Lloyd Johnson: The Beginner's Guide to Growing Marijuana

The question of how to start your marijuana garden may be answered for you. Most people have saved some seeds—often for many years—for just this occasion. There are several negatives to using seeds, but you can use them without involving anyone else, and the price is right. If you decide to use clones, you’ll need to find a supplier.

Clones, or rooted cuttings from a female or mother plant, have many advantages. The genotype is a known entity. You know already that the clone is female and that the plant possesses characteristics of value to you. There is no need to wait for the young plant to display sexual differentiation; it can go immediately into a fast-track growing mode. This is particularly helpful when the outdoor grower has a short growing season, as it sidesteps the waiting time for sexual differentiation needed for seed-propagated starts.

If you are providing medical cannabis to patients, it is important to remember that clones are very valuable in assuring that the patients get strains that actually help with their medical condition(s). Most medical cannabis patients have experimented with different strains until they found the ones that work best for their condition; genetic uniformity is essential if the grower is to supply cannabis as medicine.

Seedlings come from seed. Seed propagation also has advantages. If stored properly, cannabis seed remains viable for years. Unlike a clone, which immediately needs soil, light, water, and care, the seed will wait for you. This is a convenience, even if you plan to just buy seed and not breed on your own. Seed is also a way for a breeder to easily bank certain genetics that he might want to reintroduce at a later point in developing a strain. Trying to store genetics by repeatedly cloning is time-consuming and takes up far more space.

All seed is created by sexual propagation. Cannabis makes this interesting for the breeder as it is a dioecious plant, requiring both a male and a female plant to produce viable seed. Sometimes cannabis will produce hermaphrodites. This is an undesirable characteristic, and these individuals should be destroyed. Hermaphrodites can pollinate themselves and the rest of your crop if you let them.

Many growers produce crops that are a combination of both clones and seedlings. The clones provide the completely known entities, while the seedlings are an opportunity to produce a genetic sport, something new, in an aim to improve one or more characteristics supplied by the parent plants.

Seed is more versatile than taking clones; you can select plants for specific desirable traits and produce your own individualized hybrid strains. Instead of relying on other breeders, you have more independence from outside sources and can control the genetic direction of the breeding program.

A seedling also has the potential to be a male plant, needed for pollen, and, depending on the growing trends in one’s area, perhaps rather rare. Many growers who work exclusively with clones instead of seed are horrified by male plants, viewing them as a threat to the production of seedless, or sinsemilla, high-grade cannabis. Despite exaggerated fears of out-of-control pollination, you can easily ensure that a male plant is isolated and only used for controlled pollination and fertilization of specific females. To a seed breeder, males, particularly from a prized strain, are very valuable in their own right because without males there is no advancement of the strain.

You should not feel intimidated by the idea of growing from seed, but your first grow will be less complicated if you start out with clones. You can leapfrog over seed germination and move right to planting.

Also, with clones, your plant count will stay mostly the same from start to finish (barring pests, rippers, and accidental breakage to young clones), the plants will be more or less what you expected as far as genotype, and there will be no anxiety about accurately sexing the young plants. And, having females, you still have the option of procuring pollen from another grower and breeding some seeds for next season.

Think of clones like going to the garden center and buying a healthy young tomato plant instead of a packet of seed. With reasonable care, all of your clones will grow to be healthy plants without needing germination.

Let’s start with beginning a garden of clones. Assuming you have organized and prepared your garden area, indoor or outdoor, your first question is probably: Where can I get clones? If you live in a medical cannabis state, there is a good possibility that clones or cuttings are available from a local compassion organization or from meetings where patients and their caregivers/growers gather to share concerns and cannabis. This is an opportunity to sample various strains and identify which types of cannabis are locally available.

Many meetings have clone tables where you can acquire labeled strains for free or a nominal fee or donation. Be sure to discuss the characteristics of the clones you select; not only their effects, but find out what the propagator has observed as far as their performance during the growing phase. Ideally, of course, you will already know a grower who will take cuttings and make rooted clones of various strains that you specify.

Note that sometimes you will receive cuttings from a mother plant that have not yet produced roots and made the transition to being a real plant. These will require a little more attention than rooted clones, and you should expect a little more attrition; not all cuttings are going to root. If you are in the position where you have to get cuttings to root, always start with more than you think you are going to need.

A complete explanation of handling and planting a clone is provided in “How to Take a Cutting” and “Rooting a Cutting” in Chapter 5: Propagation. The techniques and materials are the same whether you obtain cuttings from others or take the cuttings yourself.

Be careful to get as much information as possible on the genetic origins of the strains: Accurate information will be very useful to you as you raise the plant. If you plan to breed the plant, knowing something about the parents can help you decide which males will be the most likely to add the characteristics to improve performance.

Be aware that there are casual, if not dishonest, people who will misrepresent their clone as being a certain popular strain. Until you have a trusted source for cuttings or clones, or have started breeding or cloning your own plants, always note the name of the strain with a bit of skepticism. The same applies to casually acquired seeds; they may or may not be what is reported.

This does not necessarily mean that people are deliberately lying to you; it is just that people forget, or information gets translated incorrectly from person to person. Of course, this low-key attitude toward sketchy information only applies to free, as in freely given, seed or clones.

If you are going to buy clones or seed, either know the grower or buy from a well-established seed bank. A reputable high-end seed bank will absolutely guarantee their breeding program and seed provenance beyond question.

Cannabis can express itself very differently from strain to strain and even plant to plant.

Knowing the characteristics of the parents will also help you know if you have an outdoor strain or an indoor strain—or one that seems comfortable and obliging no matter where you grow it. A sativa bred to be sixteen feet tall outdoors is going to have a miserable time growing in a low-ceilinged basement grow room where a chubby little indica type will be much more productive and easier to handle. A late-finishing strain may not do as well in an outdoor grow, especially if your season is short. If you are growing it indoors, you can easily manipulate the same strain’s finish time by controlling the timing of the light it receives, but you will save yourself some frustration if you have accurate information.