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Clones have several advantages for the home grower. They’ll speed up your growing cycles. They’ll predetermine sex of the plant, they’ll preserve the exact strain and they will save you money. To appreciate the benefits of medical marijuana clones more, let us discuss them individually.

SPEEDING UP GROWING CYCLES

Marijuana often takes 4 or 5 months to mature when left to grow naturally. Add another couple of weeks for harvesting, drying and curing and you could find yourself limited to 2 crops per year. With horticultural improvement of the strains, and with the use of hydroponics, growing cycles can be reduced to three months or less producing up to 4 crops per year (or six or more if you alternate two grow areas.) Not only does this produce a larger amount of medical marijuana (and good rule of thumb is between two and four ounces per plant), but your expenses for electricity and nutrients are less per crop as well.

PREDETERMINING THE SEX OF THE MARIJUANA PLANT

Starting with clones is the only guaranteed way of producing female plants. By nature, starting from seeds, you will get a 50/50 mix of male and female plants. If you want, you can use marijuana strains that are considered as feminized seeds - these claim to produce 70% females. The presence of many male marijuana plans is not helpful for two primary reasons: (1) male plants have significantly less medical effect and (2) they’ll weaken the medical potency of female plants through pollination - female plants are more concentrated on producing seeds rather than flowers. Thus, it is always a great option to start with medical marijuana clones. This is the only way to ensure that 100% of your plants will turn out to be female.

PRESERVING THE EXACT STRAIN

Clones, which are basically a small cutting of a marijuana plant that’s placed in a block of rock wool, are as the name clone implies, an exact replica of the original plant. Theoretically speaking, once you see a strain of marijuana you like, and locate a clone for this strain, you can grow the same plant time and again. The most notable benefit here is that there are many times when your pharmacy is out of stock of your favorite strain. So you don’t have to rely on the stocks of your pharmacy, rather, you are guaranteed with a steady supply all-year round.

SAVING MONEY BY GROWING YOUR OWN MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Complete Hydroponic Starter kits available from Stealth Hydroponics are recommended for medical marijuana clones because they are easy to set up and simple to use; cost is around $400. While these kits usually have “space” for 6 plants in their reservoir setup, our suggestion is to grow 3 plants. Even at a low growing rate of 3 crops yearly, with each plant yielding two ounces of medicine, you’ll end up growing around $4000 worth of medicine, at pharmacy prices, per year. Even if you factor in the expenses on electricity and nutrients, your annual harvest will only cost you $600-$750 but you can still enjoy $4000 worth of medicine.