Fall is officially here for the year and with its arrival brings many wonderful things.
Leaves changing, pumpkin spice everything, Halloween, cozy nights, corn mazes, and most importantly harvest time for this year’s outdoor crop!
October, or as we call it here at Cannasaver, ‘Croptober’, is our favorite time of the year.
For us, it means there’ll be a whole bunch of new weed deals for the month and some brand new strains to test out. There’s nothing better than getting your hands and fingers sticky from trimming up those tasty buds with your buds before they are hung and dried.
The smell alone is worth setting some time aside to trim some pot. But maybe you didn’t have a chance to grow your own crop this year or maybe you didn’t know where to begin your growing journey?
Well, fear not, friends!
We here at Cannasaver have done our research and are bringing you all the information you’ll need to decide for next year how to begin your garden by starting some seeds or acquiring some already rooted weed clones or cuttings.
Each option has its own benefits and ranges in level of difficulty to get your baby plants into flowering giants.
Has this ever happened to you?
You get a bag of some dank, dank chronic and while smoking it, you stumble upon a few seeds hidden in the tasty flowers so you set them aside and save them because the ganja was so dank that you want to grow some yourself.
Great!
The first step you’ll want to do is to get the seed to germinate and begin its very first root.
To germinate and begin your seeds, you’ll want to get a paper towel wet and squeeze out excess water so that it’s damp but not soaking.
Next, set your seeds inside the paper towel and place the paper towel between two plates so the paper towel is sitting in a small, dark dome between the two plates.
Put the plates in a warm 70-80 degree area and wait around 3 days to a week, checking the seeds once a day after the 3-day mark and keeping the paper towels wet with a spray bottle of water.
You should see the husk of the seed break open on one end and a small white root begins to show. This is called a taproot. Once this root is present, you can now put your seed into soil or your preferred growing medium.
You’ll want to start small with your pot size and increase the size as your baby seed grows bigger.
The coolest part of starting your own seeds is that the weed you grow from it and the cuttings that come from your plant are exclusive and no one else will have that exact strain unless you give out the cuttings.
Some growers take this to heart and protect their signature strains under lock and key.
The other benefit is you are able to pick the best traits from many different seeds you start and select the most vigorous, healthy, and best yielding strain by testing multiple seeds from the same bag.
If you’re looking for a great seed deal check out our friends over at Herbs4you!
They have a sale going on with their feminized seeds in some fire flavors for you to choose from.
For some though starting from seeds can be too lengthy a process and want to have a faster turnover from start to finish.
For many, the alternative to starting from seeds is to buy clones or cuttings from a grower or shop.
A clone is an already-rooted weed plant taken from a "mother" plant.
This is done by cutting one of the branches off a larger plant or “Mother plant” and placing the stem end down into either rock wool or an aeroponic cloning machine.
Both methods require a rooting hormone to be used in order to stimulate the plant's natural ability to grow fresh healthy roots.
The process usually takes 7-10 days depending on the strain you are taking the cutting from and the conditions that it is being kept in.
Ideally, the temperature should be around 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
The newly-taken cuttings must be kept moist and hydrated to prevent them from drying out before the roots have appeared.
Plants are able to absorb moisture from their stomata located at the leaf nodes.
Perhaps the best part of getting clones vs. seeds is that you know what you are getting as far as a strain goes. You have a proven winner and healthy stallion genetics thriving in those babies. If you can get them from a source such as from a featured dispensary on our site, then you know what you are getting will throw down that hot fire dank dank everyone wants to grow.
You are also able to skip the Phenotype testing that takes a whole grow cycle to perfect and determine which plant you’ll want to keep for your "mother" plant.
For many large recreational growers, clones are the way of life.
Having healthy clones to start a crop is the difference between a high-yielding, vigorous, stanky-danky garden full of thriving beautiful cannabis plants vs. a wimpy garden with some puny nuggets barely producing any sweet trichomes.
When shopping for your new babies we recommend checking out our deals on clones around your area.
We recommend starting with healthy established clones for your first garden.
Generally speaking, you’ll run into fewer health issues down the line starting from genetics that have already been tested by other growers.
You’ll cut 2-3 weeks off your grow cycle by having already rooted established babies to start your garden rather than waiting for seedlings to sprout.
Ask your budtender or grower for something mold-resistant, high yielding, and then take your pick of Sativa or Indica that will float your balloon as high as a giraffe's necktie.
Look at that thumb turn green!