How long does it take to grow a cannabis plant? It depends on whether you are growing cannabis indoors or outdoors. You can do either one. But each will have it’s own time period.
How long does it take weed to grow Outdoors?
The time it takes to grow weed outdoors is dependent on the location where you are growing. This is because you are relying on the season and the weather to change.
The outdoor season typically lasts from May to October, though this can vary depending on the region and local climate.
If you are in the Midwest, United States, it is very common to plant seeds right around the Mother’s day holiday. But you can start later, if you like.
The flowering period usually begins in late August and runs through September and into October.
After harvesting, you will need to dry your cannabis, and then trim it.
How long does it take weed to grow Indoors?
The difference between indoor and outdoor is that you can control the season. You can control “what time of year” it is inside. You do this by controlling the light cycles, which mimic the relative outdoor seasons.
When growing indoors, it will take you at least four months from seedling or clone until you have smokeable herb, and that is rushing it.
Because if you allot 8 weeks for your veg, and 8 weeks for flowering, you will still need to dry/cure and trim your herb. The drying process will take 1 to 2 weeks. Therefore, you will need 4 ½ months, minimum.
If run a shorter veg, you can trim a few weeks off of the total, but you will end up with smaller plants.
Of course, you may want to increase the total time to six months, in order to give you a longer veg period, and therefore a larger plant to be flowered.
Is it quicker to grow weed indoors or outdoors?
Indoors. You can go through the entire life cycle of cannabis much quicker when growing indoors than you can outdoors.
Because you can control the length of the vegetative stage indoors, you can choose how short you want the first half of the plant’s life cycle to be. Whereas when you grow outdoors, you can’t control when the seasons change.
Indoors, you can cut your veg cycle down to just a couple weeks and then switch to the 12/12 light cycle. This will substantially shave off time, and this will allow you to get in more “flips” per year.
If you are interested in reading more about veg strategy, we wrote this article about how long to veg before flipping. In that article, we discuss the differences in strategy when the objective is large yields per plant, versus the objective of maximum yields measured annually. The latter strategy is not concerned with yielding a lot per plant but instead seeks to maximize the number of flips/cycles/harvests per year.
Regardless of your particular veg strategy, it is generally quicker to grow weed indoors because you can take a clone, get it rooted in about a week, veg it for 2 to 4 weeks, and then flower it within 9 weeks.