Indoor vs. Greenhouse: How High Desert Relief Grows Cannabis Two Different Ways

Walk through any current High Desert Relief menu and you’ll notice flower grown two very different ways. Our indoor hydroponic facility and our WildFlower greenhouse operation both supply flower to our six New Mexico dispensary locations, but the methods behind each couldn’t be more different — and both have their own advantages for New Mexico cannabis shoppers.

Our indoor grow runs on a hydroponic system fed with Athena nutrients, with plants rooted in Grodan rockwool cubes rather than soil. The rooms are lit with Mammoth LED fixtures and kept CO2 enriched, which lets us control light schedules, temperature, and humidity down to precise settings year round. That kind of control is a big reason commercial growers lean on supplemental CO2 in the first place. Research summarized by Cannabis Business Times notes that levels between 900 and 1,200 parts per million can boost cannabis yields by roughly 10 to 25 percent during the bud-to-flower stage, since carbon dioxide is one of the core building blocks plants use for photosynthesis.

WildFlower, our greenhouse brand, takes the opposite approach by leaning on natural sunlight supplemented with light deprivation techniques to manage the flowering cycle. Greenhouse growing generally uses less energy than a fully indoor setup and exposes plants to a fuller light spectrum, including UV wavelengths that many growers believe play a role in how a plant expresses its cannabinoid and terpene profile. Neither method is inherently better — indoor growing offers tighter environmental consistency, while greenhouse growing works with the sun instead of replacing it.

For New Mexico cannabis shoppers, this mostly shows up as variety on the shelf. Whether you gravitate toward indoor-grown flower or a greenhouse-grown WildFlower strain often comes down to personal preference around aroma, texture, and how a particular phenotype was expressed in that environment. If you’re curious about the vocabulary that comes up around grow methods — things like phenotype, cultivar, or terpene — our cannabis terminology guide is a good place to start.

Both methods ultimately feed the same six storefronts across the state, from Albuquerque’s Coors, PanAm, and Alameda locations to our Santa Fe, Bernalillo, and Hobbs dispensaries. If you want to see what’s currently on the shelf, browse our dispensary menus or read more about High Desert Relief and how our New Mexico operation fits together.