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One of the major differences between seed grown plants and cuttings are the development of their root system.

From seed, roots form generally from the top of the soil down to the bottom of the pot. But from cuttings, since the end of the cutting is under the soil, the roots tend to grow from wherever that cut end is sitting in the pot. If you’ve shoved your cuttings all the way down into their pots so that their cut ends are touching the bottom, you will likely get roots growing UPWARD rather than downward which can cause problems for the plants long term health. But, if you position them more towards the middle, or are using an aeroponic system to mist their new roots directly, there should be minimal differences between plants from cuttings and those grown from seed.

Pelargoniums can live for a long time compared to some other common house plants. I wouldn’t be concerned about their vigor. Any issues with flowering are more likely related to light/season/temp, water availability, or nutrient availability.

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Plants grew from cuttings will be as new young plants. Clones of the old plant. Depending on what was the cause of the original plant to look bad after a while, they may or may not behave the same. The old plant could be ill, or have parasites, or just suboptimal conditions for a period of time. Those don't pass to new plants. But genetics does.

Plants can be cloned indefinitely. Potatoes are clones. Most of bushes you see in the gardens.

Plants from seeds are never the same genetically. If you collected the seeds from your plant, the new plants will probably be very different from the original. If you bought seeds of the same type and variety, they won't be the same, but very, very close.

You see, many seeds are now protected from being stolen. If there is an F1 mark somewhere on the package, you know they are. It's a genetic trick. They pick two selected (very long process) plants that, when crossed (mated), produce offspring of good properties. Then they use the two plants (or their clones) to produce the F1 seeds for selling. All the plants from these seeds are very similar, and have similar genetic material, few differences in genes' versions. But their seeds in turn will have very mixed up genetic material, so the resulting plants will be quite different to each other. Reverse engineering from that is almost impossible. Even harder than starting from scratch. That's how the protection works.

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After reading this, I wondered the difference between natural birth and "Test tube" babies. (In comparison to cuttings to seedlings) Expecting to see a big difference.

Apparently it's only a 5-10% difference in gene differences, between natural birth and IVF treatment babies. Which is a large percentage... but not really.

Really off topic from your thread, and I apologise for that. But I found it interesting and hope others do to.

Also be interested if anyone in the know can chime in on this.

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I was just going to say that last part too, the parent plant is just getting laid back for winter, if you're in the northern hemisphere. Sufficient light, temperature, moisture should see it looking amazing this spring.

IVF is still sexual reproduction, not cloning. There might be some odd pressures in the IVF process that reduces the viability of some genes, but you'd still expect 50% from one parent and 50% from the other.

If you're doing cloning, it gets weird. You'd expect only mitochondrial DNA from the surrogate mother. If you're cloning someone inside of themselves, you'd get a full 100% match, but otherwise you'd expect a 0% chromosomal match

Vegetative reproduction is a kind of asexual reproduction in which structures or any part of the plant is capable to develop a completely new plant, that is genetically identical to the parent plant. The writer above had an autocorrect. The majority of plants breed true, their young are reasonably identical to them. And it sounds like F1 is GMO, genetically modified. Try to avoid this. They may harm bee populations or butterflies. The long term effects are unknown.

Genetically they will be clones. Sometimes this process is called cloning. First difference will be that the mother plant, grown from seed, will have a tap root. The clone will not. The importance of the tap root will vary between plants. For some it's not an issue at all, for others it may mean less vigorous growth.

Again on cloning, some plants will naturally be able to make clones from clones indefinitely. Others will have a limited number of generations they can produce.

F1 hybrids are NOT the same as GMO. Think of an F1 hybrid as similar to breeding two different dog breeds together. So instead of golden retriever parents = golden retriever puppy we have golden mom + poodle dad = golden doodle puppy.

These F1 hybrid varieties come from the same old sexual reproductive process that all plants go through, it's just that we (humans) select which 2 varieties to breed together.

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GMO plants are not dangerous to insects unless explicitly made to be.

F1 just means they're first generation hybrids - the children of two "purebred" plants, if you will. If you choose the parents well, you can get fairly low variation - because the parents have known and predictable genetics.

Imagine you're a botanist working for a commercial nursery. One of your company's most popular offerings is a lovely little potted plant. It can either grow a red flower or a white flower, with leaves that are either waxy or fuzzy. The way the genetics work is that red flowers and fuzzy leaves are dominant traits - They win over waxy or white flowers. The powers that be inform you that customers love growing these plants from seed, but they love the uncommon red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants even more! So they want to offer seed packets that grow into red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants - But how can you know what the seed will grow into ahead of time??

Well, you might decide to be clever. You put in lots of effort and careful labor, and you come up with one plant that has, as close as possible, all the white flowering genes squeezed out, along with all the fuzzy leaved ones, and another that's exactly the opposite - No red flowering or waxy genes. When you breed these two plants together you'll tend to get lots of seeds that have both sets of genes, and because of how the genetics work that means almost all the seeds will be red flowered and fuzzy leaved! Maybe an occasional plant will glitch out and have pink flowers or stunted fuzz, but you can offer a pack of ten seeds and say nine of them will grow to flower red and have fuzzy leaves. Those plants are F1 hybrids - If a customer takes them and breeds them together trying to make more seed though, suddenly waxy leaves and white flowers will start appearing out of nowhere, because those genes are still there, just being overridden. You've maintained enough genetic variety for those traits to survive while also creating an entire generation of plants that doesn't have them.

GMO happens when those damned marketing guys butt in, and so management comes and tells you they signed a big contract with Northwestern University and they need you to grow a bunch of plants with purple flowers. "But they don't grow purple flowers, only red and white!" you protest, to no avail - In fact, that just puts dollar signs in their eyes at the thought of being the only ones to offer this plant with purple flowers.

Luckily, this is lucrative enough to them that you get a blank check to make it happen, and you take it to people with the right equipment and skills to do the same thing you did with careful crossbreeding, only more specifically and without the restriction that it has to actually be possible. They take your plant, then they grab a T. ionantha and an African violet, and set to work.

They find the specific sections of each plant's genes that produce purple pigment in flowers, and snip those out. Throw them in a machine, and swiftly they have millions of copies of each gene - And with the power of Science, they edit the genes of your plants and stick the code for purple flowers from each donor into white flowering plants. Turns out, the violet gene works better, so they manufacture a bunch of those, and next thing you know, you're growing these precious plants with aggressively purple flowers that they haven't ever been able to grow before.

Those are GMO flowers. They could also engineer them to produce their own antifungals so they don't rot as easily, or be super fancy and pricey and push the envelope of science forward by editing in the genes from that T. ionantha that code for its method of photosynthesis, so your plants now require less water.

But the edits they make are specific - You get the code for violet pigment, but not anything else from the violet.

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The whole weed industry lives on doing cuttings from the best mother plants and putting them in small root cubes until that cube is fully rooted through, then put them in bigger pots to mature

I suggest not puting the cuttling deeper then half an inch into very little earth, like 2-3 kubic inch of earth Put a see through cover on it to keep moisture trapped until some roots are there (3-5 days) make sure to air it out and keep from getting dry

Clonex or something similar may help the cuttlings getting roots quicker and more reliable..

The „new“ plants should be just as healthy as seed grown depending on how good/bad the mother is doing

Good luck

Do you know what differentiates the clones that can keep cloning indefinitely from ones with limited cycles ?

Here's one article on trees, that suffer from deficits after cloning.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11003684

And here's an article about sea grass that's been doing it for 4,500 years.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/worlds-largest-plant-is-a-seagrass-that-clones-itself-180980189/#:~:text=Scientists%20have%20discovered%20the%20world's,of%20the%20Royal%20Society%20B.

Polyploidy seems to be the mechanism in the genetics of plants such as the seaweed that allows this behavior.

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