Cloning Outdoor Marijuana Plants

If you have ever had a successful harvest, a strain of marijuana you particularly like, you need some more seeds, or any other reason to continue one of your plants, you need to consider cloning your outdoor marijuana plants. After one successful season, it’s always a good idea to clone your marijuana plants so that you can have more successful harvests in the future.

Cloning outdoor marijuana plants is useful for two main reasons: it allows you to produce more seeds, and it takes advantage of a particularly successful plant you may have had.  When you encounter a particularly good strain, you are certainly going to want to hang onto it and keep producing more like it. Cloning is the way to do this. In this article, we will cover the basics of cloning, along with how and why you might want to clone for sex.

How to start cloning

Although it may seem like something from a science fiction movie at first, cloning is, in fact, a fairly easy process that has been going on for as long as cultivation of other plants has been around. The method is simple: put a cutting from any plant and putting it into the ground and having them root.

This is the principle for plants that are not marijuana. While the process is the same for marijuana plants, there are a few further steps you are going to want to take in order to make sure that yours are cloned successfully.

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Choosing a outdoor cannabis plant that is younger (between two and three months old) is usually best, although as long as the plant is mature, it should be able to be cloned. The process is the same for older plants, except that you will have to be paying closer attention to what the plant needs in the first few weeks, especially with regards to water.

How to clone marijuana plants

Once you have chosen a plant to clone, your first step should be to clip one of the branches. Pick one that is closer to the bottom and has larger leaves. Cut the branch at an angle, like you might to with fresh flowers before putting them in a vase.

Put the clipping into lukewarm water straight away, then transport it to your greenhouse or nursery to prepare it for rooting. You can use rooting cubes or small peat pots, which can be bought at any garden center or plant store (click here for the best online grow shop). You could also find mixtures that are soilless and usually made of gel or liquid, which are diluted with mineral water or another kind of water that doesn’t come from the tap.

Another option for rooting your cutting is simply to buy a rooting powder or gel and roll the branch in that. Try a few of these options and see which one works best for you.

After you have clipped and rooted your cutting, you should be sure to keep them happy and healthy from that point on. Spray water on your plants every so often to make sure they are staying moist while also ensuring that the airflow is good, but not so good that it dries out your cuttings.

Try this idea, taken from a San Francisco grower: you can create a sort of tent out of freezer bags that can be resealed. You can easily allow a small amount of constant air during the day, without the cutting receiving so much that it dries out.

You can also easily spray the cuttings with water and keep the resulting humidity inside your plastic tent. Because the material is clear, you can (and should) also expose your cutting to light for about 12 hours per day, with the exception of when you are cloning for sex. Roots should develop after several weeks, at which point you can replant them into the ground.

Cloning for sex

If you are specifically cloning for females, you will need to take one more step in the process. Do not keep light on your plants for 12 hours per day, but rather you should deprive them of light in order to initiate the flowering process. Make sure these cuttings were taken from plants that have already had at least three or four weeks of vegetative growth (which is identifying through seeing calyx development) and are mature enough to flower.

The plants should have complete, uninterrupted darkness for twelve or more hours, for a solid two weeks. Be very certain this is done perfectly because if any amount of light reaches them for any length of time, the process will not work and you will need to start all over again.

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After two weeks, you will start to see little blossoms in your cuttings, assuming you have done everything correctly. Continue the flowering process further, and you will soon be able to distinguish between your male and female plants. Dispose of the male plants unless you need them for seeding and transplant the female ones.

After less than one week of the transplant, your plants will go back to their vegetative growth, assuming you are able to provide them with thirteen hours or more of sunlight. If you are not seeing any results, try exposing them to light for 48 straight hours or more, and then you can allow them to get back into sync with the normal, seasonal patterns of light.

Thanks for reading. Please leave comments or questions below and don’t forget to download my free grow bible

Robert