A mother plant (stock plant) is a plant held in vegetative growth, usually under 18 h or more of light, so it never flowers and can be cut repeatedly for clones. Every cutting from it carries the same genotype, which is how a selected individual is kept and shared.
In practice
Mothers are kept healthy rather than huge: moderate light (about 300-600 µmol/m²/s), steady feeding with enough calcium and nitrogen, and regular pruning to keep many cuttable shoots. Many growers replace a mother every 6-12 months by rooting one of her own cuttings, simply because an old plant in a pot becomes woody, root-bound and hard to manage. Pathogens, especially hop latent viroid, are the real threat to a mother line; test and keep a clean source.
Myth check
House position: there is no genetic drift in clones apart from pathogens. The founder keeps cuts over 40 years old with no decline. "Tired mother" symptoms are pathogens, poor care or cutting position, not the genotype wearing out. Take cuts from consistent positions on the plant. See clone-only preservation.
Don't confuse with
- Mom (slang): the same idea in casual speech; this file covers the horticultural practice.
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.Photosynthetic photon flux density: the number of PAR photons landing on one square metre each second, in µmol/m²/s; the standard measure of light intensity at the canopy.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.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.Genetic drift is random change in allele frequencies between generations of a seed population, strongest in small populations; clones do not drift this way.Cloning is propagating a plant by rooting cuttings from it, producing new plants that are genetically identical to the donor.A cutting is a piece of shoot, usually a tip with two or three nodes, removed from a plant so it can be rooted into a new, genetically identical plant.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.A clone-only is a cultivar that exists only as cuttings from one original plant, with no seed line that reliably reproduces it.Veg time is how long a photoperiod plant is kept in vegetative growth under long days before being flipped to flower, which largely sets its final size.
