Day by day, cut to rooted
Drag the slider, or pick any row in the table underneath. Every day of the first three weeks is listed, so nothing here depends on the slider working.
Rooting is not one event. It is four stages that run in a fixed order, and most cuttings are lost in the first of them rather than the last. The dates below are typical for cannabis in a warm, humid propagator. A slow variety can run four or five days behind all the way through and still finish perfectly well.
- Stage
- First tips
- Inside the cutting
- The first root tips break through the outer layer of the stem. From this point the cutting can take up a little water on its own account.
- What you can see
- White root tips, anything from one to five of them, one to three millimetres long.
- What to do
- A little more light and a little less humidity. The plant can now support slightly more demand.
| Day | Stage | Inside the cutting | What you can see | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | Cut taken | The stem is severed. Water that was arriving from the parent plant's roots stops, while the leaves carry on losing it through their pores. | A clean angled cut face, a firm stem, leaves still fully open. | Strip the lowest leaves, shorten the largest of the ones left, and get the stem into damp medium within seconds. |
| Day 1 | Water stress | Sugars and the hormone auxin, which normally travel down the stem, collect at the cut end because there is nowhere further for them to go. | A mild droop by the evening. Leaves should still feel supple rather than papery. | Keep the air close to saturated and the light weak. A cutting under strong light is being asked to work with no roots to supply it. |
| Day 2 | Wound sealing | Cells at the cut face start dividing without taking any particular shape. Their first job is closing the wound against bacteria and fungi. | The cut end darkens a shade and stops looking raw. | Leave it alone. Lifting a cutting to inspect the stem tears the tissue that is forming and costs days. |
| Day 3 | Callus forming | The dividing cells build into a pale, slightly spongy mass called a callus. It is not root tissue, and it is not a sign that something has gone wrong. | A whitish swelling at the base, visible if the stem sits in a clear plug or in water. | Hold the conditions steady. Nothing added at this point makes the next stage arrive sooner. |
| Day 4 | Callus thickens | Auxin pooled at the base pushes small groups of cells to change function. They stop being generic wound tissue and commit to becoming root. | The callus widens. On some varieties it goes cream or tan rather than white. | Begin easing the humidity down. Two brief airings a day is enough at this stage. |
| Day 5 | Root initials | Those committed cell groups organise into root initials: microscopic blueprints for roots that do not exist yet. | Usually nothing new above the medium. The drooping should have stopped. | Check the medium is damp rather than wet. Root initials sitting in waterlogged tissue rot before they ever emerge. |
| Day 6 | Pushing through | The initials divide and force their way outward through the stem tissue. All of it is happening a millimetre or two under the surface. | Small raised bumps around the cut end on the quicker varieties. | Do nothing. Day six is where most cuttings get thrown away too early. |
| Day 7 | First tips | The first root tips break through the outer layer of the stem. From this point the cutting can take up a little water on its own account. | White root tips, anything from one to five of them, one to three millimetres long. | A little more light and a little less humidity. The plant can now support slightly more demand. |
| Day 8 | Roots lengthen | Cells behind each tip stretch, and that stretching is what drives the root forward. Length roughly doubles day on day here. | Roots five to ten millimetres long, unbranched and bright white. | Keep the medium damp. Do not feed yet. There is nothing on the plant that can use a nutrient charge. |
| Day 9 | More roots emerge | Later initials catch up with the first ones, so the number of roots climbs faster than any of them are lengthening. | Five to ten roots, the longest around fifteen millimetres. | Airings can run longer. Leaves should stay open with the lid off for several minutes. |
| Day 10 | Branching begins | The first side roots form off the originals, which multiplies the surface available for taking up water. | Fine hairs and short side branches on the oldest roots. | A weak feed can start here, at roughly a quarter of what an established plant would take. |
| Day 11 | Uptake takes over | The roots supply more water than the leaves lose. The cutting stops living on reserves and starts living on what it draws up. | Leaves firm all day, not only first thing in the morning. | Bring the humidity down in steps. Doing it in one go scorches the leaf edges. |
| Day 12 | New top growth | With water no longer the limiting factor, the growing tip goes back to making leaves. This is the first honest sign the plant is past the risky part. | A small pale shoot at the top, or a fresh pair of leaves. | Move towards normal light over two or three days rather than in one move. |
| Day 13 | Roots mature | Roots turn from bright white to off-white as their outer cells thicken and take on their working structure. | Roots reaching the sides of the plug or the wall of the container. | Look at the base of the plug. Roots showing through it are the signal to plan the move. |
| Day 14 | Two weeks | Most varieties have a working root system by now. A slow one is not the same thing as a failed one. | Ten or more roots, several of them longer than the buried part of the stem. | The earliest sensible point to move a quick cutting into a container of its own. |
| Day 15 | Establishing | The plant sets its own balance between root and shoot, growing whichever of the two is behind. | Roots circling the plug or coming out of it. Top growth clearly moving. | Feed at half strength. Damp medium, never soaked. |
| Day 16 | Hardening | Leaf surfaces build the waxy layer they never needed inside a closed propagator. | Leaves look a little duller and feel less soft to the touch. | Leave the lid off for good once the plant holds up for a full day without wilting. |
| Day 17 | Ordinary growth | The rate of growth becomes unremarkable. From here the plant behaves like any other young cannabis plant. | A second or third new pair of leaves. | Treat it as a young plant rather than as a cutting. |
| Day 18 | Root density | The root system thickens instead of lengthening, filling out the volume it already occupies. | A plug that holds together when lifted by the base of the stem. | Move it on if that has not happened yet. A root-bound plug stalls the plant. |
| Day 19 | Slow varieties | Varieties with a reputation for stubborn rooting usually show their first roots somewhere between day fourteen and day nineteen. | Late cuttings finally showing white tips. | Judge a batch on its slowest members before writing any of it off. |
| Day 20 | Full function | Root, stem and leaf work as one system. Nothing about the plant still depends on what happened at the cut. | Even leaf shape and a straight growing tip. | Normal light, normal feed, normal watering interval. |
| Day 21 | Three weeks | A cutting with no roots at all by day twenty-one has almost certainly failed, and nearly always from rot at the base or from drying out in the first three days. | Either a well rooted young plant, or a soft brown stem base. | Keep what rooted. Work out which of the four conditions slipped on what did not. |
What a marijuana clone is
A definition that fits in one sentence, and the four things that follow from it.
A marijuana clone is a piece of a cannabis plant that has been cut off and induced to grow its own roots. It is not a copy of the parent plant in the way a photograph is a copy of a scene. It is the same plant, continuing, in a second place.
Four things follow from that, and between them they explain almost everything growers care about on this subject.
The genetics are identical
There is no reshuffling of genes, because no second parent is involved and no seed is formed. Whatever combination made the parent plant what it is arrives intact.
The sex comes with it
A cutting from a female plant is female. This is not a probability, it is the same plant. It is the single most practical reason the technique is used at all, since a grower working from regular seed has no way of knowing what has been planted until the plant declares itself.
Its cells do not start again from zero
A seed begins a new life. A cutting continues an existing one, and carries the parent plant's cellular state with it. This is why a cutting taken from a plant that has already started flowering spends a confused fortnight reverting before it grows normally, and why parent plants are kept in vegetative growth instead.
Whatever the parent had, the cutting has
Including the things nobody wants. Pests travel on the cutting. Viroids travel inside it, with no outward sign for months. A cutting cannot be healthier than the plant it came from, which is why the choice of parent is the first step of the procedure rather than an afterthought.
Clone, cutting, seedling, parent
Four words that get used interchangeably and should not be.
Most of the confusion around this subject is vocabulary rather than biology. The terms below are used precisely everywhere else on this page.
| Term | What it refers to |
|---|---|
| Clone | A plant grown on its own roots from a piece of another plant. It carries exactly the genes of the one it was taken from, with nothing reshuffled. |
| Cutting | The severed piece itself, before it has roots. Every clone starts as a cutting. Not every cutting becomes a clone. |
| Seedling | A plant grown from seed, carrying a new combination of genes from two parents. Never identical to either of them. |
| Parent or mother plant | The plant a cutting is taken from, usually held in vegetative growth so that it never flowers and can be cut from repeatedly. |
| Cultivar | A named variety. Two clones of one cultivar are the same plant twice. Two seeds of it are siblings, which is a much looser relationship. |
| Explant | A far smaller piece, often a fraction of a millimetre, grown on sterile gel in a laboratory. The same principle at a different scale. |
The distinction that matters most is the first two. A cutting is a thing that might fail. A clone is a cutting that did not. Counting cuttings as clones on the day they are taken is how growers end up surprised three weeks later.
Taking one cutting, step by step
Nine steps. The whole thing takes about a minute per cutting once the kit is laid out.
None of this is difficult, and none of it is where clones are usually lost. The failures come afterwards, in the conditions the cutting sits in. What the nine steps do is give the plant the best possible starting position for the fortnight that follows.
Choose the parent plant
One healthy plant in vegetative growth, several weeks old and not flowering. No yellowing, no pests, no spotting. Everything wrong with the parent is copied into the cutting, because the cutting is the parent.
Set out the kit before cutting anything
A sterilised blade, damp medium, a container, and a lid, all within reach. A cutting left on a worktable while something is fetched is already drying out.
Pick the shoot
A side branch with two or three leaf nodes on it, roughly ten to fifteen centimetres, about the thickness of a pencil. Green and flexible roots faster than woody and stiff.
Cut just below a node, at an angle
Nodes are where most root initials form, so the cut goes a few millimetres under one. The angle widens the exposed surface without leaving a ragged edge.
Strip the lower leaves
Anything that would end up buried comes off. Buried leaf tissue rots, and rot at the base of a cutting is the single most common way one is lost.
Reduce the leaf area up top
Trim the largest remaining fan leaves back by about half. The cutting has no roots and cannot replace what those leaves give off.
Treat the cut end
A gel or powder carrying synthetic auxin at the base is optional. It tends to make rooting more even across a batch rather than dramatically quicker.
Set it into the medium
Make the hole first, then lower the stem in. Pushing a treated stem through firm medium scrapes off both the gel and the outer layer of tissue you need.
Close it up and dim the light
Lid on, light weak, somewhere warm and out of a draught. For the first two days the aim is simply to stop the cutting losing water faster than it can hold on to.
Steps two and five are the ones people skip, and they are the two that cost the most. A cutting that spends ninety seconds on a worktable has already lost water it cannot replace, and a leaf buried in damp medium is a rot site with a direct route into the stem.
What is happening inside the stem
Three weeks of work, none of which is visible for the first six days.
The reason a cutting seems to do nothing for most of the first week is that everything important is happening under a millimetre of tissue.
When the stem is cut, two things start at once. The leaves carry on giving off water through their pores, and they now have no root supplying any. That is the clock the whole procedure is racing. At the same time, auxin, a hormone that always travels downward through a stem, reaches the cut end and cannot go any further, so it collects there at concentrations the plant would never normally produce.
Cells at that cut face respond to the wound first, dividing into a shapeless mass called callus that seals the surface. Pooled auxin then acts on small groups of those cells and switches their programme: they stop being wound tissue and become root initials, each one an organised bundle that will build a root. The initials divide and push outward until the first tips break the surface, usually around day seven.
From that moment the arithmetic reverses. Every new root takes up a little more water, which allows a little more leaf activity, which produces a little more sugar, which builds more root. The plant compounds its way out of the hole it was in, which is why progress looks slow for a week and then suddenly obvious.
Every root on a clone is adventitious, meaning it grew somewhere roots do not normally grow. None of this system existed a fortnight earlier, which is a reasonable thing to keep in mind before deciding a cutting has failed on day twelve.
The four conditions
Humidity, temperature, light and moisture. Everything else is detail.
A cutting has no roots and therefore no way of replacing water. Every one of the four conditions below is a way of managing that single problem until it stops being a problem.
| Condition | Target | Why it matters | What failure looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Humidity | Near saturation for two days, then eased down daily | A cutting with no roots cannot replace water, so the only lever is slowing the loss. | Leaves crisp at the edges and never recover their shape. |
| Temperature | Around 22 to 25C in the air, with the base a touch warmer | Cell division at the cut face slows sharply when the base is cold. | A callus that sits there for a fortnight and never turns into roots. |
| Light | Weak and indirect for the first week, then increased in steps | Light drives water loss through the leaves before there is any root to answer it. | Bleached, drooping leaves on day two or three. |
| Medium moisture | Damp enough to cling together, never dripping | Root initials need air as well as water. Saturated medium suffocates them. | A stem base that goes soft and brown at the waterline. |
They are also ranked, roughly. Humidity in the first three days decides more outcomes than the other three combined, and a cutting that gets that stretch wrong rarely comes back no matter how good the following fortnight is.
Where the cutting sits
Five common rooting mediums, and the way each one tends to go wrong.
The medium does two jobs at once: hold water against the stem, and hold air around it. Everything below is a different compromise between those two, and each has a characteristic failure that comes with it.
| Medium | How it works | Typical window | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rockwool cube | Mineral fibre that holds water and air in a fixed ratio. | 8 to 14 days | Very easy to overwater, because a soaked cube feels much the same as a damp one. |
| Peat or coir plug | Compressed organic medium in a mesh sleeve. | 10 to 16 days | Dries out from the outside in, so the surface lies about the middle. |
| Aeroponic cloner | The bare stem hangs in air and is misted on a timer. | 6 to 12 days | Depends on a pump. A few hours without one and the whole batch is finished. |
| Plain water | The cut end sits in a glass of water that is changed regularly. | 12 to 21 days | Produces brittle water roots that struggle badly on the move into any solid medium. |
| Soil or compost | The cutting goes straight into the medium it will grow in. | 14 to 21 days | Slowest, and impossible to inspect without disturbing the roots you are inspecting. |
None of them is meaningfully better than the others in the hands of someone paying attention. The differences show up in how forgiving each one is of a lapse, and in how easily the roots survive the move into whatever comes next.
When one clone is ready
Three signals, and why the first root tips are not one of them.
The first white tips at day seven are a milestone, not a finish line. A cutting at that point can take up perhaps a tenth of the water it needs, and moving it then simply restarts the water stress it has just survived.
Roots through the base or sides of the plug
Not tips at the stem, but roots long enough to have crossed the medium and come out the other side. That is a system with enough reach to supply the plant.
Leaves that stay firm with the lid off
Take the cover away for an hour in the middle of the day. If the leaves are still open and turgid at the end of it, uptake has overtaken loss.
Fresh growth at the top
A new pair of leaves is the plant's own verdict. Cannabis does not spend energy on new foliage while it is still in trouble, so top growth is the most honest signal of the three.
All three together, usually somewhere between day twelve and day eighteen, mean the plant can be hardened off over two or three days and treated as an ordinary young plant. Any one of the three on its own means wait.
What goes wrong
Seven things that happen to cuttings, and which of them actually matter.
Two of the entries below are normal and get treated as emergencies. Two are genuinely fatal and get ignored until it is too late. Telling them apart is most of the skill.
| What you see | What it usually is | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Leaves droop on day one | Normal. The cutting is losing water it cannot yet replace. | Wait. If they are still supple, nothing is wrong. |
| Leaves droop and never firm up | Too much leaf area left on, or humidity too low. | Trim the fans back further and close the lid. A cutting can be rescued on day two, rarely on day five. |
| Base goes brown and soft | Rot, from medium that is too wet or from buried leaf tissue. | That cutting is lost. Check the rest of the batch and squeeze less water into the medium. |
| Big callus, no roots by day fourteen | Base too cold, or far too much rooting hormone. | Warmth at the base helps. A very heavy dose of auxin makes callus at the expense of roots. |
| Lower leaves yellow around day ten | Normal. The cutting is pulling nitrogen out of old tissue to build new. | Leave it. A weak feed once the first roots show sorts it out. |
| White fuzz on the medium surface | Harmless surface mould living on the medium, not on the plant. | Increase the airflow. It only matters when it reaches the stem itself. |
| Nothing at all by day twenty-one | Failure, almost always from the first three days. | Go back through the four conditions. It is rarely the cutting and nearly always the environment. |
The pattern worth noticing is that nearly every fatal entry traces back to the first seventy-two hours, and nearly every survivable one shows up later. A batch that is healthy on day four generally finishes.
After it has rooted
Hardening off, the first move, and the thing that is now permanent.
A rooted cutting has spent a fortnight in air that never dropped below the humidity of a warm bathroom, and its leaves are built accordingly. They have almost no waxy surface layer, because there was nothing to protect against. Put that plant straight into ordinary room air and the edges scorch within a day.
Hardening off is the fix, and it is nothing more elaborate than propping the lid open a little wider each day for three or four days, then removing it for good once the plant holds up for a full day without wilting. Light comes up over the same period, in steps rather than in one move.
The move into a larger container is best made while roots are showing at the base of the plug but before they have wrapped tightly around it. Handle the plug rather than the stem; the stem at that stage is a single narrow channel carrying everything the plant has, and crushing it undoes three weeks in a second.
After that the plant is simply a young cannabis plant, with one permanent difference. It is the same age, cellularly, as the plant it came from, and it carries everything that plant carried. If a viroid such as hop latent viroid was present in the parent, it is present here, symptomless, and it will travel into every cutting taken from this plant in turn. That is the part of cloning that compounds quietly, and it is the reason experienced growers care so much about where an original piece of stock came from.
Terms used on this page
Nine words that come up whenever cuttings are discussed.
- Adventitious root
- A root growing from somewhere roots do not normally grow, such as a cut stem. Every root on a clone is one of these.
- Auxin
- A plant hormone that moves downward through the stem and, when it collects at a cut end, tells cells there to become root.
- Callus
- Unspecialised tissue formed over a wound. On a cutting it appears before roots and is often mistaken for them.
- Node
- The joint on a stem from which leaves and side shoots grow. Most root initials form at one, or a few millimetres below it.
- Propagator
- A covered tray that holds humidity around cuttings while they have no roots.
- Root initial
- A small group of cells that has committed to becoming a root but has not yet emerged from the stem.
- Hardening off
- Bringing a rooted cutting back to ordinary humidity in stages, so its leaves can build the surface they never needed indoors.
- Turgid
- Firm with water. The state a healthy cutting's leaves should be in at every point after the first few days.
- Vegetative growth
- The leafy stage before flowering. Cuttings are taken from plants in this stage and root far better than cuttings taken from flowering ones.
Questions people ask
Ten of them, answered directly.
Is a marijuana clone the same thing as a cutting?
Not quite, and the difference is worth keeping straight. A cutting is the piece of stem that has been severed from a parent plant. It becomes a clone once it has grown its own roots and can live independently. Every clone was a cutting first, but a cutting that fails to root never becomes a clone at all.
How is a single marijuana clone made?
A shoot with two or three nodes is cut from a healthy parent plant at an angle just below a node, the lower leaves are stripped off, the largest remaining leaves are trimmed back, and the stem goes straight into damp medium under a lid with weak light. Nothing else is required. The plant does the rest over the following two to three weeks.
What is the callus, and why has my cutting made one instead of roots?
The callus is a mass of unspecialised cells that seals the wound at the cut end. It appears around day three and it always comes before roots, so seeing one is normal progress rather than a dead end. It only becomes a problem when a fortnight passes with a large callus and no root tips, which usually means the base of the cutting is too cold or has had a very heavy dose of rooting hormone.
Why has a cutting not rooted after two weeks?
Two weeks is within the normal window for a lot of varieties, and slow rooters often show nothing until day sixteen to nineteen. Genuine failure at that point traces back to the first three days almost every time: leaf area left too large, humidity that dropped, a base that stayed cold, or medium wet enough to rot the stem before any root initial could emerge.
Where on the parent plant should a cutting be taken from?
Lower side branches root more readily than the top of the plant, because auxin concentrates lower down and that tissue is younger in behaviour if not in age. The growing tip roots too and tends to grow away faster afterwards. What matters more than position is that the shoot is green and flexible rather than thick and woody.
How old is a clone?
In terms of size and stage it starts again from nothing, but its cells carry on from where the parent plant left off, so it does not reset to zero the way a seed does. This is why a cutting taken from a plant that has begun flowering behaves oddly for a while, and why growers keep parent plants in vegetative growth rather than cutting from plants in flower.
Does a cutting need rooting gel or powder?
No. Cannabis cuttings root without any treatment at all, which is one reason the plant is cloned so widely. Gel or powder carrying synthetic auxin tends to even out the timing across a batch rather than make any one cutting root dramatically faster, and too much of it produces a swollen callus with no roots coming out of it.
How can you tell when one clone is ready to be moved on?
Roots showing through the sides or base of the plug, leaves that stay firm all day with the lid off, and a fresh pair of leaves at the top. All three together mean the plant is drawing up more water than it is losing. Roots alone are not enough, because the very first tips appear well before the plant can support itself.
Can a cutting be taken without a propagator?
Yes, though the odds get worse. The propagator is only there to hold humidity around a plant that has no way of replacing water. A clear bag over the container, or a covered tray in a humid room, does the same job. What cannot be skipped is the humidity itself in the first few days.
What does UK law say about growing a cannabis plant?
Cannabis is a Class B controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Producing a controlled drug, which includes cultivating a cannabis plant, is a criminal offence in the United Kingdom unless it is done under a licence issued by the Home Office. Those licences are granted for research and for regulated medicinal production, not to individuals. This page describes how plant propagation works and is not a suggestion that anyone should do it.
About this page
What it is, and what it is not.
This is a single reference page about plant propagation, written for people who have searched for what a marijuana clone is or how one is made and want a straight answer rather than a forum thread. It describes a process. It does not offer anything, and nothing on it is an invitation to do anything.
Cannabis is a Class B controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Cultivating a cannabis plant in the United Kingdom is a criminal offence unless it is done under a Home Office licence, and those licences go to research institutions and regulated medicinal producers, not to individuals. Readers outside the United Kingdom are subject to their own law, which differs widely.
The timings given here are typical rather than guaranteed, and vary by variety, by medium and by the conditions in any particular space. Nothing here is legal or agricultural advice.