Different ways to start your cannabis grow

Firstly, ensure germinating cannabis seeds is legal in your location. Always adhere to the law!

When beginning your cannabis grow, you can start with seeds or clones. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages. Each is suitable for different growing methods and techniques. They are used for both commercial and personal growth.

In this article, we cover all options and explore the pros and cons of each method. This information helps you decide what’s best for your next grow.

Seeds have long been a popular choice for starting materials for all plants, cannabis included. Before growing seedless cannabis, seeds were reliable and readily available. Initially, growers did not understand how pollination impacts cannabis plant quality, leading to male plants growing with females. Male pollen pollinated females, leading to abundant seed production.

By separating females from males, growers realised their harvest quality improved. However, they still struggled to identify and remove males before pollination. Outdoor growing meant planting many plants to combat police, thieves, and environmental elements. Various locations and collected strains sometimes produced hermaphrodite plants. Fortunately, growers learned that hermaphrodite seeds resulted in female plants.

Hermaphrodite plants have both male and female flowers and can self-pollinate. This results in female seeds only. Growers developed methods to induce this trait, including spraying colloidal silver on female plants during the flowering stage. This results in plants developing pollen sacks filled with female pollen. When applied to female flowers, these seeds produce exclusively female plants. Consequently, commercial availability of cannabis seeds soared, with millions of seeds sold worldwide.

Regular seeds result from male pollination of female plants. These seeds have a 50/50 chance of being male or female. Male plants are usually unwanted in most gardens, used only for breeding. They are often relocated to avoid pollination or discarded.

The main advantage or disadvantage of regular seeds is their different phenotypes. Most strains exhibit at least two different phenotypes, differing in some way. Sometimes these differences are drastic. Seeds can provide a special plant or one you'd prefer not to have.

Feminized seeds provide 99.99% female plants. However, contamination risks exist, especially in large seed banks and grows with multiple stages. Feminizing involves pollinating female plants with female pollen from a hermaphrodite plant. This means the strain is second generation, not an exact genetic match of the first.

If not stabilised and bred correctly, these seeds may show hermaphroditism. The biggest advantage of feminized seeds is their commercial value and usability. Not worrying about male removal is advantageous for new and beginner growers.

Clones, or cuttings, are a popular choice for starting a grow. Each clone is an identical genetic copy of the mother plant. This ensures clones have the same genetic makeup as the mother plant. The same environmental conditions produce the same cannabinoid and terpene profile, yield, and quality.

Maintaining mother plants in vegetation indefinitely allows for consistent harvest quality. Eventually, clones are inbred for new mother plants as they lose vigour. Clone-only strains have been available for more than a decade. Clones are stable and reliable, best for large commercial grows and medicinal products needing consistent quality. Unlike seeds, clones are exact copies, allowing commercial strain availability without prior stabilisation or feminisation.

• Clones have a short vegetation phase.
• Autoflowering strains are not usually cloned.
• Autoflowering strains are available as seeds only.

Tissue culture is not new in agriculture but relatively new in cannabis at a larger scale. It maintains or grows plant cells, tissues, or organs in a sterile environment. Small plant tissue pieces can produce hundreds of identical clones.

Tissue culture improves both seeds and clones as starting materials. It's quicker than seeds, offers better pest and disease resistance, and gives growers total crop control. All tissue culture samples start as a small cutting. The sample is trimmed and sterilised to kill pathogens. Once cleaned, it goes into a dense nutrient culture, typically an agar gel with nutrients, hormones, and sugars.

Different hormone mixtures trigger various development stages, such as rooting, vegetative growth, or flowering. The main benefits of tissue culture include storing genetic libraries in clean, safe environments without keeping mother plants alive.

Instead of dedicating a room to genetics, tissue culture stores everything on one shelf. It cleans genetic material of pathogens like viruses or bacteria infecting mother plants or clones during growth. Healthy, clean plants avoid energy wastage battling infections, improving yield and plant production.

Tissue culture isn't just for commercial grows but also home growers and hobby breeders. Home kits enable anyone to produce new plants and store genetic libraries. Sterilisation is key, with everything cleaned during the process. Tissue culture can help with lower germination rates, increasing older seeds' germination chances.