A first grow starts with one of two things on the kitchen table: a small packet of seeds, or a rooted cutting in a plastic cup. The seed is a plant that has not started yet, and nobody, the breeder included, knows exactly how it will turn out. The cutting is a piece of a plant that already exists, and it will grow into something very like its mother. The seeds vs clones choice is between starting from scratch and starting from a copy. For most first grows, seeds are the simpler default; a healthy, tested clone can be simpler still, if you can get one.
Is it better to grow cannabis from seeds or clones?
For most first grows, feminized seeds, unless you know a grower or nursery that tests its plants and can give you a healthy rooted cutting. Two reasons.
The first is that seeds are easy to get and easy to store: they post in an envelope and sit in a drawer for a year, while a clone is a living plant that needs light, water and attention from the day it arrives. The second is that a seed avoids the pests and some of the diseases that ride on a live cutting, though not all of them.
Clones win on two other counts, and they matter more once you know what you are doing: they are faster, and they are more predictable.
What a seed gives you
A seed is a plant made the ordinary way, by a mother and a father, so each seed in the packet is a sibling of the others, not a copy. They share a family resemblance and still differ in height, smell, finishing time and yield. That variation is the point of breeding and the nuisance of growing: you may find a plant you love in a packet of ten and never be able to buy it again. A seed also takes its time: it has to sprout, root and grow its first leaves before it is where a cutting starts, which adds a few weeks.
What a clone gives you
A clone is a cutting taken from a growing plant, kept warm and damp until it grows roots of its own. Because it is a piece of the mother rather than her offspring, it carries essentially the same genetic makeup, so a room full of clones from one mother, grown under similar conditions, usually gives a far more uniform crop than a packet of seeds would. For a grower who has found a plant worth keeping, that is the whole appeal. Second-generation grower Siobhan Darwish fills her fields with clones for exactly that sameness and keeps seeds for experimenting, as she explains in her column on cloning.
Seeds vs clones at a glance
| Seeds | Clones | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to harvest | Longer: the plant starts from nothing | Shorter: the cutting is already weeks ahead |
| Cost | Cheaper per plant, and they store | More expensive per plant, and need care from day one |
| Sexing the plants | Needed, unless the seeds are feminized | Not needed: a cutting is the same sex as its mother |
| Sameness | Siblings: each plant a little different | Usually more uniform under similar growing conditions |
| Disease and pests | Fewer travel with a seed, but not none | Depends on the source: low from a tested plant, higher from an unknown one |
| Where to get them | Posted from seed banks, where legal | A nursery, a dispensary or another grower, where legal |
Are clones identical to the mother plant?
Genetically, yes, or near enough. Practically, no. A clone has the mother’s genes, but both the genes and the growing shape what you harvest: light, feeding, temperature and the health of the cutting all change the result, which is why two growers with cuttings from the same mother get different jars. The genes set the possibilities; the grow decides which ones show up. Our page on the cannabis genome explains what the genes do and do not fix.
Even the genes are not quite as fixed as the word “clone” suggests: sequencing one mother plant from top to bottom found that different parts of her carried different mutations. Growers have long reported that clone lines “run out” over years of cuttings taken from cuttings; the study did not show that cloning causes that decline, only that it could contribute.
Do plants from seed grow bigger than clones?
They can, and the seeds vs clones argument about why has run for decades. A plant from seed grows a tap root, a single thick root straight down; a cutting grows a tangle of side roots from the cut stem and never makes one. Many growers hold that the tap root gives seed plants more vigor, especially outdoors in open ground; others see no difference in pots, where no root gets to go deep anyway. We did not find a published trial that tests it, so take it as grower lore with a plausible reason behind it. What is not in doubt is that a clone starts several weeks ahead, which in a short season can matter more than root shape.
What to check before you take a clone
Disease travels with the cutting. Hop latent viroid, the infection behind the “dudding” that stunts plants and thins out their flower, spreads mostly on cutting tools and from mother to clone, and an infected cutting can look perfectly healthy. Seeds are not a clean escape: in one hemp experiment, seed with one infected parent, whether the mother or the pollen, passed the viroid to most of the seedlings. What a seed does avoid is the pests, mold and much else that ride on a live cutting. Dr. Jeremy Warren, who led one of the two teams that identified the viroid in cannabis in 2019, explains what it does and how nurseries clean it out.
The practical part is short. A cutting from your own plant that has grown and flowered well is a reasonable bet; a test is what makes it a sure one, because looking healthy is not proof and infected plants often show nothing. If you buy, buy from a nursery that tests its mothers, and the same goes for seed. Look a cutting over for pests before it comes indoors. Keep it apart from your other plants for a couple of weeks: quarantine catches pests. It won’t catch a hidden infection, which is what the nursery’s test is for. Clean your blade between plants.
Regular, feminized and autoflower seeds in plain words
Regular seeds give you males and females, roughly half and half. A male makes pollen and no usable flower, and left in the room it will seed every female, so regular seeds mean sexing the plants and pulling the males, by eye once the first flowers show after several weeks, or earlier with a leaf test, which our page on cannabis genetic testing covers.
Feminized seeds are bred so that almost every plant is female: the breeder makes a female plant produce pollen and uses it on another female. For a home grower that removes the biggest waste of a first grow, and our page on feminized seeds goes through how they are made and what to watch for.
Autoflower seeds grow plants that flower on age rather than day length, so they need no switch to twelve-hour days and finish fast, usually smaller. They suit a balcony or a small outdoor spot, a short summer, or a grower who does not want to think about timers. Autoflowering is a separate trait from sex: autoflower seeds come regular or feminized too.
So which should you start from?
Feminized seeds when storage and access matter, which for a first grow they usually do. Tested clones when you have found a plant worth keeping, or want to skip the first few weeks.
Updated November 2026: this article was rewritten by the editors as a plain-language guide to choosing between seeds and clones for a home grow. Originally published 12 October 2018 by Nicholas Demski.
