Tough Choice: Seeds or Clones
January 15th, 2009 by SilvioThat’s right, we’re going to cover the topic that caused quite the debate in the comments of my ‘First Time Growers: Common Mistakes‘ post.
As soon as you’ve started the process to grow your own crop, decisions need to be made. The first and most important one is what foundation to start from. Are you going to grow from seeds or rooted clones.
The decision is not an easy one, as both growing options have their respective advantages and disadvantages. You will have to think about growing space, crop risk and turn around time.
Here are some useful pieces of information that will help kick-start your journey to cultivating bliss.
Clones – Pros:
- The time factor. If you go for clones, you will harvest sooner, therefore more often and end up with more harvest.
- You will be able to turn one of your clones into a new mother plant.
- You will get to know what makes your plants grow faster and produce more yield.
- Every strain is different, but once you figured out what’s good for the one you grow, the results will get better every generation.
- If you really have to, you could start flowering a clone as soon as it’s rooted.
- Poor harvest, but very short turnaround time.
- If you make your own clones, you (almost) eliminate the risk of disease.
Clones – Cons:
- Unlike seeds you won’t be able to buy clones online.
- High risk of inheriting problems from the last grower: Root rot, spider mites, powdery mildew, etc. This can kill your entire crop, if not treated early and accurately.
- Unhealthy clones may die or remain in shock for an extended period.
- Shipped clones may be in shock and take weeks to recover. There are many stories of medical clones shipped without any protection and arriving flat!
- Clones are very, very sensitive. You can kill them easily with too much light, and too much nutrition.
- Since you will end up with almost only female plants, you won’t be able to breed new strains yourself. Plants going hermaphrodite is also possible with unstable clones.
Seeds – Pros:
- Seeds you bought off a seed bank will give you a very clear picture of what you can expect regarding strain, yield, quality and flowering time.
- You can try to breed your own super-strain since you will have some male plants.
- Even feminized seeds will produce a certain amount of male plants.
- Hybrid vigor. A female plant grown from seed, is known to produce more buds in most cases. Strains can lose potency over time, if cloned to often. Sometimes it’s a good idea to introduce a new plant into your garden, and start cloning again from there.
- Seeds should produce healthy plants, free of disease and pests.
Seeds – Cons
- Cost. Not only are good seeds not cheap, since they will take a lot longer to finish, electricity bills will be higher.
- There is always a chance you get ripped of if you chose to buy from the wrong seed shop. And seeds being seized by customs is also not unheard of.
- Not all seeds will germinate and only 50% of the unfeminized seeds will be female. Feminized seeds may produce up to 90% females. Only female seeds will produce female mothers, from which productive clones can be taken and flowered.
- It may take many seed packs to discover an excellent mother.
- Growing from seeds takes a long time, a lot of labor and money before you see good results.
Ok, that should give you a good idea on the pros and cons for both seeds and rooted clones. Now choose wisely, and go and spread your wings as a weed farmer!
