How are Indoor Cannabis and Outdoor Cannabis Different?
By Lucas Kleven, shift lead at Hashtag Everett
If you start to draw comparisons between humans and plants, it’s funny how many you can find. You’ve got plants that love the sun, don’t like being touched, and succeed despite the odds, but no matter what, their growth is heavily influenced by their environment.
Today, we’re here to shed some natural light on the differences between cannabis grown outdoors in the sun and cannabis grown indoors under strict supervision.
But first: definitions and a caveat:
Indoor cannabis is generally grown in a warehouse setting or another form of artificial set-up, lining plants up one-by-one, with aisles and rows organizing plants by strain or any other factor.
Meanwhile, outdoor cannabis is grown in a large garden or field outside where it can receive natural sunlight and the benefits of an incredibly varied light spectrum.
And for our caveat: greenhouses. They almost work as an in-between for indoor and outdoor grown marijuana, receiving the benefits of both ways to grow, but because they receive natural sunlight like outdoor cannabis does, it is simplest to categorize greenhouse-grown cannabis as outdoor.
Now that we’re all up to speed, let’s move on to understanding the benefits of these growing methods.
What’s special about outdoor cannabis?
Photo by Lazy Bee Gardens.
Like any other plant, cannabis has figured out exactly how best to utilize any sunlight it receives and benefits greatly from receiving natural sunlight. By being allowed to grow naturally and develop their root systems further and deeper into the soil, these plants can thrive, potentially growing more buds.
Greenhouses push this to the next level by better protecting the cannabis plant from pests, compared to purely outdoor grown, and allowing some level of control over heat, humidity, and sunlight by shading the plant during the heat of the day or at other key times to help control these factors.
Outdoor grown cannabis benefits consumers with its rich and diverse terpene profiles. The spectrum of natural light is incredibly hard to replicate indoors, which means outdoor cannabis will have a more unique, nuanced flavor and effect. As well, cannabis grown outdoors or in a greenhouse is a less expensive process, leading to products with lower and fairer prices since there are fewer overhead costs on the farm’s side.
For growers, outdoor cannabis is given more space to allow the plant itself to be more hardy, and they impact the environment less since they need significantly less electricity to run their farm. Growing outdoors allows for more crops and more yields, with the downside of only being able to grow during certain seasons.
What’s unique about indoor cannabis?
Taking these plants indoors changes the game up significantly. By growing indoors, farms are able to take control of many factors, allowing them to grow cannabis using different methods without concern for many of these outside factors. Indoor grows can measure out the nutrients added to the soil and water given to the plants, and they can keep track of these metrics by using machines that can detect parameters in the soil.
Indoor cannabis benefits from these specificities greatly. Growers are able to provide consistent products due to conditions being so much easier to replicate in these controlled environments. By providing more carbon dioxide to soil than is found naturally occurring outdoors, growers have also been able to significantly increase THC levels in their cannabis plants when growing indoors.
Growers are also able to experiment more with the grow methods and styles when they are indoors. We’re seeing more and more farms integrating a hydroponic or aeroponic grow style for their plants. With hydroponics, the farms avoid soil and will use a water-based nutrient mixture instead, whereas aeroponic grows suspend the plants and roots in the air, misting them with water and nutrients. Both of these methods come with benefits to the plant, environment, and economy of the farm.
Which is better, outdoor or indoor cannabis?
Now that we’ve brought all the information to the table, compared and contrasted the differences and benefits of both growing styles, we can clearly see …
that each method has their own benefits and reasons why you might choose one over the other!
Indoor and outdoor cannabis both have unique benefits to the user and the grower, and it’s up to the individual to decide which one is their go-to.
Now that your knowledge banks have been updated, check out your favorite brands’ growing methods either by asking your budtender or looking to see if they have a website or social media presence.
Find out who grows outdoors or indoors, and see if you’ve naturally picked a favorite method of growing!
If you’re looking for some more options for at-home studying, we recommend
Lazy Bee Gardens, Lish or Cannasol for an outdoor greenhouse grow,
Torus who grow hydroponically, or
Redbird for the aeroponics — and you can learn more about hydroponics and aeroponics here.
See if you can feel the difference and if you find a new favorite!