Differences between cannabis seeds and cuttings

When you grow marijuana, you can start with seeds or cuttings. But what’s the difference between them? Is one option better than the other? Choosing one method or the other will determine both the development of the plants and their yielding capacity, as well as the amount of care that they’ll require. Find out all of this below as we discuss what these two growing techniques entail.

Growing your own cannabis has many advantages and is likely to be one of the most satisfying things you will ever do. And, although learning to do it correctly takes time and patience, you’ll probably be able to turn it into a real passion with just a little dedication.

However, before getting down to it, it all comes down to one single question: How do I start? Seed or cutting? This is a choice that all cannabis growers, whether rookies or pros, always need to make. And each has its own set of benefits and drawbacks.

What are cannabis seeds?

Like other flowering plants, female cannabis plants can produce seeds that showcase a variation of their own genetics. These ovular seeds are the size of a peppercorn and can be planted to develop into fully mature marijuana plants.

Seeds take a month to germinate before they move on to the seedling stage. Nonetheless, this slow beginning on the ground usually conceals substantial underground progress. When you grow from seeds, the cannabis plant produces a pivot root that penetrates deep into the growing medium, where the secondary roots start sprouting sideways to cover as wide an area as possible.

This root system allows the plant to access as much water and nutrients as possible, reaching far underground when there’s no resources available on the surface. An extensive radicular system also helps anchor the plants to the ground, which in turn supports their vertical growth and prevents them from being uprooted.

What’s more, the height and structure of plants grown from seeds of the same parents may vary as they adapt to different environments. Some thrive in conditions where others fail, which allows growers to select the best male and female plants for breeding. This way, the strains are developed through a non-natural selection process to obtain the best possible marijuana varieties.

What are cannabis cuttings?

Cannabis cuttings are clones from a living cannabis plant, which growers call a mother plant. They have exactly the same genetics as the mother, so they develop the same features, which can be reproduced many times before the plants succumb to stress.

Cuttings taken from the same mother should grow at a similar pace and produce uniform specimens, which in turn enables the growing space to be maximised so that the plants receive the same amount of lighting. This prevents the risk of some plants exhausting the resources of others and limiting their growth. Although cuttings don’t grow as vigorously with this technique, it provides greater certainty, and the end result is more predictable, which is something that’s required for commercial grows, for instance.

These are the basic concepts. Let’s now have a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of each growing option.

Purple Kush x Black Domina

Purple Kush

Purple Kush is a popular strain of cannabis known for its deep purple color and potent sedative effects. Purple Kush is a strain that’s born to thrive. You’ll be able to enjoy dramatic flowering in 60 days, dazzling your garden with a festival of colours and aromas, while purple tones will begin to appear in swollen buds that are loaded with resin from the fourth week.

Growing from cannabis seeds

Growing from seeds is the most traditional way of growing marijuana plants, especially among home growers. Besides, cannabis seeds also have several benefits which make them an attractive option for both beginners and experts:

• Seeds are more easily accessible: one of the best points about seeds is how easy it is to get them. You can buy seeds online directly from seed banks like Kannabia’s, and then receive them discreetly by mail in your home.
• Seeds offer purer genetics: they are the result of sexual reproduction, so they inherit genetic features from both parents and also develop certain genetic variations. This means that you can choose the best plant, or the one that you like the most, according to its characteristics.
• You can get feminised seeds that have a 99% chance of producing female plants. The possibility of producing male plants is removed from the equation, which makes seeds the easiest method ever for growing cannabis.
• Multiple seed types. In addition to the hundreds of marijuana varieties that you can find on the market if you’re growing feminised seeds, you also have the option of using regular or autoflowering seeds.

Growing from marijuana cuttings

When you grow from a cutting rather than from a seed, the genetics of the plant is more guaranteed, but you also have to deal with a more complicated cultivation process. Generally speaking, we can say that this is a more advanced option when compared to the use of seeds, but it also provides multiple benefits, including the following:

• You always obtain the expected genetics: nothing’s left to chance with cuttings, so the results are always more consistent in terms of structure, cannabinoids, and terpenes. This is great if what you’re after is uniform grows.
• Cuttings from mother plants are always female: you can rest assured that they will always produce female plants. These are exact genetic copies of the mother, so there’s no chance they could ever be males.
• Cuttings are quicker. Seeds take longer to become a fully mature plant because they must go through every step of the growing process (germination, seedling, vegetative, and flowering stages). Rooted cuttings start from the vegetative phase, whereas seeds start from scratch.

Nonetheless, it is also important to point out that cuttings present some drawbacks that marijuana seeds don’t have, such as:

• They can be hard to find: not everyone can get high-quality cuttings. These are definitely harder to find than quality cannabis seeds.
• Plants from cuttings are more delicate. This is because cuttings never grow a primary root, but instead develop adventitious root systems, which don’t originate from the embryo radicle but from somewhere else in the plant. These fibrous roots lack a strong central pivot root, which makes the cuttings more fragile and less resilient in comparison to marijuana plants grown from seeds.
• Cuttings sometimes come with excess baggage. If the mother plant carried pests, diseases, or mould, then its cuttings will also have them. And if the mother had some genetic problem, so will the cuttings, since they are exact genetic copies of the mother. If you get cuttings from an external source, it might be best to quarantine them before allowing them to share the space with other plants.

Seeds vs cuttings: What’s the best option?

In short, we can conclude that even though cuttings are intriguing in certain respects, growing cannabis from seeds is more interesting, more natural, and generally much easier for most people. Therefore, they’re the best choice for first-time growers.

Also, many growers claim that it’s not the same to watch a part of a mother plant grow than to grow something new from a seed, which can be really satisfying. Besides, the legal element also needs to be given consideration: contrary to what happens with marijuana seeds, whose sale is legal, the distribution of cuttings is totally forbidden. This in turn affects the amount of cannabis varieties that can be found on the market.

Therefore, as long as you purchase your cannabis seeds from a quality seed bank like Kannabia’s, you can be sure that you’re getting the best possible genetics. You’ll also have access to a wider variety of strains, and you’ll know exactly what you’re planting. Because outstanding grows start with epic quality seeds. And the full Kannabia Seeds range is waiting for you to prove it!