Medical Marijuana is legal in Oklahoma, and both private individuals, as well as licensed commercial businesses may grow and cultivate cannabis.
Interested in how the whole process works? Great! Because in this blog series, we are covering how to grow medical marijuana indoors in Oklahoma.
Do you Start your Cannabis garden from Seeds or from Clones?
When it comes to growing cannabis, you must first start with either a seed or a clone. Seeds can be purchased from Seed banks, which work with different cannabis breeds and host their new and old offerings. Cannabis Breeder maintain varieties of male and female cannabis plants, and then cross the various males and females to create new strains. Once the Breeder has created a strain worth keeping, they will then develop a mother plant which can produce seeds. The Breeder will then sell the seeds to a Seed Bank, and the Seed Bank will then retail the seeds to the general public.
A clone is a cut off of an immature cannabis plant, or in other words, a cannabis plant that is in the vegetative stage of its lifecycle, prior to entering the flowering stage.
In our facility, we have an entire room dedicated to vegetative growth. Within that room, our plant technicians will take a few hundred clones to be planted on a bi-weekly schedule. They simply find a good branch, cut it a the stem, place cloning solution on the tip of the newly cut stem, and place the clone into our cloning machine, which is simply a holding place that circulates water and helps to develop roots.
There are other ways of maintaining clones, and the simplest way is to cut your clone, place it in a cup of water, and then prepare a soil or other medium (preferably, in a small container) and place the clone in that new medium (such as a red solo cup with soil).
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Seeds versus Clones?
With seeds, you will want to pop many, because you will get many variations of the same strain from planting seeds. Think of it this way: seeds are the offspring of a male and female plants. And each time they reproduce, each offspring is similar but not completely identical to the other. If you have siblings, you know what I mean. Your parents had several children, and you each are similar in many ways, but also have your differences. In cannabis, we refer to these offspring as “Phenotypes” or “Phenos.”
So if you plant 50 seeds of the same strain, and say, 40 of them germinate, you will have 40 different Phenos of that same strain. Many of those phenos could look very similar, but some could be wildly different, both for good and for bad.
Why you it is important to Pheno-Hunt your Cannabis Seedlings for your Indoor Grow
The phrase “Pheno Hunting” refers to the deliberate act of hunting down the best pheno of a certain strain, keeping it, and discarding the other phenos that have been deemed of lesser value.
This is accomplished by planting a bunch of seeds, labeling each of the seedlings that sprout (for example, GSC #1, GSC #2, etc). Then you would clone each of those seedlings, while maintaining the originals in a vegetative state (mom #1, mom #2, etc). You then flower the seedlings. You would then harvest those flowers, and classify each as good, better, best, worst, etc. Since you labeled them, you can go back to the original mom and keep the good ones and discard the lesser ones.
Now that you have a solid mother plant, you can continue cloning off of that plant.
So the main difference with seeds versus clones is that with seeds, you don’t quite know what to expect. With a clone, you know what to expect: a duplicate copy of the plant that the clone is taken from.
When starting a new, indoor grow, you must be wary of where you purchase your clones from. If you choose to bring in outside plants, you must be cautious that those clones are pest-and-disease-free. Also, make sure the clone is a good pheno; if you do not know, or if the person selling the clones does not know, then there really is no point, as you can go purchase your own seeds and deal with the uncertainty of what will sprout.
With seeds, you don’t have to worry about pests and diseases; you just have to worry about the many possible variations and deal with the task of hunting down the best phenos, which is a time consuming process.
At Smokey Okies Grow Op, we pheno hunt our new strains in order to select the best phenotypic expressions of that strain. This is a very arduous and time consuming process, but it is ultimately worth it. Because if you exercise no control over your phenos, then you have no control over what quality of flower you produce.
When you do not keep track of pheno selection, you end up with multiple versions of the same strain, such as a GG4 that consistently tests at 18% THC and another that consistently tests at 23%. If you properly label your phenos, you can then eliminate the least favored pheno and only clone off of the better one.
In our next article, we will explain the Vegetative Cycle of photoperiod cannabis plants.
About Medical Marijuana in Oklahoma
Medical Marijuana has been legal in Oklahoma since the summer of 2018 when voters approved State Question 788. Since that time, individuals with a patient card are permitted to grow six mature plants at a time, as well as maintain six immature plants, which can be flowered as soon as the other mature plants are harvested.
Smokey Okies Grow Op is a commercially licensed grow facility which grows indoors and supplies wholesale cannabis flower to dispensaries and processing companies. Operating since 2019, Smokey Okies Grow Op celebrates the freedom of Oklahomans to grow and consume cannabis. For wholesale inquiries, contact sales@smokey-okies.com.