Lights on. Nuggs as rocks. Thumb-sized. No larger than that, or they will not fit in the packaging. Inside the grinder? They smash like cheese puffs. Coated in glandular crystals, ground, they look like a worm; you can see movement in waves of that glued plant material. Impossible to distinguish whether or not these flowers were grown indoors or outdoors.
From trap houses with hanging High Pressure Sodium lights -the same used in street lighting 25 years or so ago, to the current state-of-the-art greenhouse, lighting technology has expanded the quality of cannabis and blurred the distinction between indoor and outdoor cannabis.
Today, advanced greenhouses use both sunlight and artificial lighting, producing buds just as dense as indoor-grown. The terpene and cannabinoid richness once thought unique to outdoor crops can now be achieved at scale.
At its peak productivity, cannabis cultivation has become a kind of cyborg practice—half guided by nature’s sunlight, half engineered through artificial light. Sunlight delivers every wavelength plants need—the reds and blues that power photosynthesis, along with the subtler tones in between that shape how a plant stretches, flowers, and produces resin.
But if the sunlight is so good, why are growers supplementing light in their greenhouses? How do they do it? What are the best lights for this job? And how do they work?
More importantly, how are companies managing to undercut weed prices while still achieving indoor-quality flower at a fraction of the cost?
The Light Recipe
One of the most important aspects of supplementing light in greenhouses is finding the right amount of light and colors to achieve a certain objective, whether that is flowering or growing plants.
The different configurations of light spectrum in greenhouses, that is, the combination of wavelengths—or colors of light such as blue, red, and …
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Author: Nicolás José Rodriguez / High Times
