Grafting Marijuana -Multiple Strains One Mother Plant

[Weasel]

Thanks so much! I wasn't sure if you were maybe just a wandering know it all passing on info gleaned from google. If you are a wandering know it all - you're definitely one of the good ones. I really appreciate you taking the time to post all this.
Parafilm already ordered.
I have no major plans of getting into large scale grafting. To be honest I'm just doing it for aesthetics to create a beautiful plant if possible . Also just for the fun of learning something new.
The way I'm grafting right now is the most Neanderthal way imaginable and can be done by anyone with two plants and a knife. It kind of shows too in the end result
Still- the plant is looking happy and perky today, so I'll have to call the graft a success. I'm going to let the plant recover for a while and grow a little more foliage and a better root system before doing the next graft. The actual graft cut area is an ugly mass of scar tissue and I can definitely see how the parafilm would help a lot. But cannabis is a hardy plant and I'm sure it will grow and strengthen that spot further, making an even bigger and uglier lump. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I'm very happy with it myself.
A lot of possibilities here.
Thanks again Komatchi.

[Komatchi]

Yeah no problem, I'm so glad you ordered it.! Make sure to stretch the parafilm so it sticks to itself like plastic wrap would. I've seen plenty of people that don't realize it stretches.
I think your plants looked healthy which is all that matters honestly. If you had parafilm when you took the cuttings; just doing what you are doing should bond the plants all the way with little sign of being grafted. I bet the parafilm will fix all the problems you are running into, you have the process down.
I'll link one more picture that I find important. It's of the stem of a plant that I was growing . It shows some type of root rot moving through the stem of the plant (the brown ring inside it). That is why some grafts will never take no matter how hard you try, the fungus is already growing inside the rootstock (or scion) plant. I can't tell you how long it took me to figure that out. The best anyone can do is keep trying to get better.

-Komatchi

[PigSquishy]

I have heard mold is systemic and from my personal experience I would have jumped on the bandwagon of saying I agree with that statement. I've cut plenty of plants in my days and I've seen the ring you are showing, and yet in all honesty I just never knew what it was. All this time I always thought of it like a ring on a tree, and just never thought of it as a continuing issue within the plant.

On the grafting tape, have you ever tried that grafting paste, I can't think of the name of it off hand it is for cutting and grafting, you paint in on with the little paint brush which comes out of the lid when you open it up, black like tar. I know that stuff works really well on the grafting I do with trees, not so familiar with the tape so thank you for sharing that bit of information.

[Weasel]

Ok I made it into town to a higher speed connection and with the help of yet another different browser seem to have uploaded pictures so here is a picture of the plant as it looks today and a picture of the nasty looking graft
The blue line shows the convoluted path the plant fluids are going to have to travel to make it up the Malawi stem. It sure isn't perfect but it seems to be working and I'm happy with it

[PigSquishy]

Are you grafting the two sides of the stalks together? This is a different style of grafting than I am used to seeing, I am familiar with two styles of grafting the first is to split the stem on the end and then bind it going straight in, The second way I am more familiar with is to bind it into the side of the main stalk as if it is another branch coming out. I found a couple of sketches of this to better explain. My question becomes if you are in fact binding the two sides of the stems together, how does that affect the weight then put onto each of the two parts of the plant?

While reading on cannabis specifically in regards to grafting, the author was talking about the need to keep flowering the close mother and re-vegging it, and I was honestly stunned. First I would have thought you would graft a plant like this and keep it in a mother state forever until it died? The other thing which surprised me was the re-vegging that author spoke of, because it just seemed off to me to re-veg a mother plant... Could you perhaps shed some more light on this? I know how to graft and clone trees and flowers really well, but I do not know anything about the cannabis plant specifically in this fashion.

[Weasel]

The first time I tried a graft I'd simply read a 2 or 3 sentence description of this method I am currently using, which you will have seen if you looked earlier in the thread- I posted a picture of how I cut the stems and spliced them together.

Anyway- my friend posted this idea on his journal and I read it and just ran with it. I didn't do any research because I was looking for an adventure. It didn't take long before I had a successful graft, which, as I keep mentioning, I then proceeded to destroy.

In the last week or two since starting this latest experiment I've done a little bit more googling and seen descriptions of the methods you describe.

It's not 100% alien to me because I used to see my dad do it to our fruit trees when I was a kid, and I grasp the basic concept of grafting I suppose but never thought to apply it to cannabis before last year.

As to your question if I understand it-yes the rootstock ends up with an extra branch placed onto it so it's heavier. I have no doubt that the stem will become very strong and thick to compensate.

In fact- I'm not really sure that I do understand your question. I just lined the two plant stems up as well as I could and fixed them in place as much as possible before I made the cut, so there wasn't any pressure on them to tear apart. After about 10 days they were grown together enough to cut the grafted on branch (scion) free.

I'm doing it this way because I sense a better chance of success, and because I like doing new and interesting things. I don't have many Panama clones right now- which is the plant I want to use as the rootstock. I don't have extra to waste.

Grafting 'the usual way' seems to require a humidity bag placed around the area with frequent misting, and I'm not at the grow all that often. Usually I'm away for five days each week.

Can you post a link to the info you're mentioning about flowering mothers? It doesn't make sense to me but maybe I'm misunderstanding.

A mother can be kept alive indefinitely in veg state, but has to be constantly pruned down or she gets too big. Another method is to clone the mother and then flower her, while vegging the clones, which is what I do.

I don't keep mothers. When I am ready to put a plant into flowering I take my cuttings at that time, just before moving her into the flowering room.

I then veg the resulting clone(s) for two or three months and when I am ready to flower it/them I take cuttings again, put them in veg and flower the one(s) I just took the cuttings from. I've been keeping some of my favorite strains alive for over three years this way. It's easy and takes up less room.


This grafted plant isn't something I can really preserve by taking a cutting of it. I may graft a dozen strains together, and I can take cuttings of any of those strains off of it, but I can't take a bunch of '12 strain cuttings' from it. It just doesn't work that way.


So it's going to be a one-shot deal when I flower it and the only way to preserve my hard work would be to reveg it. Maybe that's what the person is talking about.

I can see why it would be tempting to at least try.

Is it the revegging that you're curious about?

[PigSquishy]

Like you I am always willing to listen, learn and try new things, find out what works and what doesn't work... life is to short for me to do it and try it all... I have to rely on others to help me learn as much as I can. The place I was reading that information on I do believe was a book "The Cannabis Breeders Bible" by Greg Green, and I would quote the page and such, but I have to find it again... If it wasn't from there then I would have read it based off from other research I was then doing in regards to this. I do realize I could have perhaps misunderstood something to.

I looked up grafting on YouTube and saw one guy just using a scalpel making the two small slide cuts towards the middle of the stem, shaping the other piece and then just duct taping it into place and showing off his mother plant of several clearly different strains on the same mother plant. Which is what got me to question at what limit might a plant be able to take? Which in turn got me to thinking of would it be better to have one dwarf mother per strain or to have a 5-gallon pot mother with multiple strains on it? This has also led to more questions on tissue culture as well and the idea of keeping a plant in suspension as a form of mother plants.

[Weasel]

A fellow I know a little from another site started trying to learn to graft around the same time as I destroyed my first graft. I kind of moved on and got distracted doing other stuff but he's figured it out in the meantime and I think he has about 15 strains now in one plant.
In reality I don't think it's anything particularly practical for most growers. Maybe as Komatchi said there are some great reasons to graft, but I think practically most of the time single plants will be better.
For myself the only great reason is to learn something new and interesting and try to create a beautiful plant. Unfortunately I'm out of seeds for my latest favorite strain, Golden Tiger. But more seeds are on the way so maybe there will be time to add the GT as well. Probably not this time. For now I want to make a Panama, Malawi, Mama Thai. This will be three out of my four ultimate favourite sativas. They all have very different flowers in appearance and smell. To have one plant flowering with all three of these amazing strains on it would be incredible. And I'm also very interested to see how they're affected by the strange botanical situation they'll find themselves in.

I went ahead and attempted the graft with the Mama Thai today. I'm not super happy about the way I made the cut as I sliced the Mama Thai almost completely through, and there is very little stem material left uncut to draw fluids through. I put a plastic bag/mini greenhouse for humidity around that area tonight and hopefully she won't wilt completely.

[dontknownuttin]

[PigSquishy]

I have to say that photo catches my eye and leaves me wondering... If that is a fridge all of that bud is going to mold because of the humidity which always happens within a fridge whether its in baggies or not. If on the other hand that is a freezer, the trichomes will get super cold and become brittle and break off.. so why in the world would he store that much bud in either one? Am I missing something here? Unless the unit isn't turned on and he is just using it to store it out of the light and keep it air tight, but if you were to say that, then that begs the question why its plugged in and the light behind him is on because the unit is plugged in...

[PigSquishy]

Oh Thank You again, you just reminded me on why they were flowering the mother plant and yes I do believe 100% now it was in the book...

When you graft two plants together it interchanges some of the genetic coding of the two plants, not to the degree of a male and a female breeding to make seeds, but all the same there is some qualities of the two plants that each side can or will take on. Of the new plant you make because of the two grafts, now you can take this plant into flower to give off some of the newly acquired aspects of this plant onto its offspring, thus combining its genetics to some degree into the new seeds which you now will have. Then because you don't know what this plant is going to be like yet in its seeds, you would want to bring the plant back into a re-veg cycle to keep it alive for the purpose of knowing if its worth going forward with perhaps...

[Weasel]

Yeah I had the same thought about the fridge too.
More likely it's not a normal fridge but more of a climate controlled vault with regulated temp and RH? Like a giant curing jar.

Very very interesting. I jumped ahead in my thoughts as soon as you mentioned mingling genetics.
So if I treat part of that plant with colloidal silver to make it produce hermaphrodite flowers and pollinate itself for feminized seeds- what do I get? I don't know, but mathematically there are a lot of possibilities between the three strains.

[PigSquishy]

I looked at making a plant hermie and then breeding it with itself, and it is my personal understanding that you can collect the pollen off such a plant and either use the pollen or even freeze it for an extended period of time, but you should not do anything more with that plant ever again. But the pollen is good, but it is my understanding you wouldn't want seeds or anything else from that plant because of the chemicals used to make it hermie.

[Weasel]

I make seeds with CS fairly regularly.
I have my doubts about the toxicity of CS. I work with silver a lot in one of my jobs. Many people actually drink colloidal silver and it hasn't been known to have any ill effects that I know of. Silver is generally considered one of the few non-toxic metals.
Anyway- the way I usually make seeds these days is to use two tiny flowering clones- spray one until it hermies, then isolate it under a cfl. I take the other little flowering clone out to it for their romantic liaison, then bring the pollinated one back to the flowering room while throwing out the 'male'. If I put a clone cutting into the pot and straight into flowering as soon as it shows roots I end up with about an 8" plant. Perfect for making hundreds of seeds.
I've also done it by spraying a small branch of one larger plant but this is way it is much harder to contain the pollination later on. And this way you can throw away the whole treated plant and not have to worry about any possible concern of smoking any CS.

[Weasel]

I make the CS myself. It's dead simple. Lots of tutorials online.

[dontknownuttin]

lOCAL DISPENCERY RETAIL OUTLET they sell that much in a day here at $300.00 a ounce at our "NON PROFIT" dispensary's here.

[dontknownuttin]

You can see the workers green card on a lanyard around his neck!. GOOD JOB!

[Weasel]

Yeah I saw that. I don't like that part as much. I never have to wear ID when I visit my 'curing vault'.
Definitely could be worse jobs though!

[Weasel]

Photos are working again sort of.

Here is the Mama Thai graft- branch coming in from the right and poking out the top on the right side.
This time I wrapped it with some ribbon to hopefully make a slightly neater graft.
It was wilting a little last night but seems good today so I'm optimistic I'm going to realize my goal here of getting the three sativa plant going.

I'll clean everything up later on after the plant grows a little- and get rid of most of the crap that's tied around the stem right now.

I also started two other grafts. One in this same style with a Panama/Mama Thai, and another in the style Komatchi mentions- a Mama Thai base cutting with a Malawi cutting spliced on top- wrapped in electricians tape and stuck in the cloning area. Hasn't wilted as of 24 hours so that may work too.

[slickdawg]

that's got to be a tricky process!! looks cool!

[Weasel]

Yeah its surgery all right. I'm getting better at it. Helps a lot to put the initial work in and get the limbs lined up nicely and tied side by side without any pressure pulling them apart.
But yeah- especially since I already put a bunch of work into this plant doing the first graft on it. So if I kill it I'm killing two plants really, and wasting a lot of effort. Then I have to cut the stems of them almost completely through-then fit them together and hope for the best.
It's probably a weird way of doing it. Excited about the thought of the results though if this works.

[slickdawg]

it's fun to play! lol hoping in the future i'll be doing something like that! just love the hole process of veg then the switch it's amazing i think!!!

[Weasel]

Alright I cut the third graft free today and it seems to have worked. Better than the first one actually since I took some of Komatchi's advice and wrapped the graft tightly this time. I don't have any grafting tape yet but used some plastic ribbon I found around.


Also some pipe cleaners- my most useful growroom tool.

About to remove the bandaid.