What Does Plant Cuttings Mean?
In cannabis cultivation, plant cuttings refers to stems of a marijuana plant that are taken/cut off in order to be rooted and grown into new plants.
Plant cutting, often referred to as cloning, is a plant propagation technique where a piece of a parent plant is taken for the purposes of vegetative/asexual propagation. In this process, either the root of the plant or a piece of the stem is placed in a suitable environment, for example in moist soil, and if the environment and surrounding is favorable for the plant, the piece which was cut off and re-planted will begin to grow as a new, independent, parent plant. This process is also known as striking or cloning.
When plants are re-grown through the cutting technique, a few points must be kept in mind. Only healthy plants should be used to propagate as they have good tissue from which to grow a new plant. A healthy plant would be a plant which is properly and well hydrated as the cells found in the tissue need a lot of moisture to knit together in order to re-make an entirely new root system. However, the cutting should not be too hydrated as it will rot due to the overabundance of moisture. Desiccated tissue will not provide good root cells.
Maximum Yield Explains Plant Cuttings
Marijuana is a perfect plant species for asexual propagation. To clone cannabis plants, basic materials such as a mini-greenhouse (heated, if possible), sterilized scissors that are properly sharpened (shaving razors or surgical knives/scalpels can also be used), rooting hormones, substrate for the cuttings, a small source of white/blue light (fluorescent type, 18 w cool white) and a mother plant from which the cuttings will be obtained are needed.
The temperature must be between 18°C and 22°C and the relative humidity must be above 90% for the cuttings to root, what can be easily achieved if heated mini-greenhouses are used.
Some advantages of taking cannabis cuttings are that it will be controlled and so there will be no male plants. The plants are the identical strain and breed as they share the same genetics as the plant in which they were taken, thus have no variance. All of the cannabis plants mature equally with the same size and form as they are given equal environmental conditions. Cloning marijuana through cuttings is more time efficient than growing from the seed.
However, there are some disadvantages of taking cannabis cuttings, too, such as the possibility of passing on diseases if present in the mother plant, and increased susceptibility to diseases in general. Cloning, or taking plant cuttings, may be cheaper than buying seeds but a lot of space will be taken up with a light shielded room kept for a cannabis plant in the vegetative stage, which is often on a different light cycle than the main grow room. This means more lighting and equipment taking up space and costing extra money.
