So, you’ve decided to take on indoor gardening? Whether you chose to take up the hobby because you don’t get enough light outdoors during the year, or you want to get away from the hassle of outdoor gardening, you’re in for a treat.
Indoor gardening offers you an entirely new experience of managing your crop. The backbone of any indoor setup is the tent, giving you the means to control the growing environment completely. Grow tents come in various shapes and sizes from numerous manufacturing brands.
You can produce a flawless crop with higher yields than outdoor crops and better plant quality with the right tent. Here are our top five reasons why you need to use a grow tent.
#1 Control Growing Conditions
One of the biggest issues with growing outdoors is that your crop is at the mercy of Mother Nature. The wind, rain, and especially hail can damage your plants, causing setbacks to your crop production. Some growers mitigate these risks through the use of hothouses, tunnels, and greenhouses.
However, you still have to contend with the spread of diseases and pest infestations. With an indoor garden, you can control the climate and environment, ensuring your crop gets optimal conditions to survive and thrive.
Your tent comes with a steel frame and a nylon canvas cover, with zipper doors for easy access. Inside the tent, you’ll find a mylar lining that reflects and enhances the light coming from your LED system. The lights and the fan mount to the steel frame overhead, allowing for the easy height adjustment of the lamps and fans to suit your canopy.
There are several ports and windows in the tent walls, allowing for the insertion of ducting and viewing of the plants without opening the door. The tent seals completely, cutting off outside air from entering the growing space. As a result, the gardener can control the air coming into and leaving the tent. It’s impossible to do that outdoors, and this feature of indoor gardening can be beneficial for several reasons we’ll cover going forward in this post.
#2 Year-Round Gardening
With a grow tent, you get the capacity for year-round gardening. Typically, even if you live in the Southern Hemisphere and get optimal sunlight conditions in summer and fall, you’re still going to need more light during the late fall and winter.
A grow tent gives you a controlled environment where you set the lighting hours. You can keep growing throughout the wintertime without worrying about the diminished sunlight hours and UV strength affecting crop yield. With a grow tent, you use an LED light to give your plants the light they need to thrive. These specialized LED lamps produce enough PAR and lumen to spur plant growth, imitating the sun’s rays. As a result, you get more crops per year.
Traditionally, most gardeners can manage two crops in a season of outdoor growing, and that’s using the assistance of a greenhouse in most cases. With an indoor tent, you can keep the light running year-round, rotating your crops to start a new one with minimal downtime between turnaround. As a result, it’s possible to get between six to eight crops per year, tripling or quadrupling your annual output.
#3 Enhance Light and Conserve Energy
When growing with an LED lamp, you need a way to focus as much light on the plants as possible. Most high-quality grow tents come with a mylar lining fitted to the tent’s inside walls, roof, and floor. This reflective mylar reflects the light from the LED lamp that would normally escape to the sides, pushing it back towards the canopy. The result? You get more light on your plants from all angles. The mylar intensifies the light coming from your LED lamp, giving you more efficiency from the device and the need for a lower-powered lamp compared to growing outside of a tent.
With a controlled environment, you’ll be saving energy on the efficiency of running your garden. The tent contains everything, from the heat to the light. As a result, you spend less money lighting and heating the growing area. Check out our heavy duty grow tents here.
#4 Prevent Pest Infestations
One of the biggest problems with growing outdoors is the pest and disease infestations gardeners face during the summer through to the end of the fall. While you love your plants, so do the bugs, and they taste like a 5-star buffet. By growing indoors in a tent, you can prevent pest infestations and outbreaks of disease in your plants. The majority of disease comes from fungi floating around in the air. It settles on your plants during cold, windy days, taking hold of the plant in a matter of days.
Most diseases are hard to get rid of, and if your plants come down with any disease, like white powdery mildew (WPM), you’ll have to throw them away and remove the soil to prevent overwintering the pathogen.
With a tent, you get a sealed environment. You’ll filter all the air entering the tent, removing any pathogens. Since the tent is a closed environment, there’s no way for bugs to wander into the tent unless you bring them in with your soil mix. Growing hydroponically or using a high-grade soil mix guaranteed as pest-free resolves this issue.
#5 Privacy and Stealth Growing
As mentioned, stealth and guerilla growers can benefit from using a tent to grow their crops. The smell of flowering plants is a dead giveaway of a grow. If you live on the same property, your sense of smell adjusts to the current state of the air, and you might not notice the smell in your home.
However, your visitors and neighbors will notice the smell. By growing in a tent, you seal the air inside the growing area. All exhaust air moves through a carbon scrubbing filter, removing the flowering plants’ scent before expelling it into the room.
You can also set up ducting to filter incoming air into the tent and outgoing air, expelling it into the roof or directly out of the window where no one will smell it.
