You’ve found a perfect plant and you are ready to turn one into a clone mother/cannabis mother plants—it’s a smart move, you love the plant and you love the yields, so how do you do it? Obviously, it’s hard to keep plants alive with a life cycle of only a few months to a year and it’s hard to exactly get genetics from seeds.
Instead, we can take the cuttings and create clones to ensure that the genes of this perfect plant can continue—we call the plant from which you take clippings the mother plant. That said, let’s get some things out of the way: we can’t do cuttings of autoflowering varieties though, because they don’t come into bloom with a photoperiod, so it’s impossible to maintain a fixed growth stage, so we will only be talking about Sativa and Indica plants that are viable for cloning. These plants need to be healthy, well-maintained, and of course, they cannot be clones themselves.
How do we consciously grow cannabis mother plants with the properties we want? First, we’ll need to build a separate growing space and lighting system for your mother plants indoors. This may dissuade some because not everyone will have the space to do this. If you are short on space, you can try using a 2-in-1 grow tent.
Conditions required for planting cannabis mother plants – how to grow and maintain cannabis mother plants
- A small tent, the best size is around 80x80cm. You can also grow in your closet, it’s up to you.
- Proper lighting. We need to choose to grow lights with a blue spectrum, you can choose 100w fluorescent lights, they are efficient and produce almost no heat, and the price is relatively low.
- Ventilation system. A 150m3/h exhaust fan and a clip fan to renew the air in your grow tent.
- Grow tent accessories: temperature and humidity meter, pH tester, etc.
How do you grow mother plants? – how to grow and maintain cannabis mother plants
For a mother plant setup, you should start from seeds since the genetics should be reliable. Of course, you may not know you like the plant until you’ve tried it so you may want to hang on to a few seeds while you’re growing one to flower. Although this may take a long time the quality of the mother plant will be a lot better.
A more efficient way, but potentially less stable, is to pick one of your existing plants and turn it into a mother plant: plant it in a separate pot and put it on an 18/6 light cycle to prevent it from going into bloom. This way the plant will grow denser and we can get a lot of cuttings from the mother plants. We can also periodically replace the mother plants with cuttings.
When choosing a healthy mother plant you should pay attention to:
- Root health: Roots are the foundation of a plant’s growth, and strong, healthy roots tend to produce the best plants. When choosing a mother plant, you need to pay extra attention to which plant has the healthiest roots.
- Female plants: We’re not talking about male plants of course. We would like to stress not to choose plants that are hermaphroditic since your clones will inherit this trait.
- Resistance to pests and diseases: Pests and diseases are the natural enemies of plants. You want to choose plants that are naturally resistant to most pests and diseases as mother plants if possible.
You want to pick a plant that is perfect in every way as your mother plants, but this is difficult to achieve in practice. Every plant will always have shortcomings. What you need is to figure out what you need most while you ignore those small faults.
How to maintain your mother plants? – how to grow and maintain cannabis mother plants
Fertilizer alone is not enough to feed your mother plant: you need to add extra nutrients to keep it alive. Since the mother plant is always on an 18/6 light cycle, you can buy nutrients rich in nitrogen and other micronutrients to boost its growth, and you can get it easily with nutrients designed for the mother plant.
You also need to pay attention to potting. In the beginning, you plant the mother plant in a 2-gallon pot, and as it grows, especially as the mother plant will keep growing, you will need to keep transplanting it—until it finds its home in a 10-gallon pot. But that doesn’t mean planting is over, at which point you’ll prune the roots and replant the plant into a 5-gallon pot, leaving enough roots to fill a pot of about 3 gallons to grow more. Do this regularly and this cycle will last about five months.
Wrap-up – how to grow and maintain cannabis mother plants
There are many details of growing mother plants, and this article is mainly used as a basis for understanding. We hope it will kickstart your interest in mother plants.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
And be sure to check out our other blog posts for useful tips on becoming a great grower!
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