Costs of Growing Marijuana Plants and Buds

If you’ve ever wondered how much does it cost to grow weed, then you’ve come to the right place. We will share everything you need to know about the costs of growing weed in this article. 

We’ll look at growing it in a variety of scenarios, including both indoors and outdoors, as well as the costs for growing different amounts of weed. There are many costs you might not have been aware of, but once you’ve read this guide, you’ll be aware of everything you need to know. 

It’s worth saying upfront that these costs will probably require you to do some saving and budgeting over the next few months. You might want to save up and get ready for growing weed the following summer if you’re short on money. If you choose to delay it, you should save this article to refer back to later. 

How Much Does It Cost to Grow Weed?

The cost of growing weed will vary, depending on your situation. You might have questions like how much does it cost to grow weed indoors or how much does it cost to grow a pound of weed. We’ll be answering these and other questions across the rest of the article. 

To begin with, it’s worth noting you can make money from the weed you grow. Growing your own weed means you can vouch for its quality and sell it without having to go through any middlemen. That means you get to keep more money for yourself and increase your chances of making a profit. 

If you’re brand new to the world of weed, then you’ll probably want to begin with marijuana grow kits. These contain all the elements you need to start growing weed and instructions to help you get the best results. These are affordable, with prices starting from as low as $80. 

However, they don’t guarantee an identical yield or perfect results. Many variables affect the outcome, like lighting, nutrients, marijuana strains, and climate. But if you start with a grow kit and work your way towards growing weed yourself, you’ll learn what you need along the way. 

How Much Does It Cost to Grow Weed Indoors?

If you’re thinking about how much does it cost to grow weed indoors, you’ll be pleased to know it’s usually a more affordable option than the alternative. You can use special CFL lighting in your grow room so that you don’t end up paying large electric bills. 

You can also limit the number of plants you’re growing so that you don’t need ventilation in the grow room. That keeps costs down too. You can start with only the following elements: 

• Seeds 
• Pots
• Lights
• Soil
• A fan 

Getting all these should only cost a few hundred dollars, so that should make it relatively easy for you, even if you’re on a budget. If you want to step things up, you can also pick higher-quality systems that boost yields. The cost for these is typically in the high hundreds of dollars.

If you’re a practical person who likes DIY, you can build a grow room yourself and cut costs further. However, some investment will be required to keep your marijuana plants healthy as they grow. We’ve outlined some basic requirements, but if you want to do things like a pro, then you’ll need to think of buying items like:

• A reflector 
• A ballast 
• An HPS bulb 
• A time switch 
• A fan controller 

These are all parts you can buy online, and they won’t take long to find. If you’re unsure which ones to buy, you should rely on customer reviews to find the best versions. 

Other considerations for indoor grow rooms include the air quality, the space you’re leaving between each plant, and the number of nutrients you’re supplying the plants with. If you’d like to know more about any of this, you can look at some of these grow guides. They tell you everything you need to know. 

Buying all of the equipment and resources you’ll need for growing cannabis indoors, plus paying for the electricity across the growing season, will come to an average of $1,948. This is a reasonable amount of money for a whole season of cannabis from as many plants as you can fit in your grow room. 

Growing Cannabis in Small Indoor Spaces

If you don’t have enough space for a conventional grow room, you’ll also have other options. One of these is using a closet in your house. If you choose this approach, you can get hold of items like grow tents and use them. 

They feature all the necessities for cannabis growth except the seeds and the soil. They typically have room for 2-4 plants, so although you won’t yield much cannabis, you’ll make use of the space you have. You can usually buy grow tents for less than $1,000, so they’re half-price compared to creating and maintaining an indoor grow room.

How Much Does It Cost to Grow Weed Outdoors?

When investigating the cost of growing weed outdoors, what you need to consider differs from growing marijuana indoors. You’ll find that it’s still affordable, which is good.

You’re using fewer resources and equipment than if you were creating an indoor grow room because you’re relying on nature to help you out. The sun, soil, and rain are your allies in the journey to successful marijuana growth. 

The main job you’ll have is purchasing high-quality marijuana seeds. These are not difficult to find, and to prove it to you, here are a few examples of strains you might like to purchase:

• Gorilla Glue Feminized 
• Durban Poison Feminized 
• Bruce Banner Feminized 
• Blue Dream Feminized 
• Amnesia Haze Feminized 

There are plenty more where that came from, and you can find out all the details by clicking on one of the links above. Now that you know how easy it is to get hold of high-quality marijuana seeds let’s look a little more at growing marijuana outdoors. 

It’s cheaper because you’re not getting your seeds from a store or dispensary. We’ll cover the costs of buying seeds off the street shortly, but the bottom line is it’s cheaper to buy your seeds from an online store. Otherwise, you’re paying out money for gas and any other expenses that might come up along the way. 

What To Keep In Mind When Growing Weed Outdoors

Once you’ve got your seeds and you’re ready to grow them outdoors, you’ll need to think about it. The reason why is you’ll have complete control over every aspect of cannabis growth. This allows you to budget accordingly and find the most affordable arrangement, but it also requires basic knowledge. 

You’ll need to know what techniques you’ll use to maintain your plants, the strains you’d like to buy, how long they take to harvest, and how you’ll cure the cannabis. It takes devotion to research all of this and put it into practice, but the reward you’ll get is homegrown cannabis at a fraction of the cost you’ll pay in a dispensary or store. 

However, you’ll face higher costs if your plants are victims of diseases or pests, so you’ll need to invest in good cannabis companion plants and similar solutions to repel pests and cure diseases. 

The good news is that these costs are often outweighed by the high yields you can expect from growing cannabis outdoors. One 10-gallon pot of marijuana should get you 1-2lbs of harvested flowers. These can then be consumed by you or sold at market rates to make a decent profit. 

Overall, the average cost of growing cannabis outdoors with all the necessary resources and equipment comes to $2,385. The extra cost usually comes from buying additional items like a watering tank and pieces of hardware.

The Cost of Buying Weed From A Store or Dispensary

You might have wondered whether you can buy weed directly from a store or dispensary instead of getting seeds you can grow yourself. You can, but it’s often not worth it. The products sold in those places are subject to taxation and regulation in a way that your weed wouldn’t be if kept for personal use. 

The costs to buy cannabis flowers from a store or dispensary are typically measured out in different weights. We’ll discuss pounds and ounces more later in this guide, but for now, it’s sufficient to say you can expect to pay several hundred pounds for an ounce or more. 

When you opt for cannabis that’s already grown, you also miss out on the experience of growing your own weed, and you can’t tailor it to your exact requirements. That’s why it’s ultimately more cost-effective to grow weed yourself, whether indoors or outdoors. 

Once you’ve set up a grow room or a patch of land dedicated to growing weed, you can use it year after year, especially if you live in an area that has a warm climate. That way, you can save money over time, even if you have to spend a larger lump sum of $1,000-2,000 when you’re starting. 

The Labor Costs of Growing Your Own Cannabis

When you’re thinking about how much it costs to grow weed, you’ll also want to factor in costs beyond what you’re purchasing. You have a labor cost as well, and if you hire anyone to help you, then they’ll have a cost too. 

We did some research on this. We started with a rate of $20 an hour for an indoor grow room and for growing outdoors, and $10 an hour for a small grow room and assumed that it takes 14 weeks to grow weed indoors and 20 weeks to grow weed outdoors. The results gave us some sizeable costs for labor alone. Here are the figures:

• Growing indoors in a conventional grow room will cost $1,960 
• Growing indoors in a smaller grow room will cost $980 
• Growing weed outdoors will cost $2,800

Let’s now add these to the figures we revealed in the previous sections. We said that growing weed indoors would require set-up and maintenance costs of $1,948 on average. For growing it outdoors, we came to a figure of $2,385. 

Adding these together, we can see the minimum cost for growing weed indoors is $3,908, and the minimum cost for growing weed outdoors is $5,185. That’s probably a more considerable difference than what you might have thought initially. 

However, your total labor costs may vary. If you don’t have to take time off your job to grow weed, and you can do it all yourself anyway, then you may not have to factor in labor costs. Regardless of whether you do that or not, you should be able to make the money back over a long enough period if you sell the weed you make and don’t use. Therefore, spending extra time to plant more seeds is a practical choice if you have the space.

But if you do have a large number of plants during a growing season, then you’ll need to factor in the number of hours you’ll spend caring for them. You’ll find that certain days are much busier than others, and you’ll have to factor this into the other elements of your daily routine. That’s why we covered labor costs. If you can’t make the time, then you’ll have to hire someone you trust and pay their expenses to look after your plants. 

How Much Does It Cost to Grow One Weed Plant?

As you may know by now, how much does it cost to grow one weed plant varies depending on a huge range of factors. To sum up, these factors include:

• The strain you’re growing 
• The climate where you’re growing it 
• Whether you’re growing it indoors or outdoors 
• What nutrients you’re providing your plant 
• How well you’re able to maintain your plant 

All of these will impact the cost, but we can derive some general estimates so that you can budget accordingly. The cost of growing a single marijuana plant will be between $66-265. This is the combined cost of a single marijuana seed, some grow lights, a few containers, the soil itself, and any extras needed. 

You will have the option of spending more than this, but it depends on how much marijuana you’d like to grow. If you’d like to spend a lot of money upfront to make a more significant profit later, then that’s a worthwhile strategy if you’re confident that you can sell the weed once it’s been harvested. 

However, if you’re interested in making a business out of selling weed, growing your own has its drawbacks. Weed at stores or a dispensary is more expensive than growing it yourself, but you’ll be guaranteed to get the best quality. However, if you only intend to sell the weed to neighbors and friends, or you want to use it personally, then it’s still better to grow the weed yourself.

How Much Does It Cost to Grow A Pound of Weed?

If you’re thinking about growing a lot of weed, then you’ll probably have wondered how much does it cost to grow a pound of weed. There are various answers to this, and if you do some research, you’ll find quite a few answers. 

One estimate we’ve found that applies to growing weed on a mass scale says a pound of weed costs $516 to grow. However, this includes the costs of several employees and various taxes and expenses. Therefore, you can expect the price per pound that you’ll be paying to be a lot less than this. That should give you enough to make a rough estimate of costs, and then you can find out the details as you investigate different equipment costs.

How Much Does It Cost to Grow an Ounce of Weed?

One pound of weed is roughly equivalent to 16 ounces, so if you’re asked how much does it cost to grow an ounce of weed, it’s 1/16th of the price of one pound of weed. Based on the amount we found when researching for the previous section, that makes the cost of an ounce of weed $32. That’s a calculation that you can use when you’re figuring out how much weed you want to grow. 

The price may vary depending on the suppliers you use when ordering equipment, nutrients, and seeds. But you can use the price we’ve given here as a baseline when you’re researching where to purchase what you need to grow weed.

Additional Considerations

Beyond what we’ve discussed here, there are some other points to make that will determine the cost of growing marijuana. We’ll cover those in this section so that you’re as informed as possible about what you need to know. They’re essential to factor in if you haven’t done so already. 

Refurbishing Your Grow Room

If you have enough room to grow weed indoors and want to grow more than a few plants, then it’s essential to make sure that your grow room is up to modern standards. That means setting aside the money you might require to achieve that. 

It can be challenging to calculate the total costs because they depend on your grow room’s specific situation. You’ll need to consider certain materials and how much those materials cost in the area, you live in. 

Reflective Walls

The first element to look into is the state of your walls. Specifically, they need to be reflective enough to create good light levels for the weed plants you will grow there. You can paint your walls, but it’s much better to use reflective coatings that ensure most of the light that hits the walls is reflected onto the plants. Mylar is an example of the material you can use for grow rooms, but you can find out more by researching online. 

Airflow

Another area to examine is the airflow that your room has. If it’s walled in on all sides and doesn’t have any windows, then you’re going to need to invest in a great ventilation system. Otherwise, your plants won’t get enough air to grow properly. Depending on your situation, this could mean a sophisticated system of pipes and vents. If it does, you’ll have to consider setting aside extra money for this. 

Depending on the particular lighting and ventilation system that you deem appropriate, you may require the help of a professional to install it. If you do, then you’ll have to pay the costs necessary for them to fit the equipment. You can look around for the cheapest alternative if you’re on a budget or judge by user reviews if you’re not as concerned about the amount of money you’ll spend. 

Pots and Soil

Beyond the essential considerations of lighting and ventilation, there are some other points to bear in mind. The type of pots you plant your weed seeds in is crucial, as it will affect how their roots spread and the amount of soil you can use. You can also produce your own soil or use the compost you’ve already got in your garden. These are great options if you’re interested in keeping costs down.

Nutrients

When it comes to growing healthy marijuana plants that thrive, you’ll need to provide them with good nutrients. These will make a big difference because nutrient deficiencies can be deadly for marijuana plants. Many issues can result from a lack of different nutrients, so this isn’t an area to cut corners on.

Temperature and Humidity Monitoring

To measure the health of your plants while you’re growing them, you may also wish to buy a hygrometer and thermometer. These will measure the temperature and humidity of your grow room, both of which are extremely important to measure. If these are wrong, then your plants will not grow properly, and the efforts you’ve put into growing marijuana could be jeopardized.

Tools

Beyond these essentials, you may also want to consider getting some tools so you can trim your plants from time to time. Pruning your plants is a part of specific training methods, ensuring your plants give you the best possible results. Depending on how you grow your plants, you might also want to get some cable ties to hold branches in place.

Conclusion

In this guide, we’ve discussed a wide range of considerations that can influence how much it costs to grow weed. That includes specific assessments of how does it cost to grow one weed plant, how much does it cost to grow an ounce of weed, and the cost of growing a pound of weed. 

This involved referring to calculations available online and then coming up with our own totals so that we could give you average figures for what you’ll need to pay to grow weed. As you’ll now know, these costs vary widely. The most significant difference in the cost is decided at the start of the process when you determine whether you will grow weed indoors or outdoors. 

However, there is also a range of other costs to factor in, like room refurbishment, tools, weed seeds, containers, the soil itself, and the lighting that you’ll use in your grow room. There is also the matter of labor. Even if you’ve got all of the equipment and ingredients you need, you might have to pay your labor costs or those of anyone you hire. 

But now that you’ve read this article, you should be able to start planning a budget for growing your own marijuana plants. That will involve choosing which elements you’re going to prioritize and which ones aren’t necessary for you to consider. 

If you’d like any further information, or you’d like to buy some marijuana seeds like those we mentioned earlier in the guide, here is what to do. 

Click here to visit I Love Growing Marijuana, a seed bank that sells premium and high-quality cannabis seeds.