Drawing on her background cultivating flowers, the founder of London-area licensed marijuana producer Eve & Co., has now made her company Canada’s first to begin supplying the grow-your-own cannabis market.

It was no easy feat.

Kelsey Jobson, who at the Strathroy-based company deals with provincial pot rules, handled the test shipping runs, using not cannabis plants but citronella.

Those plants, familiar to home gardeners and selected for their similarity to pot plants in structure and hardiness, were sent to garden centres across the country last winter. Each plant was packaged in an individual shipping container insulated with bubble wrap and equipped with an LED light to keep the plant in a vegetative state.

“In the dead of winter, we sent them to the Yukon to try to put them through the longest transit time . . . just to test the packaging,” said Jobson.

Rombouts said the plants arrived after roughly three days in transit. One plant was lost in the process, but it was later found and even nursed back to health by garden centre staff, who briefed Eve’s team on the condition of the citronella saplings.

“We wanted to know their professional opinion on the state of the plant, if there’s any sign of freezing,” Rombouts said.

This month, Eve began selling its clones – small cannabis plants grown from the cuttings of a mother plant – to customers in Newfoundland and Labrador, the first province to allow the sale of seeds and plants.

Residents in all other provinces, except Quebec and Manitoba, are allowed to grow marijuana plants at home, but the materials to do so aren’t yet for sale through legal channels.

Newfoundland customers pay $39.99, plus $35 for shipping, to buy a six-inch clone that’s between two and four weeks old. The clones, which Eve has in a variety of strains, include growing instructions. Buyers can also email questions to the Strathroy company’s support staff.

“Basically, we pick our best plants, we take our cuttings off of them and we root them,” Rombouts said, adding the clones need to be re-potted within the first week and will reach maturity in three to four months.

Growing a cannabis plant from a clone is easier than cultivating one from seeds, Rombouts said.

“The problem with cannabis seeds is they’re notorious for having really low germination rates,” she said. “With the clone, (buyers) get an established plant, so all they have to do is not kill it.”

But Eve’s clone-selling model won’t work in Ontario, where residents will eventually be allowed to grow up to four pot plants at home, because of logistics, Rombouts said.

All cannabis products must first be shipped to the Toronto-area warehouses of the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS), the province’s marijuana wholesaler, before they’re sent to customers.

Deepak Anand of Cannabis Compliance Inc., a consulting firm, says selling seeds and clones has been put on the backburner by licensed producers as they focus on supplying enough dried marijuana for the recreational market.

Health Canada offers nursery licences, which allows holders to propagate, cultivate and harvest plants and seeds for other licence holders.

Located 35 kilometres west of London, Eve is expanding the greenhouse operation it shares with its subsidiary, Natural MedCo, a medicinal cannabis producer, to 92,900 square metres, making the company one of the Canada’s 10 largest licensed producers.