by Nebula Haze

“I need to harvest weed as soon as possible. What’s the fastest growth method? What can I do to speed up the time to harvest?”

Learn More: Why are my cannabis buds taking so long to mature?

How to Speed Up Cannabis Harvest Time

Several readers have written in to ask about speeding up the time to harvest. So, how long does it actually take to grow marijuana?

Short Answer: From Day 1 of your marijuana plant’s life to a smokable harvest, you are looking at a wide window ranging between 2.5 – 6 months.

Many factors will affect the total time, but the average grow takes 3-4 months. Learn more about the marijuana growth timeline.

Where can I buy seeds?

7 Tactics To Get To Harvest As Quickly As Possible

Faster is not always better, but there are ways that you can speed up the time from cannabis seedling to harvest without sacrificing quality, potency, or yields.

So today I’d like to share a short guide on how you can reduce the time to a marijuana harvest, and how you can reduce the amount of time you actually spend tending your plants, while still getting outstanding results.

If you’re serious about getting big cannabis yields as quickly as possible, then these tactics will get you there the right way. Let’s get to it.

1.) Longer Nights in the Flowering Stage

With photoperiod (regular) strains, you can manipulate the light schedule in the flowering stage to get buds to mature faster. Although most plants will start flowering when they get less than 13 or 14 hours of light a day (that’s when plants usually start flowering outdoors), it can take them a long time to “finish” and be ready to harvest with days that long. Some strains won’t make buds while getting that much light a day.

Because of that, it’s typically recommended to give 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark each day to get a cannabis plant to start flowering. Most strains finish maturing about 7-12 weeks after the switch to 12/12.

Growers typically put grow lights on a timer to give a consistent light schedule every day

Some Sativa and Haze strains are from the equator, and they may take a long time for buds to “finish” under a 12/12 light schedule. In that case, a grower can give a plant longer “nights” to cause the plant to finish flowering faster. In fact, increasing the number of daily dark hours can get almost any strain to finish flowering faster.

Give plants only 10 or 11 hours of light a day to get buds to mature faster

When the days are that short, the plant “thinks” winter is coming quickly and so tries to finish maturing buds as quickly as possible.

One downside is that a shorter flowering stage with less hours of light each day mean that buds get less time to fatten and you will end up with smaller yields. Therefore it’s not recommended to try to get a plant to finish flowering in less than 8 weeks, as you’ll end up with very small yields. This technique is best used if you have a plant that’s been flowering for 2-3 months and doesn’t look like it plans on stopping any time soon.

This technique reduces yields. ​The less light you give your plant overall during its life, and especially in the flowering stage, the less your yields will be in general. A strain that takes longer to finish flowering usually produces bigger yields than a short-flowering strain because it gets so many extra light-hours where it’s making energy and fattening buds.

On a similar note, many auto-flowering strains get great yields considering plants usually go from seed to harvest in under 3 months. What contributes to bigger yields is they get 18 hours/light a day during their entire flowering period (compared to only 12 a day for regular plants). This gives the plant more light each day to produce buds, resulting in bigger yields.

2.) Choose A Quick-Finishing Strain of Marijuana (get an “auto-flowering” strain for absolute fastest harvest)

As you probably know, the life cycle for all marijuana plants is separated into two parts: the vegetative stage and the flowering stage.

Plants grow only leaves and stems in the vegetative stage. Plants grow buds in the flowering stage

The vegetative stage can be shortened by getting plants to grow faster when young. Yet the length of the flowering stage (the time between when flowers first start forming and when the buds are ready to harvest) is strain-specific.

That means that once you’ve started flowering a specific strain, there aren’t a lot of options to speed things up during the flowering stage besides giving plants longer nights, which we just mentioned.

Many hybrids naturally have very short flowering periods of only 6-8 weeks. These strains are sometimes listed as “Fast” or “Express”, or both. Some examples of cannabis buds that are typically ready to harvest in less than 8 weeks of flowering are:

• Candy Kush Express Fast Version by Royal Queen Seeds
• Anesthesia by Pyramid Seeds
• Pineapple Express #2 by G13 Labs

Hazes and Sativas often take much longer. For example, a haze strain (like Sterling Haze from Nirvana) can take 3 months in the flowering stage before buds are ready to harvest.

Every different strain has pros and cons, but if time is a factor for you, pay close attention to the length of the flowering stage when deciding which strain to grow. The majority of seed banks list the length of the flowering period as part of their stats for each strain.

Learn how to research strains

What about autoflowering strains?

Some strains are ‘auto-flowering‘ and go through their whole life cycle regardless of light schedule. These strains tend to be ready to harvest in only 2-3 months from seed (though you should expect smaller plants with relatively smaller yields when choosing a really fast auto-flowering strain).

Auto-flowering strains of marijuana often have more mild potency than photoperiod (standard) strains, which can be a positive or negative depending on what you want. However, some auto-flowering strains are just as potent as most photoperiod strains.

Here are some proven quick-finishing auto-flowering strains:

• Pineapple Express Auto by FastBuds
• THC Bomb Auto by Bomb Seeds
• KO Crop Auto by Cream of the Crop Seeds

Learn more about the difference between regular and autoflowering strains

In this auto-flowering grow, I harvested more than 2 ounces per plant in under 3 months

3.) Give Plants 24 Hours of Light per Day During the Vegetative Stage

As long as you give your plants more than 16 hours of light a day, they will usually stay in the vegetative stage. But if you give the plant more light than that, they have more time in the day to grow.

Some growers believe it’s better to give marijuana plants 18 hours of light a day max, with a 6 hour dark period during the vegetative stage. This is because plants grown under 18/6 tend to be more resilient to problems. If you have a sick plant, just reducing the light period and/or light intensity a little bit can help it recover faster.

Regardless of which is best for plant health, it’s a proven fact that marijuana plants given a full 24 hours of light a day will grow at least a little faster during the vegetative stage (however, you may consider backing down to 18/6 if your plant is sick to help it recover from problems faster).

Note: Plants can only conduct so much photosynthesis in a day. If you’re growing with high-intensity lights, your plants are more likely to need a dark period compared to plants grown under lower-intensity lights. Learn more about the plant’s daily light integral (how much light it can use in a day).

More light per day helps plants grow faster in the vegetative stage.

Therefore, if a short time to harvest is of the utmost importance to you, you may want to consider going with the 24-hour light period during the vegetative stage for the fastest growth. Again, this won’t make the plant’s flowering stage go any faster, but it enables you to start the flowering stage a little bit sooner. Speaking of which…

4.) Initiate The Flowering Stage Sooner

You may not realize that regular (non auto-flowering) marijuana plants can be coax to start making buds almost as quickly as auto-flowering plants.

Basically, start giving your seedling a 12/12 light schedule when only 3-4 weeks old from germination (if you give it earlier your plant will just grow slow and won’t start flowering any sooner).

This makes the plant “think” winter is coming, like the seed happened to sprout towards the end of summer, and the plant start making buds as soon as it’s able. This means that your “flowering stage countdown” begins within about a month from the seed being planted.

So for example, Northern Lights has a flowering stage length of about 8 weeks. If you give your Northern Lights strain plant a 12/12 light schedule once it’s about 3 weeks old, your buds would be ready to harvest in about 11-12 weeks from germination.

Some growers will also flower marijuana clones as soon as they have formed roots, for basically the same effect, though clones tend to start flowering faster than a plant put on 12-12 directly from seed.

That being said, flowering from seed (also known as 12/12 from seed) is a very inefficient manner of growing. Plants flowered from seed don’t get enough time to grow many bud sites or structure to allow long buds to form.

If you want to initiate flowering early, it’s better to do so after waiting 3-4 weeks, so you grow plants that are relatively small but can produce more than a couple of grams worth of bud. This is known as the “Sea of Green” (SoG) technique. A bunch of smaller plants is easy for new growers to manage, plus it gives you the option of trying different strains instead of growing a lot of any one strain.

Learn more about flowering plants sooner (known as “Sea of Green” technique)

On a similar note, you might want to consider hydroponics over soil.

Soil tends to get the slowest vegetative growth rates of any grow medium. You can get faster vegetative growth with almost all hydroponic methods compared to what can be achieved with soil. That means that you could speed up time til harvest by using Deep Water Culture (DWC), Coco coir/perlite, or pretty much any non-soil growing medium. During the flowering stage, this isn’t as important, but this can shave weeks off your vegetative stage time (get straight to growing buds sooner!)

In my experience, top-fed Deep Water Culture hydroponics (also called ‘bubbleponics‘) has given me the quickest growth of any hydroponics system I’ve tried.

5.) Grow Indoors 

Growing outdoors can be more convenient and vastly cheaper for those who happen to live in a place with great growing conditions since the sun and nature are doing a lot of work for you. But outdoor growing isn’t the fastest way to grow and harvest your crop.

Learn About the “Light Deprivation” Technique for Faster Outdoor Harvests

Outdoors, you must plant in the spring, and don’t typically harvest until late autumn. If you germinate seed in April and harvest in October, your oudoor grow takes 6 months. Given the right conditions (high-yielding strain, direct sunlight all day, good soil, avoid pests, etc) you can grow huge plants in that time, that produce pounds of buds.

Yet growing indoors gives you the ultimate control over how big your plants get, how long to keep them in the vegetative stage, and exactly when they start flowering amongst other things. You also have a lot more control over how much bud you’ll end up yielding.

With a well-chosen strain and a good setup, one can harvest several ounces of buds in less than 4 months indoors, which is nearly impossible to do outdoors in the same timeframe.

6.) Pay Attention To Your Plants and Quickly React to Problems

I know this sounds like it doesn’t need to be listed, but it’s a more important job than people think. Every time your plants get sick, it slows down their growth while they try to recover. Every problem your plant runs into can add days or even weeks to your total grow time.

Simply put: fixing all problems quickly equates to a shorter time to harvest.

Plus, by reacting quickly to problems, you will save yourself the stress of trying to deal with a huge problem that’s gotten out of control since you’ve been watching out and adjusting along the way. Problems tend to get much worse when left unchecked.

The more you tend to your plants’ needs, the better they grow, and the faster you get to harvest.

For example, the following plant problems will add time onto your grow

• nutrient problems or a pest infestation can dramatically slow down growth, especially for young plants
• heat stress or light burn can not only slow down growth in the vegetative stage, they can prevent buds from maturing properly in the flowering stage
• accidentally re-vegging your budding plants will stop buds from maturing

Learn more about the most common cannabis plant problems right here

7.) Make Sure You’re Feeding Plants The Right Type of Nutrients During Each Stage of Growth.

In the vegetative stage, it is important that you give your plants the right nutrients needed to get optimal growth.

Learn which nutrients work well for growing weed

Now if you’re starting with a good soil like Fox Farms Ocean Forest soil (a proven choice for growing cannabis), you may not need to supplement any nutrients for the first several weeks, as the nutrients you need are already in the soil. If you’re growing hydroponically (directly in water, or in a soil-less medium like coco coir), it is essential that you provide the nutrients your plant need by deliviering nutrients in the water from the beginning.

You’ve probably seen ‘N-P-K’ numbers on the bottles of pretty much every nutrient line there is. These numbers are important to know since cannabis plants use more N (nitrogen) in the vegetative phase, and relatively more P & K (phosphorus & potassium) in the flowering phase. Giving your plant too much N in the flowering phase will actually slow down bud production. This means that you will harvest smaller yields of less-dense buds in addition to waiting longer for said buds.

This is why you need to choose a nutrient system that is specifically formulated for the flowering stage of a plant like marijuana. By providing the right nutrients to your cannabis plants at the right time, you’ll reduce your overall time to harvest and maximize yields.

Learn more about some of the best marijuana nutrient systems here

Learn more: Why are my cannabis buds not ready to harvest yet?

How Much Time Per Week Does It Take To Grow Cannabis?

Now that you’re equipped with the information to get you to harvest as soon as possible, let’s quickly address another common question we receive about time.

Growers often write in to ask us how much time it will take per week to grow a marijuana plant. We understand that many of you have busy schedules, and want to know if growing your own weed is a realistic goal for you.

The amount of time spent growing varies greatly depending on the method you use to grow, the size you let your plants get, and the skill of the grower. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a growing method that’s conducive to spending less time plant-tending.

The truth is, you can grow weed in only 20-30 minutes a week when you use the right techniques and get used to the process of growing. The following article reveals the best way we know to grow lots of potent bud while using a minimum amount of time to do so. We make this happen using a hydroponic style of growing known as Top-fed DWC (aka “bubbleponics”).

Click here to learn more: https://www.growweedeasy.com/high-yield-bubbleponics-technique

Keep in mind that this is a fairly advanced technique, and should only be attempted by intermediate-advanced growers or particularly brave newcomers.

Check out other ways to save time for busy cannabis growers.

About Nebula Haze:

Marijuana has made a positive impact on my life, and I believe every adult should be able to grow the weed they want. I’m dedicated to showing you how easy it can be to grow your own high-grade buds for your medical or recreational needs.

I have made it my mission in life to make new and advanced growing information available to anyone on GrowWeedEasy.com.

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