Cultivation Corner with Olivia Sobelman: Growing cannabis indoor vs outdoor

You can grow one of a million different ways outdoors. You can throw seeds at the ground and come back four months later to see if anything came of it, you can meticulously manicure and tend to your plants in a way that makes your significant other a little jealous, and you can find some method in between.

There are significant differences between outdoor and indoor gardening, but ultimately they are more similar than they are different. Keep some of these differences in mind when you are tending to your outdoor plants this season and if you are simply wondering whether it is something you want to try in seasons to come. If you want to maximize your plants’ potential outdoors, there are a few things that are absolutely worth doing and a few tips on how to do it.

Pruning Outdoors Vs Indoors

Indoors you will have light coming from above the plant canopy which means that the more you can prune up the bottoms of your plants, the more energy your plant will send to produce larger buds up top. There is more to it, but that’s the basic principle behind the technique. Removing buds and plant material that will get shaded by the canopy will prevent airy and unusable buds from forming on the undergrowth. The canopy should really be about 8-12 inches thick on the tops of your plants and bare completely underneath it to maximize yields and optimize light penetration to your bud sites.

Outdoors you can apply the same technique for the same reasons, but with some important differences in application.

The sun moves differently than our indoor lighting, it will arc across the sky and your plants will receive light on all sides from top to bottom throughout the course of the day and even the entire season as the sun rotates on its axis. In order to compensate for the differences between the indoor and outdoor light source and movement, you will need to prune up the inside of your plant and move outwards. The center of your plant should be bare and the ends of every branch should move outwards to make a canopy that has foliage all the way around.

It is for this reason that plants are usually grown with about 10ft of space from plant to plant, so that one plant does not shade another.

Pest Management Outdoors Vs Indoors

Indoors is a fairly closed environment that gives more control to the grower. The biggest difference between outdoors and indoors as far as bugs are concerned is that being indoors also provides a safe place for bugs to live. In the perfect environment that you create to perfectly nurture your plants, you also create a perfect environment free from rain, freeze, overheating, and predatory insects.

A strict regimen of preventative pest control is recommended indoors and some of the more experienced or larger scale growers will use what is referred to as IMP (Integrated Pest Management) a very fancy acronym for using multiple varieties of pesticide on a rotating schedule to prevent bugs from building up a resistance to any one in particular.

Any oil-based pesticides/fungicides should only be used up until week 3-4 of Flower, any longer and you will run the risk of having residue, burning, etc. You can switch to other types of pest control that are safe up until harvest, there are numerous on the market, just ask your local store for their best recommendation.

Outdoor bugs are intense. However, nature creates its own ecosystem, which means you aren’t up against every bug in the wild, simply the ones that out-eat the others. You’ll see ladybugs start to flock to a plant with Spider Mites and you’ll see bats flock to an area with grasshoppers, moths, and beetles. Pests can be enormous issues in any environment, but they are not without their natural predators outside. Keeping up with the large pests like caterpillars, rabbits, moles, and deer are more important than the small ones like mites and aphids. Raised beds or above-ground pots are good deterrents from rabbits, fencing or a dog is a good deterrent for deer, and a well-timed spray is effective against moths. Spraying for moths early on is incredibly important, the best time to spray for them is when you begin to see bud sites forming on your plant. These small sites are where the moths will lay their eggs. As the bud grows it forms around the egg, and when the caterpillar hatches it will eat your bud from the inside out causing a lot of damage later on in the season.

Environment Outdoors Vs Indoors

One of the final factors that I’ll touch on is the environment of each locale of growing. However self-explanatory these differences may seem, they are always worth noting.

Indoor quality should be better than outdoor quality, at least in theory, though its fairly commonplace. It’s not a contest of ego or grower capability, it simply has everything to do with the growing environment. Indoors can be manipulated in nearly every way to simulate the perfect home for your flowering plants. A person living in an air-conditioned home with the perfect balance of nutrition and support should theoretically be in a better condition to thrive than a person living outdoors under the elements.

Indoors and even in some greenhouses you can monitor your room temp to a perfect temperature, you can dial back your humidity, you can place oscillating fans every 4 feet for precise airflow to help mitigate powdery mildew and hot spots, you can keep rain from falling on your buds late in the season. Set up correctly for it, you can even drain your water out of the bottoms of your plants for an effective flush at the end of the bloom phase. Indoors you can set your light timer to anything you want, you can trick your plant into thinking the sun never sets. You can plunge it into total darkness for days. The control is what can make indoor growing exceptional.

Outdoor Environments are predictable up to a certain point. You can reference the Farmers Almanac to track a lot of the temperatures and the daylight hours from previous years. The end of the season does tend to sneak up on even the seasoned grower, making it hard to effectively time out a flush period and for the plants to run their full cycle. If it is a long flowering strain, it may not have a chance to finish its full flowering phase which ultimately affects quality and yield. However the sun is 306,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts. Truly an incomprehensible amount. If you are trying to grow with the full potential of light and see what these strains really are capable of without the limitations of your electrical output, this is the season for you.

Wind can do some damage to plants, but with the proper support you can prevent any severe damage and it will also aid in airflow and help mitigate any mold issues as well as strengthen your stalks.

There is a time and a place for both indoor and outdoor growing, it took me years to realize that I could do both, as silly as that sounds now to admit. I just assumed that one was harder than the other, that I wasn’t equipped with the skill set to adapt one style to another, and I didn’t want to suffer from a quality difference between the two. They are a world apart in a lot of ways, but the plant is the same, ultimately. They still need the same balance of nutrients, and have the same growing habits, you just have to do a little homework or get a walk-through from a good grow shop on the ins and outs as you go along.

August marks the time in the Outdoor Season when your plants should be stretching a lot. Doubling, if not more, in size. Make sure to keep an eye on the weather and support your plants with some bamboo when it looks like you’re going to see some heavy winds coming up and you’ll need to start thinking on which bloom nutrients and bloom-boosting nutrients you want to administer as your soils start running out of their amendments and your plants needs to start changing to produce buds. Have an amazing season and stay tuned for harvest tips and the stages of Curing for your Harvest!