Mom (UK "mum") is everyday grower slang for a mother plant: a plant held in vegetative growth under long days so it can be cut repeatedly for clones and never flowers.
In practice
"Moms" live in a corner of the veg space, are kept small by regular cutting and root pruning, and are refreshed periodically by rooting a new cut to replace the old plant. A grower with five keepers might run five moms, each labelled, while a backup cut of each sits in a second location or in tissue culture.
Moms are the most valuable plants in a clone-based garden, so sanitation matters most here: pests, mites and especially hop latent viroid spread from a mom to every clone taken from it. Testing moms for viroid and quarantining incoming cuts protects everything downstream.
Don't confuse with
- Mother plant: the horticultural term for the same thing; "mom" is the slang.
- Female plant: every mom is female (unless it is a kept male, sometimes called a "dad"), but not every female is a mom.
- Keeper: describes the selected genotype; mom describes its role.
Myth check
"Old moms run out of steam." GenetixBay position: there is no genetic drift apart from pathogens. A tired mom is usually root-bound, underfed, infected or overcut. Start a fresh one from a cut. See clone-only preservation.
A mother plant is a female kept permanently in vegetative growth to supply cuttings, so a selected genotype can be propagated as clones indefinitely.Tissue culture is growing small pieces of a plant on sterile nutrient gel in a sealed vessel, used to multiply, clean up and store cannabis genotypes.Tetranychus urticae, the commonest cannabis mite indoors: a 0.5 mm sap-feeder that stipples leaves pale and spins webbing, breeding fastest in hot, dry rooms.HLVd, a small infectious RNA that spreads through sap and tools, causing stunting, brittle stems, small loose buds and reduced resin in cannabis; called dudding.The smallest known plant pathogen: a short circular RNA, usually 246-401 nucleotides, with no protein coat and no protein-coding genes, copied by the host's own enzymes.The genotype is the set of alleles a plant actually carries, either at one locus or across its whole genome, as opposed to the traits you can see.Genetic drift is random change in allele frequencies between generations of a seed population, strongest in small populations; clones do not drift this way.A root-bound plant has filled its container so densely that roots circle the walls, water runs straight through, and growth slows or the plant wilts fast.A cut is slang for a clone of one specific plant, used to mean that individual genotype, as in "the original cut".A keeper is a plant from a seed hunt good enough to be kept alive as a clone or mother for future runs or breeding.Cloning is propagating a plant by rooting cuttings from it, producing new plants that are genetically identical to the donor.
