How to Keep a Cannabis Mother Plant: Care, Benefits and How Long It Lives

A cannabis mother plant is a plant you keep in permanent vegetative growth, under an 18/6 light schedule, so you can keep cutting clones from it. Kept healthy, a mother can live for years and supply genetically identical, all-female plants on demand. There's endless talk about strains, leaves and seeds, but this is the one term experienced growers really love. So what does it take to keep one?

Cannabis mother plants are basically plants that are kept in the vegetative stage indefinitely so you can take clones, cuttings that grow into exact copies of the mother.

Of course, this means growing indoors with a room and a lighting setup dedicated to your mother plant. That's why you don't see many home growers keeping mothers: you'd need two grow spaces, one in permanent veg and another running the regular cycle for your other plants.

Still, keeping your own mother plants comes with a lot of perks.

What Are the Benefits of a Mother Plant?

The beauty of running a mother plant on the right schedule is that cloning lets you harvest one day and have a fresh batch of plants ready to go the next. On top of that:

1. Mother plants are the perfect source of young plants for sea of green (SOG), a method that packs many small plants into a space. Cuttings of similar size form an even canopy with no taller or shorter phenotypes to worry about, which maximizes light exposure and yield potential.
2. Handle the cycle right and your plants can be as big as you want. A mother can be shaped and trained to fit your space and your setup.
3. With clones, there's no risk of male plants, which means a grow made up entirely of female plants.

A mother plant's traits bring a lot to the table: you can pick one specific plant, the one with the best terpenes, aroma and exactly the effect you're after, and reproduce it for as long as you like. To pull that off, though, you'll need to give it some care, and there are certain steps you'll want to follow.

How Do You Grow a Mother Plant?

Choose the strain

First, decide which strain you want to grow and what kind of care it's going to need. Lots of people go for a heavy yielder, others want a specific flavor, others care about plant shape, and some want strains that handle cold or resist mold. There's a whole world of strains, effects, flavors and properties out there.

Should you top a mother plant?

There's plenty to stay on top of, but once you have your mother plant, it's a good idea to give it a topping (cutting off the main growing tip). It's not mandatory, but this kind of pruning makes the plant grow more branches, which makes it easier to take cuttings when you need them.

Keep it in permanent veg

Mother plants are basically cannabis plants kept in the vegetative stage for as long as possible, so it's crucial to keep them on an 18/6 light schedule and never change the light cycle. The idea is to keep a mother in veg for at least 6 months so you can take a good number of clones, but that's easier said than done.

To make it happen, every growing condition needs to be dialed in, and feeding matters a lot. Remember, nitrogen is the macronutrient cannabis uses to build green growth, so your mother plant is going to need plenty of it. If you're wondering how to keep a mother plant going, remember that it has to stay healthy, because clones are exact copies: if the mother isn't healthy, the cuttings will struggle to survive.

Since a mother spends so long in veg, good care means it can get pretty big and outgrow your space. So to keep it manageable, your best bet is training techniques like topping or LST.

When Can You Take Clones From a Mother Plant?

Once the plant is big enough to take cuttings, be very careful, because you can end up passing diseases to the mother. That's why sterilized tools are a must when you're learning to take cuttings at home.

You can start taking cuttings from your mother plant from the second week of vegetative growth. If the plant is young, take just 2–3 cuttings at a time. As it grows, you'll be able to take more and more.

How Often Can You Take Clones From a Mother Plant?

After each round of cuttings, give the mother at least two weeks to recover before you take more. Taking too many at once, or not giving it enough recovery time, can stress the plant, stunt its growth and leave it more vulnerable to pests and disease.

How Long Can a Mother Plant Live?

In the right environment, mother plants can live for years, although some growers find that clones get weaker over time. When a plant gets too bushy, it creates the perfect setup for pathogens, the most common being powdery mildew. To avoid that, defoliate as needed. Removing leaves lets the plant breathe and moves air through the inside of the canopy, which keeps insects and bacteria from taking hold.

Container Tips for a Home Indoor Grow

For indoor grows, we suggest techniques like SCROG, SOG or simply growing the traditional way. Even so, some growers chasing bigger yields skip these techniques and put more weight on their soil and overall plant care.

For beginners, we recommend using soil as your growing medium and running about 10 to 16 plants per square meter (about 1 to 1.5 per sq ft). Ideally, use two containers per plant, one for veg and one for flower, or a single final container, though that's better left to more experienced growers who keep very tight control of their watering.

Some cannabis plants get huge and may need a third or fourth transplant to keep them compact. The more plants you have per square meter, the less veg time they need before flowering, so each container needs less growing medium too.

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