How to Clone Cannabis Plants at Home
If you plan on growing many cannabis plants, one of the most expensive things you’ll have to deal with is buying seeds. The simple reality is that a single cannabis seed can cost you anywhere between $10 and $40, if not more, depending on where you get them from and what quality level they are.
Therefore, the better solution may be to clone cannabis plants. When growing cannabis, you can take a healthy plant, otherwise known as a mother plant, take just the very top of it, and then turn it into its own plant by transplanting it into an appropriate growing medium.
This is a really cost-effective way to reproduce a strain or specific cannabis plant that you really liked. By creating a cannabis clone from mother plants, you end up with the exact same plant as you had before, but at the beginning of its growth stage rather than at the end.
A single mother plant can produce dozens of clones, helping you save money while providing you with tons of awesome new weed plants. This is your step-by-step guide on growing clones for superior growing results. Let’s start growing!
Growing Clones for Dummies — What Are Clones?
In layman’s terms, cannabis clones are genetic replicas or copies of an existing cannabis plant.
Here, you would take an existing plant, making sure that it is healthy, cut off either the very top of it or the end of a branch, and then transplant it into a good rooting medium or growing medium.
This could otherwise be referred to as cannabis cuttings. Because the clone is taken from an already grown plant, the new plant will have the exact same genetic makeup as the original plant.
The Benefits of Cloning a Cannabis Plant
Now that you know what cloning a cannabis plant is, let’s take a look at the various benefits that comes with it. Using existing cannabis plant cuttings to create a new clone is actually a relatively simple process, and it can benefit you in a number of ways.
Genetic Consistency
One big benefit of cloning cannabis plants is that you get good genetic consistency. Simply put, you can replicate the desirable traits of the mother plant to effectively produce an exact copy.
Cloned plants therefore have the same characteristics, such as terpene profile, growth habits, yield potential, and cannabinoid profile as well. If you have a strain that you really like the quality of, this is how you preserve it.
Preserving Desirable Traits
If you find cannabis plants, specific ones that you have grown, that are very potent, have unique flavors, are very resistant to diseases or pests, or have any other such exceptional qualities, cloning them is the best way to recreate these benefits in your next growth cycle.
You might think that simply purchasing seeds from the same strain is enough, but seeds have genetic differences in between them. Every single plant can be different from the last, even if it is the same strain. However, cloning a cannabis plant effectively mitigates these differences.
Faster Growing
What is also true about clothing cannabis plants is that it’s significantly reduces the time it takes for you to get to harvest.
Clones are already in their vegetative stage, technically speaking, and can therefore transition to flowering much more quickly. This results in a much shorter overall cultivation cycle, and ultimately means that to get your harvest much faster.
Cost-Effectiveness
Something else worth considering here is that cannabis clones are also much more cost effective.
Once you have gathered the materials you need for cloning, you can make dozens if not hundreds of clones all from a few mother plants. This is much more cost effective than constantly purchasing seeds and having to germinate them.
Uniform Growth and Consistent Harvests
If you take all of your cannabis clones from a single mother plant, which means that they are all exact copies of the mother, and they’re all identical to each other.
This means that they all grow in the exact same ways, which includes growth speed and size, and your harvests will be very consistent as well.
Efficient Use of Space
The other big benefit that you get from cloning cannabis plants is that you get to use space very efficiently. Germinating dozens or even hundreds of cannabis seeds can use up a whole lot of space, and issues that you don’t really have with cloning.
Materials You’ll Need to Make Cannabis Clones
Now that you know what cannabis clones are and why it might be beneficial to clone instead of growing from seed, let’s take a look at all of the materials you will need for this process.
The Mother Plant
Perhaps the most important thing you’ll need here is a mature cannabis plant, otherwise known as the mother plant.
Here, you want to choose a plant that is extremely healthy, does not have any pests or diseases, is fast growing, large, and very potent. You want to choose a mother cannabis plant that has all of the best beneficial properties that you are looking for in a cannabis plant. Choose carefully!
The Propagation Medium
You’ll then need the right kind of propagation medium. Most people choose to use something like rockwool cubes to propagate their clones.
However, peat pellets and soil also work well, as well as hydroponic and aeroponic systems for cloning. We highly recommend looking into each propagation medium to see which one is best used in which circumstances.
With that being said, rockwool cubes or peat pellets tend to work best for initial propagation.
You will then also eventually need real soil or a hydroponic system. You’ll have to transplant the cannabis clone from the propagation medium into its final resting space, the growing medium, after a certain period of time.
Shears
You’ll also require some basic cutting tools, such as a razor blade, shears, or scissors. Make sure that they are very sharp and sterilized.
They need to be very sharp so you don’t cause any unneeded damage to the clone or the mother plant. They also need to be sterilized so that no bacteria or diseases infect the new clones or the mother.
Rooting Hormone
Another extremely important part of the equation here is the rooting hormone. Rooting hormones come in both powder and gel forms. These are rubbed onto the cut stem of your new cannabis clone.
These rooting hormones are designed to stimulate root development in the cuttings, so that roots start to grow out of the stem. This is 100% necessary for a new cannabis plant to grow, because without a root system, your plant can’t absorb any water or nutrients.
A Container or Propagation Tray
Next, you’ll also need some kind of sterile and clean container to hold both the routing medium and the cuttings, with a propagation tray usually considered best.
A Humidity Dome
Cuttings require a lot of humidity to promote good root growth when they are first propagated and transplanted. Therefore, you need to get some kind of humidity Dome to cover the cuttings with, so you can keep humidity in.
Lights
The other part of the equation here is light. Your cuttings will require a lot of light to start growing properly, so you need to have the right kind of grow lights for cannabis. We strongly recommend looking into some kind of LED grow lights.
How to Clone Cannabis Plants — Step by Step Guide
With all of your materials gathered, you can now get to the meat and potatoes of it all, the cloning of your weed plant.
1. Choose the Mother Plant
Although we already discussed this in the above section, the reality is that you need to choose an extremely healthy mother plant to grow clones with. Make sure that there are no spider mites present, no fungal disease, no fungus gnats, and anything else of this sort.
Make sure that the mother plant you use is healthy, and then it also has all of the features and genetic traits that you want in your new plants.
Remember, taking a clones from a plant that is not healthy and doesn’t have the genetic traits you want is nothing more than a waste of time, something that many growers unfortunately figure out the hard way.
2. Prepare the Area
Whatever area you are working in, you need to make sure that it is 100% clean and sterile. You don’t want any dirt, bacteria, or other contaminants present.
This means that you also need to sterilize all of your cutting tools that will come into contact with the cannabis plants.
3. Take Cuttings from the Mother
A really important aspect here is being able to take the proper cuttings from the mother plants. Here, you want to select healthy branches, stems, or even the top of the plant.
Right below a node, where a leaf or branch grows, make a 45 degree cut. All of your cuttings or new clothes should be anywhere between four and six inches long, and should always have at least two sets of leaves. Do not take cuttings with any less than two sets of leaves.
4. Apply the Rooting Hormone
Exactly how you apply the rooting hormone to your cuttings depends on the product in question. There are gels, powders, and other types of liquids.
Generally speaking, you have to dip the stem of the cutting in the rooting hormone and then let it sit for a certain amount of time.
5. Transplant the Cuttings Into the Rooting Medium
Now that you have the rooting hormone on the cuttings of your clones, it’s time to put them into the rooting medium of choice. Remember, you can use peat pellets, soil, rockwool, or anything else of the sort.
What is important here however is that you insert the cutting about an inch and a half below the surface and gently pack it down. Once the clone is inside your rooting medium, you can provide them with a little bit of water.
The rooting medium, combined with some water, should allow the roots to grow big and strong. At this point, using a spray bottle should be more than enough. All you have to do here is keep the routine medium or the soil moist.
6. Provide Clones with Light
To encourage cuttings to grow their own roots, you need to provide the new clones with some light. Use an appropriate LED, fluorescent, or HPS grow light, located at the right distance from the cuttings, to encourage good root growth.
To grow clones, roots growing big and strong is what you need. Make sure that you don’t place the light too close, because very intense light can damage newly planted clones.
Only when you transplant the clone from the rooting medium into its growth medium do you want to provide it with more intense light.
7. Maintain Proper Conditions
Now it’s time to put that humidity Dome over the clone, so it remains nice and humid. To allow roots to grow properly, humidity levels should be around 75%.
Also, the temperature here is important, which should be between 70 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
8. Water Your Clones
You’ll need to keep the soil moist, and you’ll need to keep watering your newly rooted clones on a regular basis.
Moisture is extremely important, and without it, your new cannabis plants will die. However, also keep in mind that overwatering your cannabis plants can lead to root rot, which can kill the whole plant in a matter of days or weeks.
9. Transplant Clones into the Growth Medium
After several weeks of your newly planted clones growing in the vegetative stage, it’s time to transplant them into the growth medium.
Make sure that the new growth medium, which will most likely be soil, is moist and at the right temperature. You’ll also need a larger container, one that is up to 4 gallons in size, as this will allow your weed plants to grow big and strong.
Also, test the PH level of the soil before transplanting. You don’t want to cause transplant shock, because this will kill your newly planted clones within days. Gently tamp soil so that the newly planted clone is stable. However, don’t pack the soil down too hard, or else you might crush or suffocate the roots.
10. Adjust the Light Cycle
If you wish, you can now adjust the light cycle for a proper vegetative growth stage. Keep in mind that you can provide your newly planted clone with anywhere between 18 and 24 hours of light.
When it comes time to transition into the flowering stage, so your plant can produce buds and flower, reduce the amount of light to 12 hours per day. If you maintain proper conditions throughout this process, attaining high yields after a few months should be more than doable.
Conclusion
Now that you have a fully comprehensive and step-by-step guide of what you need to do to clone a weed plant, you should be able to do so at home with minimal effort and trouble. Just remember that marijuana plants can be relatively delicate, so you want to take great caution at every step of this process.
