Seed vs Clone vs Tissue Culture: Which is best?

Growing from seed, a clone or tissue – what’s best?

The answer to this question ultimately lies with the type of grower you are.

-Are you growing just a couple of cannabis plants for personal use?
-Are you legally growing in larger quantities?
-Are you a major commercial grower specialising in legalised cannabis for medical reasons?

Currently there are four ways for germplasm collection, germplasm being that ‘stuff’ which you can grow a plant from, either seeds or ‘cuttings’ from existing plants.

So what are the four main ways of propagating cannabis plants?

From seed, cloning from a seeded mother, tissue culture, and a clone from a mother created by tissue culture.

Have we lost you? We’re not huge fans of complex botany either, but it’s still useful to get an idea of what this is all about.

We all know what growing something from seed involves, so we’ll skip that bit, other than to say that it is the cheapest way to grow cannabis but takes the most time and has the most variable results.

Cloning from a seeded mother simply means taking cuttings from a growing plant, which subsequently reduces variations found with growing from seed.

The advantage of cloning is that the new plant is already at stage three of its development, so you are bypassing the first two, most dangerous stages of growth.

Cloning like this requires certain skills and unlike animal cloning, cloned plants aren’t always identical.

Time to cultivation is much quicker than growing from seed, though knowing when to take cuttings from the mother plant requires experience.

Next, to create an even better clone, you need to take original cuttings and grow clones in a totally sterile environment, from which you then take further clones, which are known as tissue-culture plantlets

Finally, you can then take clones from the tissue-culture-derived mother.

Yes, it seems to get more complicated, but in simple terms, tissue culture plantlets are created specifically for either growing cannabis or to become mother plants to new clones.

Because the clone from the tissue culture-derived mother is a clone of a clone and all created under sterile conditions, the final clones in this chain are going to produce plants of a very similar quality.

However, as you will appreciate, when you start cloning, not only does it take longer to produce cannabis, but it also becomes more costly and invariably requires more space.

Hopefully you’re still with us, and if you are why not share a little of your own experience in the comment section below, and of course if you enjoyed this video give us a like, and consider subscribing, so you too can become a cannabis expert!