Cannabis plants as we all know are annual and that means they go through all their life stages in one year – starting their life in spring, maturing in the summer, and ending their life with those big buds in autumn. This is the usual life cycle.
Of course, there are autoflowers that are even faster in their growth and end their life some two to four months from the start of their life.
And then there is the cloning mechanism that can in theory extend the same genetics for unlimited generations keeping a regular photosensitive cannabis mother plant under 24 hours of light. This mother keeping can be great for cloning but you can’t get any buds from that plant as it is always growing only in that vegetative growth stage.
One way you could get a perennial or multi-year harvest is to re-veg after you cut off those buds. This process is utilized by hippies in California mountains and also by some indoor growers as you don’t need to buy new seeds and can get the same genetics.
I don’t know how many vegetative-flowering-vegetative stages a plant can sustain but I bet that this light cycle change can give high stress to that plant and eventually it will die!
Currently, as far as I understand, there is no cannabis genetics that could grow in one season, hibernate in winter and then start growing again in the next season. But I know there have been a lot of tries to create strains like these.
In the previous years, cannabis enthusiasts have tried to cross-breed cannabis species with Hops and other Cannabaceae family species but those crosses were not successful! I have also read that growers have tried to graft cannabis branches on Hops plants and the other way around but that also did not work because the grafted part would have the original genetics and the host plant would have different genetic material and they cannot be mixed!
But won’t it be amazing if you could plant one cannabis plant and get a continuous harvest every season not worrying about light cycle changes or cold weather? And imagine how much yield that one plant could give after a couple of years because as we all know that cannabis grows insanely fast and can give many times more fiber mass than trees can in one year.
If a plant could start a new life cycle with the same root mass from the previous year then imagine how much that plant could grow in the second year and in the year after that! I imagine that with countless cross-breeding cycles with the strongest phenotypes that can be re-vegged you could ultimately create a strain that could live for multiple generations in the equatorial region when it rarely gets below 0 degrees Celsius. I think that this is an interesting topic to discuss and maybe somebody knows more about plants like these? If so then please leave a comment!
And at last I have come to the original point I wanted to show you!
Did you know that there are genetically modified cannabis strain called Forever Buds from BC SEEDS that is basically a perennial cannabis strain?
From the description, we can see that they have genetically modified that plant and now it has been producing buds for 8 years averaging 20 lbs (9 kg) of dried bud mass every year. The article also states that this magical plant is 29 feet (8.8 meters) tall and that is a very massive plant if you can even imagine a weed that big.
And lucky for you, it is now available for purchase on the BC seeds website. Of course, it costs a lot as well, but, if you’re interested in trying Forever Buds and have the money to do so, you now have the option to do so!
So what do you think about Perennial (multi-year) cannabis? Would it be helpful for medical communities and would you even ingest a genetically modified plant like this? Let me know in the comments below!
5 Comments
Unlikely that there would be harmful substances in GMO developed plant and almost zero chance of harmful chemicals. Unless of course such a plant ‘required’ a cocktail of arsenic, heavy metals and the poison chemical of the said ivy for its nutrient mix. Like I said, unlikely.
The automatic supposition that there is something freaky or “Frankenstein-monsterish” in GMO botanicals is quite tedious. Every cross between Sud American strains and Afghani is a GMO. Methodology of just rubbing sexual parts of related plants together or getting those self-same genes together in a petri dish is just a different type of hammer getting the job done. Frankly I would love to see such a plant a reality. Talk about an awesome overgrow weapon, hardy monster bud trees. Be careful and check things out very diligently of course but I would generally bet across the board on the safety of GMO’s and in the long run I would come out a financial winner with that kind of action.
Also if such a source of effective perennial bud were to come about it would go a long way to disabuse the low information types who like to oppose GMO in a blanket sense (and consequently condemning millions to starvation around the globe) as too many of them give stoners a bad name by convincing straights that dopers are dopes. Considering the risks taken by many of the aficionados of ‘altered states’ in attaining the same I am amused by how upset that community is by things that have served humanity welled for quite a while but falls short in the pursuance of some recent infatuation in utopian economic systems (that have generally failed in the big picture of human advancement). I kind of like things ‘natural’ and nature has been crossing genes of all sorts of organisms throughout the existence of life on this planet with the assist of cosmic radiation, gases from volcanic activity and slurries of dissolved minerals as almost any nature program gives ample evidence of (dangling preposition).
Is it here yet?
Some great points here, but I think we are still some years off from seeing there multi year plants on the market and when that time comes then and only then we will be able to tell what will be the reaction from growers/users/others.
Crossing geographic land-races is NOT genetic modification. It is genetic recombination. None of the alleles involved is non-cannabis. No DNA has been altered.
I would love to have a perennial not only for its harvesting/convenient (no need for the need of always acquiring seeds and the continuous hustle of planting every year) advantages, but also due to that I could have such a plant (shrub… tree???) on my patio as part of beautiful garden. There it could fit in as part of a tropical setting with the rest of the foliage.
I grow exotic hemp in Vermont and i have a plant that is surving the winter in the greenhouse, been below 32 a few times already. I let it go because i grew too much. seems to be re-vegging tiny leaves at the stem in winter… Very cool about the genetic modification, if it was about 1000x cheaper i’de give it a shot. We all want and need to see picture of that 13 year old plant for science!