How to Grow medicinal plants Indoors: An Ultimate Guide 2020

If you’re reading this, that means you’re ready to start growing your own medicine, and that's huge! Once you get the hang of growing you'll hardly ever need to purchase your own medicinal plants (or any plants, really) ever again.

But with great power comes great responsibility, so before we get started take a breath because we're diving deep into plant growing.

By deep we mean deep. Mediums, nutrients, temperatures, pest control, lighting schedules and much more. Think you're up for you?

Trust us, you're more than capable of growing medicinal plants(or medicinal plants, whichever you prefer to call it). All you need is a little guidance and you're on your way to becoming the grower you always knew you could be, getting big yields in no time.

If you need to know everything you need to know about growing medicinal plants, how to harvest it, and how to keep a good amount on hand all year long, this is the guide's your key to unlocking big time yields.

Step 1: Choose the Perfect medicinal plants Grow Room or space

You don’t need a particularly large growing/cultivating space. A typical grow room for a small-scale grower is a small tent, cabinet, or designated area in a spare room. If you’re stuck for room, even an unused corner of the house is sufficient! Here are a few helpful tips to get started.

1 – Begin Growing from a Small Plot & Adjust as Necessary

By “small,” we mean nothing more than a few plants at most. You can start with just one or two plants. There is an inevitable learning curve involved with growing medicinal plants indoors. As such, you are bound to make some mistakes. The fewer plants you have, the fewer plants you’ll waste.

Even veteran medicinal plants growers run into mistakes and unexpected mishaps with almost every batch they produce. Therefore, it is possible to endure a completely failed grow on your very first attempt. In this case, it hurts a lot less when you ‘lose’ a plant or two.

It shouldn’t take long to get the hang of things and start producing some beautiful, flowering medicinal plants. At this stage, you’ll need to make room as your medicinal plants proliferates. From the first signs of flowering, you can expect a plant to double or triple in size by harvest time.

Also, make sure that you leave enough space to work in!

I believe grow tents are the best grow space for new medicinal plants growers. Eco farm grow tent are designed to keep things simple for hobbyist medicinal plants growers. As convenient as grow tents are, they’re not designed for huge medicinal plants grow operations! But for someone who wants 1-5 ounces/month, a grow tent may be the best way to go!

Pros of using grow tent

Relatively Cheap – Prices are around $70-150 for your average indoor grow tent. Setting up a grow space to have all the same characteristics (reflective walls, air-tight vents, light proof, a waterproof tray at the bottom to catch spilled water, etc.) can easily cost the same amount or more. Plus it’s difficult to DIY a space so that it works as well as a grow tent (which has been designed for this purpose) and it will often take more time, planning and effort than simply buying a pre-made tent.

Easy & Quick to Set Up – Assembling your grow tent and getting completely set up to start growing will take about an afternoon and can be done by just about anyone (full instructions below). Overall, the work of setting up a grow tent reminds me of putting together an old-fashioned camping tent, only medicinal plants comes out of it a few months later!

Stealth – A grow tent prevents smells and light from escaping the tent when set up properly, and can be tucked away in a big closet or the corner of a room without necessarily drawing a whole lot of attention.
Perpetual Harvest – Grow tents work very well if you want to keep two separate grow spaces, for example if you wanted a separate vegetative and flowering chamber for a perpetual harvest. Grow tents create a completely self-enclosed environment that can be managed separately.

Helps Prevent Bugs – The intake holes of most grow tents are covered with mesh, which allow air to pass but stops many insects. This helps prevent incidental bugs like spiders or carpenter beetles from getting to your plants. A grow tent with strong grow lights is also a pretty hot and inhospitable environment for many medicinal plants pests!

Keeps Buds Clean – In addition to preventing bugs from getting on your plants, the mesh intake holes help keep out dust and impurities. The sticky trichomes on medicinal plants buds are surprisingly good at holding on to fibers, animal hair and anything that floats by. A surprising amount of random debris can get onto your buds even if you keep your grow room pristine. A grow tent helps keep buds clean and looking good!

2 – A Clean Space is One of the Most Important Things to Remember

Make sure your space is easily sanitized; cleanliness is important when growing indoors, so easy-to-clean surfaces are a must. Carpeting, drapes, and raw wood are all difficult to clean, so avoid these materials if possible.

3 – Keep Your Grow Space as “Light-Sealed” as Possible

Another crucial criterion for a grow room is that it be light-tight. Light leaks during dark periods will confuse your plants and can cause them to produce male flowers.

4 – Successful Indoor Growing Requires the Following Features

Choose a secure place safe from any “unwanted visitors.” It keeps your plants away from animal and human invaders. It also enables you to monitor them regularly.

Temperature and humidity concerns will always remain an issue. Try and select a spot that is well sealed off from fresh air from outdoors.

Convenience is just as important as anything else. Therefore, make sure your spot is safe, and easily accessible at any time, day or night.

Step 2:  Choose Your Grow Lights

LED Grow Lights

Short for light-emitting diode,  LED Grow light For indoor plants  are simple forms of light with an efficient energy signature. Due to how the light is generated within an LED, they use a meager amount of electricity for the same amount of light compared to other sources.

However, LEDs have a pricing problem. The inexpensive ones are the type you don’t want. The lights you need for cultivating medicinal plants are costly.

If you try and use the cheap, Christmas-style lights, your medicinal plants harvest is going to be smaller than the LED’s carbon footprint. If you want to invest in your bud correctly, prepare to spend a substantial amount of money.

This ensures you don’t overheat your grow room. Medicinal plants plants like a warm environment. However, excessive heat damages them, and may also cause a fire in your grow room.

Led grow lights can also distribute a fuller spectrum of light due to how the light is created through electroluminescence. This can result in a better, higher quality yield from your bud.

This benefit is somewhat counteracted by the fact that the average LED light board is quite low powered. As a result, you either require multiple boards or a huge, single one. Also, you only get the best results with LEDs that offer a full spectrum of light.

HID Grow Lights

HID grow lights, short for High-Intensity Discharge, are large light bulbs that emit a tremendous amount of heat and light. They usually require a full exhaust fan to remove the excess heat, and electricity consumption is enormous. Also, they generally need a decent amount of time and space to set up a properly working system.

Fluorescent Grow Lights

The two types of fluorescent lights are T5 and CFLs. The former is long and narrow, while the latter are twisted into the shape. They have cool, warm, or full-spectrum colors. Growers sometimes use them because they are cheap to buy, and have a low energy consumption which saves money on energy bills. They also provide a pleasant color for an indoor growing site.

Furthermore, fluorescent lights don’t need the investment of an additional setup like with HID. You also don’t need to include a particular ventilation system to keep the room’s temperature down.

However, fluorescent lighting provides lower yields than its rivals. You must also position them close to your plants to derive any benefit. This means you can use them in a small room, but they are ineffective if you plan to grow several plants.

Step 3: Fresh Air is the Lifeblood of Healthy Medicinal Plants

Make sure you have consistent airflow across your entire plot. Depending on the size of your grow room, you can achieve this easily. All you need is a portable fan on one side of the space, and an exhaust fan on the other side facing the ceiling.

Step 4: Develop a Control System and Monitor the Growing Process

Once you have selected your lights and climate control equipment, you’ll want to automate their functions. While there are sophisticated (and expensive) units available that control lights, temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels, the beginner will generally need a simple 24 hour timer for the light and an adjustable thermostat switch for the exhaust fan.

The timing of the light/dark cycle is very important when growing medicinal plants; generally you will have your lights on for 18 hours per 24 hour period while the plants are in vegetative growth, then switch to 12 hours of light per 24 hour period when you want them to bloom. You need your lights to turn on and off at the same times every day or you risk stressing your plants, so a timer is essential. You can use a timer for your exhaust fan as well, but spending a few extra dollars on a thermostat switch is a much better option.

Step 5: Be an Artist! [And Choose a medicinal plants“Grow Medium”…]

Once you have an idea of the strain you want to grow and where you want to grow it, now comes the stage of preparation that's probably the most important part: choosing the medium you want to grow in.

Your medium will determine how many nutrients you use, what type of nutrients you'll use, how you feed your plants, and how challenging correcting issues will be.

There are three popular grow mediums to choose from with their own advantages and disadvantages, so be sure you make the right decision before growing those plants:

Soil is the perfect all-purpose medium. Most soil doesn't need much supplemental nutrition because it's already loaded with nutrients. Heck, if you mix up your own super soil you can even eliminate around 90% of supplemental nutrition and just use water for the majority of a plant's life.

Hydroponics is an all-water soil-less way of growing medium. It's a lot less messy than dirt, and if you run in to nutrient problems they're much easier and faster to fix than soil problems. Hydroponic grown plants even take less time than soil plants to harvest.

Coco is the perfect middle ground between hydroponic and soil mediums. Though there's no nutritional value to coco like with soil the nutrition it receives tends to be held in longer than hydroponic applications. That means you won't have to run such a heavy flow of water like you would in hydro, yet you can assure your plants are getting nutrition from the very beginning instead of trusting soil has enough to carry you through to flowering.

Step 6:Starting with Seeds

Feminized seeds – When you’re starting out, we recommend that you buy feminized seeds. Feminized medicinal plants seeds are chemically treated so that they grow to become females. This means you don’t have to worry so much about sexing your plants and throwing out the males. Later on, when you may be interested in breeding your own new strains, you’ll want regular seeds.

Auto-flowering medicinal plants seed - strains have been around for some time now and are a great choice for indoor growing. Auto-flowering seeds are not light dependent. They will start flowering after a certain amount of time, regardless of how much light you give them. They tend to be smaller and faster than regular strains, and you can have vegging and flowering plants all together in a single grow space.

Conclusion

As you gain experience and knowledge, you will alter your grow room and equipment to better fit your particular environment, growing techniques, and the specific strains you grow, but this article will give you a solid foundation of knowledge to get started on the right foot.

And remember, growing medicinal plants is a labor of love, so spend a lot of time with your plants and have fun!

Also in Indoor Growing Guides