nute burn.
- Grow from seed instead of using clones.
Keep in mind that while some high-stress training techniques such as topping, fimming, and stem mutilation can increase your yields, they also come with some risks. If you get them wrong, you could stunt your plants’ growth, or even kill them. Before taking drastic measures, make sure you’ve got the basics down and your plants are healthy enough to withstand heavy pruning.
Increasing Yearly Yields With Autoflowers
If you live in a warm climate or have a small grow room, you might want to consider another approach to increasing your overall yields. You can purchase autoflower seeds that will produce smokable marijuana in a shorter period.
Each plant will produce less bud, with regular autoflowers usually averaging between 10 and 50 grams per plant and high-yield varieties averaging between 50 and 250 grams. However, you’ll be able to harvest your crop in just 60 to 90 days, which means that with the right planting schedule, you can pull down an almost continuous crop of high-quality marijuana.
The best part is, unlike photoperiod plants, autoflowers don’t need to be switched over to a different lighting schedule to induce flowering. If you grow them indoors, you can keep all of your autoflowers in the same room or tent, even if you’re using techniques like succession planting to spread out your harvest.
Best High-Yield Strains
- Critical Mass
- Blue Dream
- Gorilla Glue #4
- Big Bud
- Girl Scout Cookies Extreme
These five strains produce massive colas that can net you a much larger harvest, but they won’t make up for poor growing conditions. Make sure you take care of your plants, keep an eye out for pests, diseases, and nutrient deficiencies or toxicity, and invest in high-quality soil. No matter what type of pot you want to grow, providing your plants with all their basic needs will increase vegetative growth and induce the formation of larger colas.
Let’s Get Growing
Are you ready to start growing marijuana for the first time or honing your skills to improve your yields? Browse the seed selection at Kind Seed Co to learn about different strains and read up on basic and advanced growing techniques. Just like a penny saved is a penny earned, every bit of information you can pick up could help you make improvements that will create healthier plants and higher yields.
