Making the Most of Your Marijuana Motherplant, Part One

I was talking to a newbie marijuana grower who started growing in his 2000-watt home grow room in Colorado only a year ago, and when I mentioned marijuana motherplants to him, he didn’t really know what I meant.

I explained that marijuana motherplants are cherished female plants kept alive in vegetative phase (grow phase) for months or even years so cuttings can be taken from them.

The grower remarked he’s never made clones because he can easily buy cannabis clones and seeds at his local legalized marijuana stores.

He never gave much thought to where clones came from, so I decided to write this article after he asked for more information.

The first thing that comes to mind is, why do you want marijuana motherplants.

The simplest answer is you favor a specific marijuana female, and want to grow many generations of clones from it.

In most cases, you favor that female because it has the genetics, growth characteristics, and high you love.

Perhaps you bought a rare clone that cost a lot of money, or you grew ten seeds and one of them is a female that excels above all the others.

You don’t want to run it through bloom phase, harvest it, and get rid of it. You want to keep it alive so you can take cuttings from it numerous times.

You might do this by taking clones of the plant when it’s several weeks old, just before you flip it to 12-12 lighting, and then growing the clones through bloom phase, while keeping the original plant (the motherplant) in grow phase.

Another strategy is to grower grow your marijuana plants through bloom phase all the way to harvest, but you don’t harvest the entire plant when you want to make it a motherplant. You leave 20-30% of it uncut, including the roots and main stalk of course.

Then you take that partially harvested cannabis plant, flush the root zone, start using grow phase nutrients again, and put the plant back into an 18-hour lights-on cycle.

Within a few weeks, the partially-harvested cannabis plant has reverted to grow phase, and it’s kept in grow phase using special strategies we’ll talk about later.

This is called “re-vegging” a marijuana plant, when you partially harvest a ripe bloom phase plant and then put it back in grow phase.

The main benefit of re-vegging to create marijuana motherplants is that you get the opportunity to harvest, dry, and cure the buds and see if they give you the exact effects you want before you invest too much more time in caring for the motherplant.

Get the inside story on the best methods to re-veg your cannabis plants right here.

Taking care of cannabis motherplants creates extra work and requires a permanent grow phase veg room.

That’s why you need to know special strategies to keep your marijuana motherplants healthy, to minimize the costs of maintaining motherplants, and most importantly, to ensure that your motherplants generate easy-rooting cannabis clones.

Look for our next article on marijuana motherplants—we give you those insider strategies.