by Nebula Haze
The dry weight of your cannabis buds (“yields”) used to be one of the most important numbers growers paid attention to. But yields are most important for people trying to sell. For most home growers, what you want is enough weed and excellent bud quality, not necessarily the max amount of buds you can grow.
Why? Because most home growers would rather have 8 ounces of incredible weed than 16 ounces of subpar weed.
Home growers usually don’t need to sacrifice quality to get the yields they want
You’ll notice that the newer trendier cannabis strains in the United States for home growers typically have middling to low yields, especially compared to European strains from the early 2010s, which were heavily yield-focused.
In these newer strains, buds stay small and hard like nuggets, as opposed to creating huge enormous “colas” of buds.
Older and European strains tend to produce bigger, looser buds with medium-to-high bud potency
Newer and American strains tend to produce smaller, tighter bud nuggets with very high (20% or more) levels of THC
Plants of these newer strains may produce just 2-3 ounces per plant, whereas “high yield” strains may produce 5 ounces or more per plant in the same conditions.
This Ultimate cannabis plant produced double the yield as all the other strains in the tent, but buds ended up being the least favorite. So after all the other buds had been smoked, we still had tons of Ultimate buds left.
The secret to not caring about yields is to get the basics right: start with a good setup, keep a suitable environment, and train plants to grow multiple buds per plant. This ensures that even if you grow with the lowest-yielding strains, you will still produce more than enough weed for most people. For many cannabis growers, a few ounces of weed per month is more than enough, especially when combined with the fact that many growers also use their “trim” to make edibles. I don’t know about you, but I tend to go through my weed slower when I also have tons of tinctures, canna caps, oils, hash, kief, weed gummies, and other goodies around the house.
Low-yielding strains still produce plenty of weed if you use a good grow setup and provide the right environment in the flowering stage. I’d rather get 3 ounces of these buds per plant than 6 ounces per plant of mediocre weed.
The plants in this picture were all “low-yielding” strains from various boutique breeders including from Square One Genetics and Ethos Genetics. You can see plants produced tight nuggets instead of huge “colas”. Despite that, together these plants still produced over 9 oz of premium bud under a 300W HLG 300 R-Spec light because they had a great grow setup and I used simple plant training techniques to force plants to grow multiple buds.
Although I would have increased the yields by growing with “high-yielding” strains, these “low-yielding” strains produced some of my favorite buds I’ve ever grown. The higher bud quality is more than worth smaller yields, in my opinion. Especially since 9 oz is plenty for me.
“Pacific Punch” buds I grew (strain by Square One Genetics)
On average, a cannabis grow takes 4 months. That means if you want 1 ounce a month, you’re producing more than enough weed as long as you produce 4+ ounces per harvest. With a typical 300W grow light, it’s difficult to produce less than that much weed with even low-yielding strains.
Why grow high-quality strains even if they produce smallish yields?
- Effects – You get the bud effects you actually want, plus you’ll never find yourself smoking subpar weed
- Weed goes further – When weed is high-quality, you don’t need to smoke as much for the same effect
- Less chance of mold – Buds that produce really huge yields with big fat colas tend to have overall a looser bud structure and are much more likely to suffer from bud rot. Strains with small tight “nugs” are much less likely to get bud rot.
- No “bottom shelf” weed – You never find yourself with weed that no one wants to smoke (and a year later realize it’s still sitting there in the back of the cupboard)
I’ve found that, on average, the higher yielding the strain, the lower the bud quality. That is not set in stone, it is simply that when breeding a strain, you can only pay attention to so many things. If you focus purely on breeding strains for bud quality, often the yields tend to get lower over time because the highest-quality bud typically comes from smallish nuggets. When a breeder focuses purely on increasing yields, often the bud quality, smell, or potency suffers.
High-yielding strains are more likely to suffer from loose bud structure and have a tendency to get bud rot. This strain produced enormous yields, but I lost several of the biggest buds to bud rot after the humidity unexpectedly rose to 80% RH in San Diego where I live. Even my industrial dehumidifier wasn’t able to bring the humidity in the grow room down to a safe 50%.
However, with strains that produce small hard nuggets, you’re unlikely to get bud rot even when the humidity rises. There’s no good place for mold to grow in a tight bud like this.
So what strains should you grow with?
I recommend strains by any of these breeders if you’re looking for high bud quality above all else:
- Big Head Seeds – Most affordable option on this list. Modern trendy genetics.
- Ethos Genetics – I’ve had excellent results with Ethos strains, especially anything from their Mandarin or Zweet Inzanity lines.
- Square One Genetics – Just to warn you, their seeds are unbelievably expensive ($165 for 10 seeds?!?!). I never would have paid so much for seeds but I received free seeds from a friend and I was blown away by the bud quality plants produced, though underwhelmed by the yields.
