Doing your cloning right will depend on a few things. First, it depends on if you are cloning from a plant that is growing from seed or from clone. If from seed then you will want to wait until just before flowering the mother so that it is sexually mature, and good and healthy. This will allow you to clone only females rather than cloning both and having to go through the male culling process every time.
One caviot to what I just said above. Often it is difficult to detect male from female until plant goes into full flower. This makes it difficult to decide which plants to take cuttings from. Whenever I start a strain from seed, I allow the plants (5-12 seedlings) to grow to sexual maturity before taking cuttings, then I take several cuttings from each plant and label them to match the mother. I then flower out the mother plants and remove any males (and their clones) from the mix. I then decide which plants have the best features (growth, look, size, yeild, and smoke) and eliminate any extras that don't "make the cut".
If you are cloning from a clone, then you can take cuttings at any point. Still it is prefferable to take cuttings after the plant has reached a nice size so that you get good healthy cuttings. Taking cuttings at the right time is also useful for making the plant branch out more and become more bushy.
While you can take cuttings from the top of the plant for cloning, it is considerably more difficult to acomplish for the inexperienced grower due to the nature of the plant. As Solanero said, it is better to take cuttings from lower branches of the plant as these will root much easier.
Successful cloning also depends on your cloning and growing environment. Its much more than just taking a cutting and putting it in water and setting it in the window to grow roots. The best way to ensure success is to READ about it and then carefully plan ahead.
That is the same advice for generally growing MJ. :hubba: You will need to have a place for caring for the growing clone that is separate from the standard grow area. You will need proper medium for growing your clones, and you will need to get some cloning gel for much better results.
It is important to remember that you need to have all these things ready before taking any cuttings, as there are a few different methods that peeps like to use for cloning. I personally have a commercial aeroponic propagation unit called an "EZ-cloner". I simply make up a solution of "clonex" and water and put that in my unit. Then when I take my cuttings, (about 3-5" tall) I trim off most of the leaves and cut the bottom so that it is just below a node. Then I dip the bottom 1/2" into the clone gel and place in my unit.
Clones can also be placed in soil, rockwhool cubes, jiffy starter plugs, etc. Just look up propagation here and on any of the hydro-store websites.
Clones also take special care to ensure success. They need to be kept warmer and in higher humidity than fully rooted plants. They should not be placed in any kind of fertilizer or nuted soil, nor fed any nutes for at least 2 weeks, until they have rooted.
With careful planning you should not have to take many cuttings to get a few successful plants. Most here have anywhere from 75% to 100% clone success. Make sure you do some reading before doing any cutting.
