Using Space Wisely in a Small Grow Room

The very first step to prepping a small grow room is to be realistic. If you’re growing in a small location, especially in a closet or other micro setup, be reasonable in your expectations and accept that you will have to choose between the number of plants you want to grow, and how large you’d like them to be. You can try for a good in-between, but you can’t have both. Controlling your pot plants and the way in which they grow is very important with limited space.

Utilizing methods like the ‘sea of green’ method can help grower get the most out of a small grow room.

If you go with smaller plants, you can plant more of them and harvest them sooner as a result but the yields will be much smaller for each individual plant. Larger plants will fill up your grow space faster, they will take longer to mature and although the individual yield per plant will be higher, the cumulative yield may actually be smaller, especially when you consider harvest time.

One of the most popular methods for a small grow room is called the sea of green or SoG method, not to be confused with the very similar derivative screen of green or ScroG. The SoG method centers on the principle of growing a large number of small, quickly maturing plants. Some growers use the SoG method to stack multiple layers of growing plants, this maximizing their grow space even further.

With the SoG method, seedlings may be as thickly planted as 4 per square foot, and they will develop a dense canopy that absorbs most of the light. Growing with the SoG focuses on developing the top of the cannabis plant, or what is called the main cola. You’ll want to encourage your plants to stay small and bushy so they can support a heavy cola. If you have limited space, a good closet grow box may come in handy in order to get the most out of your space.

Grow Lights and Small Grow Rooms

One of the best options for those with a small grow room is a closet grow box.

Make the most of your light, especially grow lights, in your small grow room, too. Every lumen counts with cannabis, so use reflectors to keep that light and consider lining the walls and floor as well.

In addition to how you grow in your limited space, what you grow is equally as important, if not even moreso. You’ll want to choose your strain carefully, staying away from pure sativa breeds and dominant crossbreeds, and favoring indica breeds instead. The reason for this is simple: sativa strains originate in equatorial and more tropical regions, so they love to grow tall, whereas indica strains originated further north and in higher altitudes. It’s likely that a sativa won’t fit in your small grow room, but a couple of dense, compact little indica plants will. Another added bonus of growing indica strains is that they tend to mature faster than sativa.

Once you’ve settled on a strain and started growing, you can encourage your plants to stay short with an easy trick: don’t make them stretch to reach the light. The closer you can comfortably keep the lights, the less your plants will feel the need to grow up to reach them. However, use some common sense and make sure the light isn’t too close, as this can be harmful to the plants.