Preserving Your Genetics: Growing Cannabis Right
By Ryan Cross/Grower/Breeder
One of the most important decisions to make before you plant your seeds is, what seed to choose. Choosing the right genetics is a factor of what you hope to get out of the plant and what plant will do well in our climate. This may seem like a daunting task given the amount of varieties that are on the market, but choosing well could be the difference between harvesting pounds and harvesting ounces.
I recommend setting some time aside to conduct a little research prior to making your purchase. Ask yourself what your overall goal is, what are you expecting come harvest time? Are you looking more for quantity or quality? Are you looking to treat a specific illness? Whatever your goal is, there is most likely a strain out their for you. If not, you always have the option of breeding different strains until you get what you’re looking for. If you choose to create something new I would suggest studying and gathering as much information as possible to increase your odds of achieving your goal. Breeding takes time and patience, preserving something that is already established is a lot easier.
There are three main varieties of Cannabis, indica, sativa and ruderalis. Then you have your hybrid strains, which are a certain percentage of both indica and sativa. For example Girl Scout Cookies, which is 60% indica and 40% sativa, would be labeled as an indica dominant hybrid. Here in New York, indica dominant strains tend to be more popular with growers because of their shorter flowering period. This is usually anywhere from 55-70 days, some sativas can take more than 90 days to flower, which could put you into November or December, depending on whether you started your seedling indoors before the last frost. In addition, we all know how unpredictable the weather can be in New York! However, if you prefer sativa dominant Cannabis, look for strains with a flowering period of 63-70 days, such as, Hulkberry which is 65% sativa.
Once you have settled on the right strain and grown your beautiful plant, you might not want to let it go. Your options would be to preserve some pollen from a male plant and control pollinate some of your flower to breed seed or an easier method would be to take a cutting of your new friend. Taking cuttings requires you to keep the plant alive over winter and flower it out the following year. You can take several cuttings off of one plant. To do this, you will have to be set up to bring your plant indoors over winter.
After your planted seeds grow out of the seedling stage and hit their big growth period, also known as the vegetative stage, start looking for appealing characteristics such as spacing between nodes, growth rate, color, even aroma of the plant and many other factors. If you like what you see when they reach a healthy size, I suggest taking a fewcuttings of each. Taking more than one cutting will greatly increase your odds of preserving a beautiful mother plant. Each cutting that survives will be an offshoot of the original plant, its mother.
After the cuttings take root, let them grow a few weeks. These rooted cuttings will become your mother plants. Then place them outside with your other plants, most of which should be in the flowering stage at this point. Allow the cuttings to start showing signs of flowering and then bring them indoors and put them on vegetative indoor growth cycle. The point of doing this is when you return them outside next year, they will tend to flower earlier. However, you can keep them indoors the entire time versus putting them outside. Once the new grow season starts, you can once again take more cuttings from your now established mother plants (that you have kept alive indoors through the winter) depending on how many total plants you want to grow that year. If you have taken the step to allow those mothers to flower and then return to vegetative state, each of these new cuttings you take will also tend to flower earlier. After the new cuttings have rooted, you can then return the whole operation to the sunny outdoors and sequester some more carbon.
Pictured above is a clone and a seed plant of the same genetics placed outside at the same time, the difference is amazing, almost shocking. Not all strains are the same so the results may vary depending on your genetics. Your mother plant will allow you to produce as many clones as you would like, year after year. Just keep her healthy.
Ryan has 15 years growing and breeding experience. He is a lifelong cannabis activist. If you have a topic you would like him to cover or a question for him, please email: connect@nysmallfarma.org