It doesn’t matter if you are an indoor marijuana grower or an outdoor cannabis grower. Increasing Cannabis Yields is one of the most important considerations for a hard-working cannabis grower. No matter what cannabis strain you happen to be growing you are looking for a huge yield of cannabis flowers for the least amount of time and energy spent on your plants.
We have already covered Trimming your cannabis and Drying, Curing and Harvesting your buds so in this article we will teach you how to get the maximum harvest possible from any of our cannabis seeds strains.
Cannabis Plant Genetics Will Always be King
First, we would like to point out that no matter what you do externally to your plants, nothing a grower can ever do can trump plant genetics. Cannabis genetics will have the biggest effect on the plant’s final, yield, taste, and ultimately strength of the THC and CBD is the cannabis plant. If you happen to be a first-time marijuana grower and are looking for high yielding cannabis strain seeds, at the end of the article we will suggest some of our top yielding strains if you are looking for seed.
Start by Manipulating how the Cannabis Plants grow
Manipulating the plant with Low Stress Training is the fastest, safest and easiest way to get more cannabis buds. The idea to produce more buds on your plant using this method is to train your plant. To do this you will need to bend and twist the plant until you can create a flat even canopy under the lights.
We think this is the best way to increase cannabis yields, the reason being that, it is free. It also only requires a bit of extra work from the grower. You don’t have to change anything in your grow as well.
We have an article on Low Stress Training so we will only provide a brief overview of this method. This method is mostly referred to as LST for short. It involves a way that you don’t have to do any physical damage to your plants.
Your goal with this method of growing is to create a plant that is very short, but when you look at it from above it is very wide and flat. The flat top receives more light from your grow lights. The best time to do this type of training is when the plant is young as it will be easier to bend and twist into place.
More Light Equals Increase Cannabis Yields
When growers ask us how to get the biggest, fattest cannabis buds possible we always recommend more lighting. Cannabis is an intense high light loving plant. For the most part marijuana crops just can’t get enough light especially indoors. In other words, light is the number one nutrient that your plant needs to create increase cannabis yields.
Once you have finished germinating your cannabis seeds, it is very important to make sure your plant is getting all the light that it needs to start growing strong. One simple way to tell if your cannabis plants are getting enough light during vegetative growth, is to watch how much the plant is stretching. If the plant isn’t getting enough light it will tend to stretch up to your lighting and possibly fall over. As soon at the cannabis seeds leave the soil make sure the seedling is getting its proper light.
If you see that the plant is becoming spindly in the vegetative growth stage this is also another clue that the cannabis plant is requiring more lighting.
Flowering Lighting
When the cannabis plant starts to flower is when they need the most amount of lighting to increase cannabis yields. High intensity lighting is what drives the growth of larger buds. Anything that you can do once your plant starts to flower will have a direct impact on cannabis flowering sites. Keep the lighting as close to the tops of the plants as you can, this will increase light. Be careful when keeping the light close as you don’t want to burn the tops of the plants.
Increasing CO2 in the Grow Room
Once a grower is able to max out the lighting in the grow room, they can also increase CO2 levels as a larger yield bonus. The grower can think of CO2 as another plant nutrient that can once again create larger cannabis yields. CO2 can increase the amount of light that the plant can absorb helping them to grow faster, and larger.
Keep Humidity and Temperature under Control
Keeping your grow rooms temperature under control is key to increase cannabis yield. Doing so will also increase your plants potency. When your temperatures are too high or too low, the plant will not grow as well as when the grow room temperature is kept under control. When growing cannabis, the best temperature to keep yield and potency at the maximum potential should be around 71F (22C) to about 75F (24C).
This is the best temperature to grow cannabis at if you are not suppling CO2 in your grow room. If you are suppling CO2 to your growing space, you can increase these temperatures to buy a few degrees.
If temperatures are not controlled in the grow room the weed plants will start to do something in flowering called “Fox Tailing”. The bud sites will start to stretch out long and spinally and not be compact, and thereby lowing your overall cannabis harvest.
In extreme cases of heat the tops of the plants may even burn, this will have a very serious effect on your final yields as the largest yielding buds are located at the top of the plant.
The Right Nutrients for the Increase Cannabis Yield
When we discuss the right nutrients, you will notice that we don’t say “more nutrients”. This is because more nutrients do not directly increase cannabis yield. Likewise, the right nutrients can have a big effect on cannabis harvest. You can check out our article on Organic Marijuana Fertilizer to learn more about how to use organic fertilizers on cannabis plants.
Many cannabis growers think that more nutrients equal more harvest. However, this is not the case at all, as plants need different nutrients at different times of growth. Giving the plant what they need and more importantly how much they need is a key driver to be able to increase cannabis yields.
Often new growers will give their plants too much fertilizers in flowering and burn the plant or create nutrient lockout that will limit what nutrients the plant can absorb. When both of these things happen during the flowering time in the cannabis plants life, it can slow the growth of the plant down. When this happens, it will have a direct effect on the plant’s overall growth.
We have always found it better to give the plant a little less nutrient instead of a little more. Using organic nutrients will not burn your plants, and will slowly provide them with the amount of food they need to create the largest harvest possible.
Remember you are feeding the soil, and not feeding the plant. Keeping the soil healthy is very important to larger bud harvest.
Harvesting for the Highest Cannabis Yields
Harvesting your plants to early will reduce yields, and not increase cannabis yields. There is a window of time that you can harvest your plants, for the highest yield. Giving the plant time to “bulk up” is very important to increasing cannabis yields. In the final 2 weeks before you harvest your plants, they will grow larger buds and put on extra weight.
If you do not wait for this to happen you will be losing out on harvest yield. A grower will never want to harvest a plant before it’s time. We have seen plants gain over 25% extra yield by giving the plant time to fully mature.
One final Note
While all these things can help you bulk up your final harvest, no matter what you do, you can never get a larger yield with poor genetics. Here are some cannabis seeds strains that we sell that will have the largest yields:
