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Every grower eventually finds a plant they don’t want to lose. The phenotype that out-yielded everything else in the tent, the one whose smell stopped you in your tracks, the keeper you’d happily grow for the next ten years. Seeds won’t give it back — pop ten of the same strain and you’ll get ten slightly different plants. The only way to grow that exact plant again is to copy it, and that’s exactly what learning how to clone cannabis lets you do.
For a lot of home growers, learning how to clone cannabis is the natural next step after their first successful harvest. It’s free, it’s fast, and once you’ve done it twice it stops feeling like surgery. This guide walks through what a clone actually is, the gear you need, the step-by-step cut, how to root cuttings without rotting them, and how to keep a mother plant going, and when to replace her.
The first thing to understand about how to clone cannabis is what a clone really is. A clone is a cutting taken from a living cannabis plant that you root into a new plant. It isn’t grown from a seed, so there’s no genetic shuffle — the cutting carries the same genetics as the plant you took it from, apart from the small mutations that build up in any plant as it grows. Botanists call this vegetative or asexual propagation, and it’s the same way gardeners have long propagated grapevines and many other plants. When you cut a branch and coax it to grow roots, the offspring are practically clones of their parent plant.
That genetic identity is the whole point of how to clone cannabis. A clone inherits everything from its mother: the cannabinoid profile, the terpenes, the structure, the yield, the flowering time — and the sex. Take a cutting from a female and you get a female, guaranteed, with no sexing and no surprises. If you’ve ever lost half a crop to males, you already understand why that matters. (If you’re still learning to tell them apart, our guide on male vs female cannabis plants covers it.)
So before we get into how to clone cannabis step by step, hold onto the core idea: you’re not making a baby plant, you’re making a copy. Everything good about the mother carries over. So does everything bad — a clone off a weak or sick plant will be just as weak and sick, which is why the plant you choose matters more than any technique.
Before you decide whether how to clone cannabis fits your grow, weigh it honestly: cloning isn’t strictly better than seeds — it’s a different tool. Here’s the trade-off.
| Factor | Clones | Seeds |
|---|---|---|
| Genetics | Same genetics as the mother | Unique mix every time |
| Sex | Same as mother (female from female) | Needs sexing unless feminized |
| Time to harvest | Faster — skips germination and seedling stage | Slower — starts from scratch |
| Cost | Free once you have a mother | Cost per seed |
| Vigor | No taproot; roots grow from the stem | Taproot |
| Disease risk | Carries the mother’s pests and diseases | No hitchhiking pests, but seeds can still carry some fungi and the hop latent viroid |
The reason serious growers learn how to clone cannabis and still buy seed: seeds are how you find a keeper, and clones are how you keep it. You pop a pack, grow them out, pick the best plant, and keep cloning that one. That hunt is its own skill — we walk through it in phenotype hunting — but the punchline is that a clone only preserves genetics; it can’t improve on what the seed gave you. That’s the real reason to learn how to clone cannabis — not to replace seeds, but to lock in the winner they hand you. Start with good seed and the cloning takes care of itself.
The gear list for how to clone cannabis is short — you don’t need a lab. A clean, sharp blade and somewhere humid to root the cutting cover the essentials. The full kit:
That rooting hormone deserves a word. The active ingredient is usually IBA or NAA, and it’s not marketing — auxins like IBA and NAA are applied specifically to stimulate adventitious root formation on cuttings. A bare stem will often root on its own, but the hormone makes it faster and more reliable, and faster rooting means less time for the cutting to rot. In a 2021 hemp trial with no dome, hormone-treated cuttings rooted far more often than untreated ones; in a Danish trial using a misting (aeroponic) system, cuttings rooted fine with no rooting hormone. Under a dome at home, it’s cheap insurance.
Here’s the actual cut. None of it is hard, but doing each step cleanly is the difference between cuttings that root in a week and cuttings that turn to mush.
Rooting is the stage of how to clone cannabis where most failed clones die, and almost always for the same reason: the grower got impatient or let the environment swing. A cutting with no roots has no way to replace the water its leaves lose, so the entire job for the next one to two weeks is keeping it humid, warm, and undisturbed.
Environment is everything in how to clone cannabis. Aim for high humidity inside the dome: a 2024 review of cannabis greenhouse practice gives above 90% relative humidity at 20–24°C (68–75°F) for the cloning stage. The cutting should look perky, not wilted.
Keep the medium moist but never waterlogged, and keep it warm; a root zone around 22–25°C (72–77°F) helps, which is why heat mats are popular for cloning. Light should be gentle. Cuttings don’t want intense flowering light yet; soft fluorescent or a dimmed LED a good distance away is plenty. Blast them and they’ll burn through water they can’t replace. Get the environment dialed and how to clone cannabis becomes mostly patience.
Then you wait — the slowest and most nerve-wracking part of how to clone cannabis. Most cannabis cuttings root in 7 to 14 days, though some strains take three weeks or more. Resist the urge to tug on them to “check” — you’ll rip off the fragile new roots. Instead, crack the dome a little more each day toward the end of the first week to harden them off, and watch for roots poking out the bottom of the cube or fresh green growth up top. That new growth is the signal the clone has rooted and is feeding itself. Once roots are 2–3 cm (about an inch) long, pot it up like any seedling and grow on.
A mother plant is where how to clone cannabis pays off over the long run. It’s a cannabis plant you keep permanently in vegetative growth, never flowering it, purely as a source of cuttings. Keep it under 18+ hours of light so it never flips to flower, feed it well, and it’ll throw new growth you can clone from for months.
Mothers do wear out, though. A 2024 review puts commercial stock plants at 3 to 12 months old, with older ones growing more slowly, and a genetic study of one cannabis plant found mutations building up as it grew. Its authors’ advice is to replace the mother with one of her own clones. That’s how one keeper stays in your tent for years.
Picking the right mother is the part people rush. You want the plant that earned it — best yield, best smell, best resistance, the standout from a grow-out. Get this choice right and the rest of how to clone cannabis is just maintenance. Choosing that plant is exactly the keeper-selection process behind how breeders pick their keepers, and it’s the same logic Mac uses picking keepers for Lighthouse’s in-house lines.
A mother also lets you stagger a perpetual harvest: take clones every few weeks and you always have plants at every stage. Count them first, though: every rooted clone, mother included, counts as a plant under home-grow limits. Those limits vary (four per household under Canada’s federal law, Quebec bans home growing, and US states set their own), so check the rules where you live before you start a rotation.
The one place how to clone cannabis doesn’t really fit is autoflowers. Autoflowering plants flower on their own schedule, not on a light change. You can take a cutting, but it’s still an autoflower, so it won’t wait in a leafy stage while you build it up, and that’s why growers don’t keep auto mother plants. We couldn’t find any published study on how auto cuttings actually perform.
This is why cloning belongs to photoperiod plants, the ones that flower when you cut their light to 12 hours. If you’re set on autoflowers, the move is simply to keep popping seeds — there’s no shortcut around it. If you want the repeatable, clone-it-again side of how to clone cannabis, you want feminized photoperiod genetics. The difference is laid out in autoflower vs feminized seeds.
When how to clone cannabis goes wrong, it’s usually one of a short list of culprits. Run through these before you blame the strain.
Almost every one of these comes back to patience and cleanliness. Get those two right and how to clone cannabis stops being a gamble and becomes routine.
The strain you pick matters: in rooting trials, some cultivars rooted faster and more often than others. You can clone any photoperiod plant, and for a first mother it makes sense to start with an easy-going strain. A few from our shelves that suit the job:
If you want to clone something with a story, Mac’s originals are worth a look too — keeping a mother of a strain like Blue Monkey Dick means your best Blue Monkey Dick plant doesn’t end with one harvest. Browse the full feminized cannabis seeds lineup to pick a mother, and start it from seed the right way with our germination guide. Every mother starts as one good seed.
Cloning is how you stop starting over. Find a keeper from seed, take cuttings, root them with patience and clean tools, and keep a mother going — and you can keep growing your single best plant, refreshing the mother from her own clones as she ages. None of the steps are difficult; the whole skill is humidity, cleanliness, and not rushing the roots. Learn how to clone cannabis once and you’ve turned one great plant into a line you can keep.
The catch is that cloning only ever preserves what the seed gave you, so it pays to start with genetics worth keeping. Pick a vigorous photoperiod female, grow it out, and clone the standout — that’s the real lesson behind how to clone cannabis. For more on getting from seed to keeper, our cannabis growing guides cover every step before and after the cut.
Shop Feminized Seeds | Phenotype Hunting | Cannabis Growing Guides
Most cuttings root in 7 to 14 days, with some strains taking three weeks or more. You’ll know it’s worked when you see roots out the bottom of the cube or new green growth on top. The whole appeal of learning how to clone cannabis is that a rooted clone then skips germination and the seedling stage, shaving weeks off the next grow.
No, but it helps a lot. Cuttings will often root without it, but rooting hormone — IBA or NAA based — speeds up and increases your success rate, and faster rooting means less time for a cutting to rot. For a few dollars it’s the easiest win in how to clone cannabis.
You can, but expect it to be harder. A cutting from a flowering plant has to “revert” back to vegetative growth before it grows normally, so it’s slower; we couldn’t find a cannabis study that timed it. It’s far easier to clone from a plant in veg — this is one of the trickier corners of how to clone cannabis. Autoflowers are a separate case: a cutting stays an autoflower, so it won’t wait in a leafy stage for you.
This is the most common worry people have about how to clone cannabis. Genetically, a clone is a near-exact copy of its mother, so in the same conditions you can expect the same potency, flavor, and structure. It won’t grow a taproot like a seed-started plant. Growers often say that makes clones a little less hardy outdoors, though we couldn’t find a trial that compared them fairly. A clone can’t be better than the plant it came from, which is why the mother you choose matters most.
Keep reading
A Simple Guide to Germinating Cannabis Seeds Successfully
Male vs Female Cannabis Plants
Why Are My Cannabis Seeds Not Germinating? 7 Fixes to TryBrowse all cannabis growing guides by topic, from germination to harvest.
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