The thing about autoflowering plants is that they flower by time and they cannot be fooled to stay in vegetative period by turning the lights on 13+ hours a day.

This means that these ruderalis plants know how old they are and they will start flowering two to three weeks after sprouting no matter what light cycle they receive. Because of this autoflowering trait, these plants cannot be cloned effectively.

For example, if you manage to take a clone from this auto-flowering marijuana plant and you manage to plant it, it will flower exactly at the same time as it’s “mother”. This means that your newly taken clone will probably start flowering a few days after the cloning and nothing will return that little cutting back to the vegetative stage as it is possible with regular short-day cannabis strains.

So, can you clone autoflowers?

Although autoflowering cannabis plants can technically be cloned, there is no point of doing that because you can’t set them back to the vegetative growth period and therefore they will automatically flower and produce a harvest at the same time as the “mother” plant will and you will get a one bud plant at most.

In fact, autoflowering cannabis plant seeds that we can buy these days were engineered so that we don’t need to clone them. This means that you don’t need to clone your plants and grow a mother plant that needs constant light cycle with light more than 12 hours to keep it in the vegetative stage.

Autoflowers are designed to grow fast and flower fast and with feminized seeds and very stable strain genetics you just need to plant a few seeds every month or so and you will get a continuous harvest or plant seeds just before the harvest to maximize your growing space.

So what can you do if you cannot clone autoflower plants?

Instead, you can produce seeds from female autoflower plants by pollinating them with male pollen and plant those beans in small pots.

After 2 or 3 weeks when they have shown sex, you can remove the male plants and grow your new crop.

This process is more effective than cloning regular strains and you don’t need separate growing rooms for vegetative and flowering plants. Because autoflowers grow so fast and flower quickly you can get a much faster turnaround and if you know how to make feminized seeds yourself or buy them from seed companies then you can get that seed-lees crop without the need to clone and keep a mother plant.

14 Comments

  1. Marianela on

    Appreciate the modern appear. I loved this content. Many thanks for your fine posting.

    • KirkH420 on

      Hey thanks, great info. I personally tried planting some cuttings from my autoflower plants last grow. I topped my plant and put the cutting into/onto some moist substrate. The thing stayed alive for a couple weeks. As this article says, it even grew the white pistols that females make where their buds are going to develop.

  2. larrycampa on

    Thank you for this great article do you recommend a certain company to get from ?

  3. Some strains like my candy cane branch so much you can clone very early in veg and get almost half the yield of the mother from each clone.

    • Hi, tnx for sharing that information!
      Have you done some side by side grows with plants that are cloned and ones that are grown out without cloning? It would be interesting to see the yield difference between those both!

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