There's a lot of variability in the approach. If you're an indoor cultivator, you're sort of force-flowering the plants, so to speak. It might be a cycle where you would plant a seed or establish a cutting, and it might grow for four weeks, or something, and then you would trigger flowering, and then there would be a flowering period of about eight weeks. It's about three months in total, sort of seed to harvest, in typical terms.
Outdoors, that might be longer, because you would potentially plant in May, when you would plant tomatoes, around the Victoria Day long weekend, and be harvesting later in September. That would stretch out that growing season to more than three months, or a little bit longer.
In terms of the smell, cannabis has a very distinct odour, whether it is smoked or grown. This is not due to THC but rather due to the terpenes, the sort of volatile components of the plant. They are the same chemicals that give mint, lavender, and basil their smell; those are also terpenes. They have quite a powerful odour. In terms of indoor cultivation, they can be controlled with appropriate ventilation or appropriate filtration. You can have charcoal filters to remove the smell. It is a little bit more complicated than tomatoes, in the sense that tomatoes don't smell as much.
Some of the issues are that people are pushing larger numbers of plants into closets in their apartments or dwellings, and that smell, in that intense light, in the indoor confined space, is difficult to control.