What is a Clone & Why is Cloning a Good Skill to Have?

Learning the Proper Way to Clone

Cloning is a popular method of propagating cannabis; it allows you to ensure a higher degree of quality control and predictability when raising your crop, as well as allowing you to bypass the lengthy process of growing from seed. Although seed is a good way to start a grow initially, the process of germination and growth from seed, including the weeding out of unwanted male plants, hermaphrodites and weak females makes growing a cannabis clone an attractive alternative.

In addition to being able to cultivate a crop of entirely-female plants, cloning will ensure a uniformity of growth among your plants, so you can expect to harvest similar quantities and potency of medicine from each plant grown in the same conditions. After all the other factors in your grow are taken into consideration, the quality and quantity of cannabis that your plants will yield largely comes down to genetics.

With cloning, once you’ve identified a female plant with robust, healthy growth and high resin / THC production, you can keep her alive and propagate genetically-identical clones from her for years to come. Timing the growth cycles and harvesting time of your crop, adjusting your nutrient blend to be perfectly suited to the needs of your specific strain, and maintaining perfect light, heat and humidity levels is all made easier when you grow a uniform crop of clones.

Perhaps most importantly, whether you choose to grow from clones regularly or not, being able to clone your plants is an immensely useful skill to have simply because it allows for asexual reproduction. So long as you know how to clone your plants, you won’t be totally reliant upon seeds or having access to pollen from a male plant in order to continue your crop. In this way, someone with only one or two female plants can still propagate a new crop and continue to grow and harvest their crop successfully, practically indefinitely.

There are very few downsides to cloning, and it is widely practiced by growers.

Downsides of Choosing to Clone

One of the few downsides to cloning is the resultant lack of genetic diversity among your crop. Not only might you get bored of smoking the same strain of bud all the time, but if a disease, mold, infection or pest gets into your grow and afflicts your plants, it can quickly spread to all the plants in your grow. To mitigate this factor, choose a mother plant that has demonstrated hardiness, resiliency and resistance to mold, infection, pests and other growing hazards.

To further avoid the potential of infecting or infesting your grow, be sure to sterilize and clean all the equipment you use (especially if you reuse equipment between grows), and try to wash your hands before entering your grow room or handling your plants.

What is a Clone & Why is Cloning a Good Skill to Have?

How to Care for Your Marijuana Clones

Marijuana Clones and How to Care for Them

It is very important to understand how to care for your marijuana clones.

Caring for your marijuana clones is easy once you’ve had a bit of practice, and some strains are so easy to clone that you can practically set them and forget them. But as a general rule of thumb, here are some of the basic guidelines for taking care of your plants and ensuring the best survival rates for your new clones.

1. Prevention is worth a pound of cure, so protect your clones from the potential of disease, mold or a bug infestation by sterilizing your cloning area and tools before use. You can use a water and bleach combination (10 parts water for one part bleach) to wipe down and sterilize the walls, tabletop or other area that you are growing in. Also use sterile tools for cutting your clones, so as to avoid the possibility of infection at the cut-site.


2. Work fast so that your clones go from being on your mother plant to dipped in their rooting hormone and plugged into the rock wool cubes or other growing medium with as little down time in between as possible.


3. Keep the temperature stable, generally between 75 – 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Fluctuations and extremes in temperature will stress your new clones and can kill them.


4. Maintain humidity levels of approximately 75 – 95%, especially during the early days of rooting your new clones; if the growing medium dries out too much you risk damaging or killing the fragile new roots your clone is growing.


5. Use a heating pad beneath your plug tray or the tray holding your rock wool cubes to ensure that the new roots are kept warm; new roots thrive in warmer environments, so if you have a heating pad under the tray but the rest of the room is only 70 degrees, you can still achieve good results rooting your new clones.


6. Reduce the amount of foliage your new clones have to support; without a root system, it is hard for your cuttings to focus energy and nutrients on photosynthesis and you want them to be focused on developing new roots anyway, so remove or trim any large fan leaves on your cutting. Smaller leaves may remain, so don’t strip your cutting to a twig.

Marijuana clones are important in increasing the efficiency of your grow operation.

Other Considerations

Follow these basic recommendations and keep your plants under cool fluorescents or low-wattage MH or HPS lights, and you should have healthy clones with roots in 1 – 2 weeks. Some strains are harder to clone, or slower, but if you don’t see any roots by ~ 3 weeks, you may have a problem. Cuttings that haven’t rooted after 3 weeks or more are unlikely to become viable clones, so you’ll have to take new cuttings and start over if that happens.

How to Care for Your Marijuana Clones

Aeroponic Systems and Marijuana

Aeroponic Systems

Aeroponic systems allow growers to produce great marijuana with quick turnover.

Whether you’re looking for a more reliable system for use in cloning your cannabis crop, or you’re interested in producing the maximum number of clones possible, aeroponic systems are a great resource for the serious grower. Aeroponic systems are especially useful when you want to root clones from a strain that doesn’t usually respond well to traditional cloning methods. Properly managed, most aeroponic systems require little or no oversight after initial setup, and they can produce viable roots in as little as 6 – 8 days.

One of the best aeroponic systems available, and admittedly one of the more expensive, is the EZ Clone system, available from many online retailers including Amazon. The EZ Clone system comes in several sizes, with room for 30, 60 or 120 clones accordingly. For optimum results with the EZ Clone system, be sure to clean it thoroughly between uses and maintain a pH balance of roughly 6.0 – 6.3 for the water / nutrient blend.

The EZ Clone 30 has room for up to 30 clones and comes with a 12 gallon reservoir, so it’s a fairly sizeable setup, and the larger EZ Clone systems come with bigger reservoirs. But if you aren’t ready to invest ~ $250 – $300 in an aeroponic system like the EZ Clone setups, you can still experiment with aeroponics on an affordable scale.

Bloom Brothers Cloner Bucket

Knowing how to grow marijuana with Aeroponic Systems is a great skill to have.

The Bloom Brothers Cloner Bucket, for instance, comes with everything you need to get started with up to 18 clones in a compact 3.5 gallon bucket, and it costs as little as $65. Cuttings should start showing roots in 5 – 10 days, and the Bloom Bucket comes with neoprene inserts to use in lieu of net pots or other cumbersome materials, as well as a decent pump and 15ml of Clonex rooting gel to help get your clones started on the right track.

Whether you opt for a larger system or a smaller aeroponic bucket or bubbler bucket-style system, the results of aeroponic rooting and even full aeroponic growth through the vegetative and flowering cycles, can be quite rewarding. Certainly, as a method for quickly and reliably establishing robust roots, an aeroponic system seems to win hands-down over its competition.

Remember to use a good rooting gel (Clonex is far and away the most popular) in conjunction with your aeroponic system. While you can certainly get good results from an aeroponic system with no extra help, the rooting gel will speed up root production by an average of 2 – 4 days, depending on your specific circumstances.

Aeroponic Systems and Marijuana