how to look after your mother

You can do this a few ways, but what you should think about is finding 'keeper' plants- that is the ones that you liked the best and want to keep. You could plant all your seeds (with strain names and individual numbers on the pot) and take a cutting from all of them. You then flower the cuttings or the plant you took the cuttings from. After that batch is done, you'll have heaps of labeled mother plants waiting... if number 2 rocked, you keep that one and pitch the rest or etc. You do this (or something else similar) even if you have 10x seeds of only 1 strain because you will get to choose the very best genetic expression of the plant. Some strains you can buy vary a fair bit seed to seed- others you will just find the one which is slightly better than the rest.

Once you have your mother(s) you keep them under a light regime such as 16-8 or 18-6.... you just grow it like any other veg but just don't drop the light hours and it won't flower

Oh right you wanted to know about trimming. Basically you want to trigger lateral budding. You do this by letting the plant get a few nodes tall and then nipping the top off (causing all the lower nodes to shoot out 2 branches each) or by bending the top of the plant 90 degrees (or more). If you didn't know, the plant has a hormone system (which varies strain to strain) which says the top of the main trunk has priority and untill such a time that it moves away from lower nodes it actually inhibits them from shooting lateral buds. By cutting the top off the plant, or bending it far enough, it triggers a hormone response which stimulates the lower nodes to shoot out.
Just keep bending branches down and spreading it out and you will easily grow lots of new shoots and branches to take cuts from.

good advice so far.

i would add that with mama plants, you want to prune them after cloning from them. after taking clones, just nip all the remaining branches back so that the plant is very uniform. remove dead leaves and "sucker" branches that stand no chance of ever growing into healthy clone material.

every once in a while, you will need to revitalize the soil. if you are unable to transplant into a bigger pot, that means you need to root prune. basically, just take the rootball out, remove up to about half of all the soil from the base and sides, and transplant it back into the same container with fresh, new soil.


or you could just flower your mom and use one of your clones for a new mom.

Nice! I like this. I was just wanting to know about this and I was also pondering root pruning too. I will have to look into this more. I have been reading about Bonsai technique. It seems to give some good info.