Maintenance for Moms

I grow in 5 gal fabric pots w/ coco perlite
How do you guy/gals maintain your moms?
what ppm?
Feed/ plain water frequency?

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Slow release amendments and heavy pruning plus regenerating from new clone stock every 3 months max and keeping back ups.

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You don’t need to do anything special , just veg it out like you normally would and take clones when it’s looking really healthy. Once those new clones root, the healthiest one is your new mother. Rinse and repeat, it’s nothing to it.

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I tend to keep em small, space consideration, medium dosage nutes once a week and water when they need it. Low power LED strips, keeps em slow and small.
All depends on how many cuts you need. Had one on my speaker for a year, grew a few inches in that whole time, still alive a year later.

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I usually torture them. I keep them in Solo cups or other small pots (coco), feed full strength veg nutes every watering and hack them back to a few tint growth tips every couple weeksish.

Weed plants LOVE being chopped back like that they come back with vigorous and healthy new growth. Probably because they have a big rootstock to work with.

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Yep, Even if you don’t need the cuttings that time, it’s important to keep on a regular clipping schedule or they will get overgrown and too thick for their own good.
Case and point, this one needs some detailing to keep it from chocking the center lol

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Get the chainsaw!!

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Might as well lol, it’s in a 16oz container and exploding. It’s a practice mom off one of my practice bag seed plants. Not sure if it’s worth keeping yet, but it’s a source of female cuttings if I need it, until I find something to replace it with something else. Of course then there’s the strategy for finding the moms, plant a bunch of one strain at once and pheno hunt, or got through a few of several strains first to have variety, then find if there’s possible better keepers after.

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Well if you don’t end up keeping it you can experiment with root pruning and bonsai techniques. I’ve killed a few messing around like that haha

I’ve kept a bonsai mom and did root pruning twice on it. But that was in a half gallon, not two cups lol

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Grow them and hack them back until they become a dense gnarled stump of nodes. After a year or so, take a cutting for a new one. I have never root pruned.

I feed them the same thing every other plant gets.

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If your actual intent is to keep a MOTHER I’d go along the slow release feed Like @Heritagefarms said or a good organic no til soil. Pruning and training on the moms weekly at times.
I keep mother plants myself. Not to many guys keep actual MOTHERS they do what farmerjoe420 is talking about.
Hope some of this is helpful to you

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If you zoom in and look you can see the all nice mycrohizae forming in the soil.

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@Ak49 I use Canna Coco fertilizer…do you mean something like miracle grow slow release?

Oh no :hear_no_evil:. I use ff marine cuisine.

You don’t like Canna? I found it simple and effective, but expensive. But when people say less nitrogen, idk how to do that with A&B nutrients.

Have you ever found that the quality of the genetics starts to slide after coming a clone of a clone time and time again?

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I’ve never ran it to be honest with you. I ran dyna gro for fifteen. But the last ten or twelve I’ve just been running organic I have a huge goat pen that’s had pig and goats it’s in for twenty plus years and I have always used it in our veggie garden in the summer. And just recently I’ve start to try coco I have my first coco grow going now so far so good.

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I have a clone that’s over thirty years old and I’ve had her for twenty years my uncle gifted me her when I was 15 I’ve had her every since and so has the cops and the cops and did I mention. Yeah anyway to answer your question she has changed significantly in her structure leafs are a lot wider and her nodes are tighter this plant I’m talking of is a pure Sativa her buds have remained the same the terps are the Same the yield is the same .
Hope that rambling help some.

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Absolutely man happy growing :call_me_hand: