These days, grow rooms are all the rage for people that want to safely grow and harvest their own plants from home – but what if you don’t have an entire room to give over to it?

A lot of potential growers think they need at least an unused bedroom to start their own at-home grow operations, but don’t have enough space to devote a whole room to a grow operation. Faced with this potential frustration, a number of growers have turned to an even smaller solution: grow closets!

True to their name, grow closets are a grow operation set up inside a standard home closet, walk-in closet, or even a large pantry in some cases, and can serve as a low-budget alternative to a full-sized grow space.

Sounds pretty appealing so far, right? Here’s a few of our favorite tips for maintaining a low-cost grow closet in your home:

Find the right closet

The first step is to pick the right closet. It needs to be spacious enough to give your plants room, insulated enough to not let them get too damaged by the cold, but close enough to a source of ventilation to help them get light and air. It’s a tough balance to strike, but the important thing is to find a closet you can easily access and aren’t using for anything else at the time.

Light it up

The right lighting can make all the difference no matter how small your grow closet is, and there’s a few tricks you can do to make your closet as lit-up as possible. A common solution we’ve seen to maximize the light contact with your plants is to line the walls with Mylar, or paint the walls of your closet a very bright white color to reflect light better throughout the closet. Depending on the wattage of the HID or LED lights you use, you may need to make some room near the top of your closet to hang them the appropriate distance from your plants to avoid over-drying or other damage.

Give your plants a home

Depending on the size of your closet, you may or may not be able to use traditional greenhouse shelving for housing your budding plants. For smaller closets you may want to look into wire shelves (or specifically rustproof wire shelves to prevent corrosion during watering) in the size you need. These shelves can help provide the ventilation and support your plants need while still being able to slide into a regular-sized closet like most of us have. Whatever your shelving solution, pick something that can let air flow around your plants to prevent the growth of mold, and find something that can handle frequent watering – we suggest avoiding wooden shelves for this reason.

Leave room to grow

Since your new grow closet is largely there to help your plants grow, you’re going to need a little extra room for all the various chores that come with home growing such as trimming and drying. In an adjacent room (preferably one indoors that’s temperature controlled, so try to avoid the garage unless it’s attached and heated) set up a few greenhouse racks nearby including drying racks and trim tables to help with the more hands-on parts of plant growth, and leave the closet for the actual growth.

Keep it ventilated

Finally, proper ventilation is crucial for plant growth. We know not every closet is equipped with a multitude of vents and fans, so our favorite simple solution is to prop the door open, place one indoor fan at the base of the door, and hang one at the top of the door (inside the grow room) to blow hot air out. This prevents your plants from losing moisture while they’re in the grow room and can help a lot with maintaining healthy growth without drying out. (Even smaller spaces can do this with a cooling fan from inside a computer, but we don’t recommend this for anything bigger than a cabinet.)