Mother Plants

[webfoot]

Just wondering how long a mother plant is good for. I have a couple now that are 8 months old.

The tops are getting woodier.

These plants are getting big and taking up a lot of room. Would it be better to put them into bud

and start some new moms, Or should I just keep cutting off them?

the bottom three feet of the plants are bare, All the growth is in the top three feet. There are

more cuttings on these plants (Apollo 13) then I will ever use. Thanks for any help.

[LongHairBri]

you can keep a mother FOREVER!! however, woodier cuttings are difficult to get rooted. as long as your taking your cuttings from the softer, new growth, things will be fine,

 

also, flowering huge plants sucks. they streach to the ceiling and you can't get the light exposure even. flowering a large mom usually ends in sub-par results

[Catfinger]

Just FYI, 'mother plants' count against your legal numbers, so unless you have some super special rare clone only breed, you can always just back clone off existing plants that go into flower on a regular schedule and stop using so much light, space, nutes, and energy and plant count numbers on running a mother, especially when you can start new ones once a year or so to reset genetics. Genetic degredation could take years if at all by continuously back cloning but again if its not a rare clone only then save yourself a headache, toss her into flower and just continue to take regular clones off your plants after they grow in veg for a bit before getting put into flower. Just putting it out there, some will skewer me and say how important a 'mother' is but if you can reset it from seed its not worth 'mothering', especially since it seems space is important to you by your comment.

[cristinew]

Yes i do not use a Mother plant, I just cut clones before i put them into flower, repeat repeat ,,I clone every 19 days and harvest the same 3 sets in each room,

Edited January 31, 2012 by cristinew

[The Digital Nomad]

First off - Clones are copies of the plant it was taken from. It will be practically identical to the results you had with the original plant of the conditions are the same.

cloning is easier than seeds, you do not have to sex or wait until the plant shows presex to flower. The clone has the maturity of the mother plant vs the immaturity of a seed still developing. The BAD thing about cloning - you can clone a sick plant. While you started with a healthy mother plant, if you start cloning from clones taken from the healthy mother plant, you risk cloning from a sick clone.

 

It can get harder to clone from woody, older plants. Technically you can use any 'green' sprout on the plant, bottom or top (while bottom cuttings are better). But I find that you will reach a certain point - the plant is still growing UP and soon it will be too big. I too rotate mothers in to flower once they reach a certain height. Just pick the next healthy vegging clone to be the next mother.

 

You want to be careful with the process of cloning from clones - plants can acquire disease or viruses that make them weak - so cloning from a sick plant yields sick clones. So you want to be careful before you 'flower' a healthy mother, or choose to clone from a more recent clone - make sure its the best one.

 

DN

[webfoot]

Thanks for the help, I gonna throw her in bud, And start a new mom or two.

[Catfinger]

I still remember the conversation with a friend from Colorado back in 09' when I was asking him questions about one of my mother plants. He didn't really respond to my question so much as he fecetiously asked me "So, how long have you been mothering that mother?"