Happy Mother's Day: Celebrating Mother Plants

While cannabis can be grown from seeds, some cultivators prefer using clones taken from mother plants instead. A mother plant is one from which cultivators take cuttings to produce cannabis clones. There are many advantages to growing cannabis from clones. For one, clones are an exact genetic replica of their mother plant, creating greater consistency across crops with the same scent, effects and physical characteristics. For another, cloning a healthy cannabis mother plant can be faster than germinating cannabis plants from seeds.

Growing cannabis mother plants, however, requires care and attention. Cannabis clones can become stressed or sick over time if they aren’t properly cared for—particularly if they’ve had cuttings taken many times. Maintaining the cannabis mothers’ persistent vegetative state also requires different light, humidity and temperature inputs than cannabis plants that are going through a full growth cycle with intention to harvest. That often means keeping a library of clones in a “mother room” at a cultivation facility where these valuable plants can be maintained just so.

At Grodan, we’ve worked hard to develop growing media that give mother plants the support they need. In fact, our largest block available is nicknamed the “Big Mama” because it’s so well suited to sustaining full-grown plants long-term. Twice the size of our Hugo Block, the Big Mama features a vertical water distribution structure. This means mother plants won’t get waterlogged by irrigation events, and continuous root growth is supported for better long-term plant health.

As for the cuttings taken from cannabis mother plants, we also have smaller stone wool plugs designed specifically for rooting stem cuttings during the propagation phase. Made from the same material as the larger blocks, these plugs are specifically designed to grow with the cannabis cutting and transplant directly into the hole pre-cut in Grodan Gro-Blocks. All a cultivator has to do is take the starter plug and insert it into the Gro-Block as soon as the cutting’s roots are emerging from the tapered base of the plug.

Like cannabis clones, Grodan products are uniform and consistent—perfect for making cultivation more predictable. Growing cuttings in trays of stone wool plugs, for example, is a simple way to prevent overcrowding and ensure each plant gets equal water, light, fertilizer and other inputs. That’s especially true if you use techniques like checker-boarding, or staggering stone wool plugs on a diagonal, to provide each plant with plenty of air and light circulating around its leaves and stem.

What’s good for the young cannabis plant is good for the mother, too. With the same design as smaller Grodan Blocks and plugs, future mother plants can easily be transplanted onto larger blocks, like the Big Mama or Uni-Block, when they’re large enough, bolstering the health and longevity of your cannabis genetics lineup over many generations.

It’s especially important to use cannabis growing media that provide great control over irrigation and fertigation inputs because mother plants have unique nutrient requirements to help them maintain their strength and quality over multiple cuttings. Improving cultivation efficiency is also easier with a growing medium that’s compatible with cultivation automation tools that precisely dose each input on a custom schedule. Automation tools, when incorporated with stone wool blocks, cubes and plugs, also give cultivators robust datasets on the health of an individual plant, a broader crop, or a mother room.

While techniques like crop steering and precision irrigation are useful for triggering rooting, vegetative growth and flowering on a cultivator’s schedule and creating predictable results, mother plants need to be kept in the vegetative phase. Cannabis mothers also need help replacing the energy stores lost when their leaves and stems are removed to create clones or tissue cultures.

Get a closer look at how Grodan products contribute to a more sustainable agricultural industry on our blog and podcast.