seeds or clones

i just finished my first crop. i was thinkin about trying seeds. Are seeds better than clones.
I would appreciate some input from anyone with experience in either field.

Seeds take much longer, but will produce tighter nodal length and more weight. Clones will grow way way way faster. You want to grow your mother plants from seed and cut clones from those.

Clones are all duplicates of the mother, so they are all the same. Seeds will have variations of the strain, which can give you some nice stuff, some shit stuff, and some in between too. If you have a great mother, then its better than seeds. Otherwise, seeds until you find one you like!

Clones grow faster than seeds? I didnt know that............

grady6969 said:

i just finished my first crop. i was thinkin about trying seeds. Are seeds better than clones.
I would appreciate some input from anyone with experience in either field.

Click to expand...

No "seeds are not better than clones" - But they each have their place.

I would say for a new grower that if I had access to clones I would use them for awhile.

Then make clones from you clones, until you feel comfortable doing it.

When you grow from seed, you will need to:

1) germinate them, takes a couple of days
2) grow them out for 4 weeks (to let them mature)
3) Sex them (unless you have reliable feminized seeds) which means, flip to 12/12 until you can tell the sex, the throw out the males.

At this point you could keep going and flower them. So it takes 5-6 weeks to start a seed cycle. (a real grower would now clone these to make more and them veg the clones)

This may be difficult for a newer grower.

OR - You could buy a clone.

1) veg it for a few weeks.
2) throw into flower.

So for most it is a timing thing. It takes a little longer to grow from seed generally.

I do both

I wouldn't say either one is better than the other . I personally grow from clones , but that is to make sure that I will always be grow females. If I get a clone from a female ...... it will always be female. With seeds , I may have to plant a few and weed out the males. Thats okay if you have the seeds and space. Clones do vegg faster because they are bigger when you take them . Flowering time will always be the same either way. 8 to 12 weeks . Some things you can't change. With seeds , you can also be more positive about the genitics. With clones , you have to rely on the info from who you got it from . People are always changing the names of their strains to sound better and improve sales and bragging rights. Maybe start your first batch with clones to get going faster , and when the time is right , plants a few seeds on the side . You can eventually make your own clones.

I like seeds, don't have room for cloning.

Seeds produce a tap root. Clones never develop a tap root. But hey they both do well in the right environment. I like both ways, if I have the time I grow from seeds, if I'm in a bind and need it fast I grow clones. I'm never in a bind so I grow both, no preferences on either one, as they say "it's all good".

Dunno which is best. Depends a lot on you and how you like to run your grow. Do you want to experiment with phenotypes or do you want predictability?

I will say germination and seedling are the most vulnerable stages of a plant's life. I think this is where most plants are lost. Also, it's usually no big deal to lose one clone since you can get a duplicate easy enough.

Even if you do grow from seed, at some point you will find a plant thats a keeper and want to clone her.

There is a lot of debate about this. I read something by Ed Rosenthal the other day that said neither is better. Seeds make better mothers and clones grow faster. Aside from that potency and yield and blah blah blah, is all debatable.

Are seeds better than clones? That depends entirely on what you are trying to do.

Advantages of clones:

-You know exactly what you're going to get, since they presumably come from a plant that you're already familiar with and know the sex of. With seeds, some of them may be non-viable, and some of them may be males.
-Because clones from the same mother are all genetically similar, a row or even room of them grown under the same conditions will all grow to more or less the exact same height and at the same rate. If you're growing commercial crops and want to fill a room (eg sea of green) with one kind of plant, clones are a big advantage. With seeds, unless you're using a true-breeding strain (and lots of commerical strains are NOT true-breeding) you may expect some differences in phenotypes even between all-female'sibling' seeds taken from the same mother and sold in the same package.
-Because clones are taken from mature plants, they're generally faster to get into flowering. Most seeds take at least a few weeks before you can flower them.

Disadvantages of clones?
-More work to create them, also requiring a separate mother plant and cloning area (vs just planting a seed).
-You can only take clones from mother plants you actually have access to. If you want to try a new strain, unless you happen to have a friendly grower nearby who can give/sell you a clone of that strain, you can't start with a clone. Very few growers have that luxury.
-Some strains (eg autoflowering ones) may be difficult or impractical to clone.

It really depends on the plant and it's genitics, I here this is a seedling started at the same time of a cutting, ok the seedling is my blueberry make crossed to my female bubblegum to create bubbleberry or berrybubble the cutting is skywalker which is mazar x blueberry ok see the little tabs for my bb

Here is my BB now View attachment 1816961notice the skywalker clone in the back . Here is another seedling that grew like a rocket launch, thought a boy but it is a girl View attachment 1816966 she is over 2 feet and the skywalker clones are not much bigger at all. It depens on the plant.

Also what clone sellers will not tell you is yes the clone takes on the genitics of the mother, but it does lose "vigor" so depending on if the clone is a clone of a clone the less vigor it will have, something to take into account.
As my skywalker are still growing and I was able to flower my bubbleberry and she grew a ft in flower, the topped one is still growing in flower and as you see they we just little bitty seedlings with my skywalker clones.

Here is a seedling of my Cyan Kush it is about 6 inches tall and thick stemed fat leafs, taking after the OG kush.
You can see the skywalker leaf in the backround, this bomb seedling is awsome.


So as you can see it depends on the plants and how many times a clone was cloned.