How legally growing 6 marijuana plants in Ohio can land you a felony after this-

An adult 21 or older in Ohio can legally grow six cannabis plants at home. The same person can commit a felony by keeping the harvest. The line is the cut.

Ohio Revised Code 3796.221(B), in effect since Senate Bill 56 on March 20, 2026, says no one may knowingly possess more than 2.5 ounces of marijuana plant material, or 15 grams of extract. The plant-material cap excludes seeds, live plants, and clones being grown under section 3796.04. Flower still attached to a living plant does not count. Flower cut off the plant does. Homegrown and dispensary flower are added together.

Section 3796.04 allows six plants per adult at a primary residence, 12 per household, inside a locked enclosed area that minors cannot reach and that is not visible from a public space. The statute does not split seedlings from flowering plants. Six is six.

A single plant can finish at 5 to 10 ounces of dried flower, and indoor plants often finish higher. Six plants at the low end of that range is 30 ounces. At the high end it is 60. The legal harvested stash is 2.5 ounces, about 71 grams. Possession is charged under section 2925.11 through 3796.99(D). Under 100 grams is a minor misdemeanor. From 100 to under 200 grams is a fourth-degree misdemeanor. From 200 grams to under 1,000 grams, about 7 to 35 ounces, is a fifth-degree felony. From 1,000 to under 5,000 grams is a third-degree felony. One legal plant, cut and jarred, can clear the felony line. Six legal plants, harvested and kept, can clear it by a wide margin.

That is the trap. The garden is legal on the stem. The same garden is overweight the hour it is trimmed.

The tax question is fair and not settled. Adult-use flower sold in a dispensary carries the state cannabis excise tax. Homegrown flower does not. A 2.5-ounce ceiling on anything already cut does push a grower who wants to stay inside the statute toward the taxed counter, or toward throwing most of a legal harvest away. Lawmakers have not said that was the point. The text does produce that result.

The dispensary comparison does not erase the gap. A recreational customer can buy up to 2.5 ounces of flower in a day, and non-flower products totaling up to 15,000 milligrams of THC, not 1,500. The 1,500-milligram figure is a package cap on infused single-serving units in the Division of Cannabis Control chart, not the daily purchase cap. Adult-use edibles are tighter still: 10 milligrams a serving and 100 milligrams a package. Extract possession, separate from the buy limit, stops at 15 grams. A first-time 5-milligram dose is a consumer rule of thumb, not a legal measure. Fifteen thousand milligrams is 3,000 of those doses on paper. It is also a purchase allowance, tracked by the dispensary, not a license to stockpile past the possession caps.

Issue 2, passed by voters in 2023, is what made the six plants legal. Senate Bill 56 is what rewrote the chapter and left the harvest on the wrong side of a felony scale that still counts grams. No Fostoria, Findlay, or Tiffin case charging a six-plant home grower under that harvest rule has been reported. The statute does not require one. It only requires the dried flower.