- Yes — an adult 21 or older can grow cannabis at home in Vermont. The cap is 2 mature and 4 immature plants per dwelling unit (per household, not per person).
- No license or registration is needed for a personal home grow. You just have to stay within the plant limit and the rules below.
- Plants must be kept out of public view and screened from access by anyone under 21 — not visible from the street or a neighbor's yard.
- Cannabis you harvest and store at the home where you grew it doesn't count toward Vermont's two-ounce possession limit. Take it off the premises and the limit applies again.
Vermont was the first state to legalize adult-use cannabis through its legislature rather than a ballot measure, and home cultivation was baked in from the start. So the short answer is yes: if you're 21 or older, you can grow your own in Vermont without a license. But "grow your own" comes with a specific, per-household plant limit and a handful of rules about where and how you grow. Get those wrong and a legal garden becomes an illegal one. Here's the plain-English version — what you're allowed to plant, where it has to live, and how a home harvest fits alongside the amount you can buy at a shop.
How many cannabis plants can you legally grow in Vermont?
The limit is two mature plants and four immature plants. A mature plant is one that's flowering — producing the buds you'd eventually harvest — while an immature plant is still in its vegetative stage and hasn't started to flower. So at any given moment you can have up to two plants in flower and four younger ones coming up behind them.
The single most misunderstood part: that limit is per dwelling unit, not per adult. A "dwelling unit" is a household — a house, an apartment, a condo. If three cannabis-age adults share one apartment, the whole apartment is still capped at two mature and four immature plants combined, not six mature and twelve immature. The plant count belongs to the residence, not to each person in it.
Do you need a license or permit to grow at home?
No. A personal home grow inside the plant limit needs no license, permit, or registration with the state. Licensing in Vermont applies to commercial cultivators — the craft growers who supply licensed shops — who are tiered by canopy size and heavily regulated. Growing a couple of plants for yourself at home is a separate thing entirely and doesn't put you in that system.
The catch is that "no license" doesn't mean "no rules." The plant limit, the out-of-public-view requirement, and the 21+ restriction all still apply, and staying inside them is what keeps a home grow legal.
Where can you grow — and who has to say yes?
You can grow indoors or outdoors, but two conditions govern where the plants can go:
- Out of public view. Your plants can't be visible to the public — not from the sidewalk, the road, or a neighbor's property. Outdoor growers typically use a privacy fence, a screened enclosure, or a greenhouse; indoor growers are covered as long as the plants aren't on display through a window.
- On property you control, with the owner's OK. You can grow on property you own or rent, but a landlord or property owner can prohibit cultivation. If you rent, that means checking your lease — a "no cultivation" clause is enforceable, and growing anyway can put your tenancy at risk even though the activity is legal under state law.
You also have to keep the grow secured against access by anyone under 21. Practically, that's the same enclosure or locked space that keeps it out of public view doing double duty.
Does home-grown cannabis count toward the possession limit?
This is the part worth reading twice. Vermont's personal possession limit is two ounces of flower (it doubled from one ounce on July 1, 2026). But cannabis you harvest from your own plants and keep at the dwelling where you grew it does not count toward that two-ounce limit. That's deliberate — a healthy plant can yield far more than two ounces, and the law doesn't force you to destroy your own harvest to stay legal at home.
The exemption is tied to the premises, though. The moment you take home-grown cannabis off the property where it was grown, the ordinary two-ounce possession limit applies to what you're carrying, just as it would to anything bought at a shop. So: grow and store at home, effectively no cap; leave the house with it, two ounces.
What are the rules that don't change when you grow your own?
Growing at home doesn't unlock anything the rest of Vermont cannabis law prohibits. The same core rules apply to your harvest as to anything else:
- It's 21+. Only adults 21 or older can cultivate, possess, or use cannabis in Vermont.
- No public consumption. Using cannabis in public isn't permitted anywhere in Vermont — not on Church Street, at the waterfront, or in a parked car. It's for private use at home.
- It can't cross state lines. Even into a neighboring legal state, taking cannabis out of Vermont isn't allowed — and that includes anything you grew yourself.
- Keep it away from kids and pets, and store both the plants and the harvest securely.
Grow your own, or buy from a shop?
Home growing appeals if you enjoy the process and want a supply of your own, but it's a real project — a flowering plant takes months, needs light, airflow, and steady attention, and the first harvest is rarely the best one. It's a hobby as much as a supply strategy.
The trade-off is convenience and consistency. A licensed shop gives you lab-tested, labeled product today, from Vermont's regulated supply chain, with the grower and test data named on the package. The price you see on a licensed menu is the final, all-in price — Vermont's 14% cannabis excise tax and 6% sales tax are already built in — so there's no math at the counter. Plenty of people do both: grow a plant or two for the fun of it, and shop when they want something specific, fresh, or tested. If you'd rather skip the grow, you can browse the live menu or stop by us in downtown Burlington.