Testing sequence

[Doninvt]

We have germinated and grown purported, high CBD plants from various vendors. I have no expectation of advertised values. Plan has been to flower and professionally lab test full analytics of flower at a fair investment. Plants yielding poor CBD content would be destroyed.
On the chance of stellar results, those would become mother plants for a future cloning effort. However, was told that's not feasible. That once a plant flowers it can not be retained to generate quality clones. Alternatively, must clone all samples prior to flowering, then harvest and test the entire sample plant. If positive results, to work from clones.

Obstacle is, nearly doubles time and space requirement for what will likely be a failed effort. Suggestions?

 

[Bush Doctor 77]

Welcome. Good question. Still giving it some thought, but I don't see any alternative than saving a clone from your mother plant.

 

[Doninvt]

Thank you for the reply. I recall reading hemp is a perennial plant, and females would flower multiple times over several(?) years. If flowering is a once & done proposition, will redefine our core plans. Are there any recognized text books or other publications to learn from?

 

[Bush Doctor 77]

Hemp is an annual as far as I know, but I am not up on it at all. I learned by experience with cannabis, and haven't done a lot of reading.

 

[Jackalope]

Saving a clone of each plant is always a good practice. We pay good money for the genetics so why not keep them.

You can tell a lot about a plant by the looks of it. Affects have to be felt or tested in the case of CBD. You can't tell that till it is dead and dried.

I only deal with the THC side but finding a great mother is all the same. You can't go back after it is dead so clone it just in case.

 

[TorturedSoul]

A person can "reveg" a cannabis plant, but it is not a sure thing. You'd want to leave some leaves on and it would be helpful if you didn't take it to the extreme end of the flowering period (on the other hand, many plants, if taken to that point, will produce a few opposite-sex flowers and self-seed - kind of a survival mechanism; if it cannot successfully get pollinated this year, maybe its offspring (which would be female, and more or less copies of Mom) can get pollinated next year... kind of thing).

Best thing to do would be to take a cutting (or two, for an even greater liklihood that one will successfully root, I suppose) from each plant now. Lots of people do that during the flowering period with no issues. You might see some odd looking initial growth (single-bladed leaves), but that's no big deal, and they'll generally return to the growth phase under high-hours-per-day lighting.

If you've not initiated flowering yet, of course, they'd not have to go through the switch back.

If space is at a premium, know this: I once took cuttings (from three different strains/plants), recut the ends at an angle as per my usual method, placed them into three small Styrofoam coffee cups filled with a (roughly - I eyeballed it) 11 mixture of perlite, vermiculite, and soil...

...and stuck them on top of the medicine cabinet in my half-bathroom so that they could get long hours of light from the two low-wattage CFL bulbs that were in the light fixture directly above it. They quickly rooted, as cuttings do. I wasn't ready to do anything with them, so I left them there, watering them... occasionally.

Time passed. And more time. Pretty soon, it had been several months and they were still really small plants. I think I fed them once during that period of time, but did manage to water them... Well, before they actually died . And then I thought, "Gee, I wonder if they'd survive until their first birthday?"

So I left them there, in the same little cups, for a year. And maybe a couple months (didn't keep exact track) longer. At any time before I pitched them, I could have given them a decent feeding, repotted them into a regular container (or at least larger coffee cups ), and a reasonable amount of light, and they'd have grown larger.

It's just a "balance" thing. Extremely restricted root space, low nutrient levels, low light level (but still pretty close to the plants). Instead of stretching and maybe falling over, they merely continued to exist as very small plants. They were, more or less, "in stasis," so to speak.

Some people keep "mini-moms" in 18-ounce Solo cups, although they're not going to be producing lots of cuttings each week (but this is understandable, and they will be capable of producing some). I've done it myself, various containers from the red cups up to about a gallon. It helps to "refresh" the soil every six to nine months: Say it's in a 6" diameter container, maybe a little larger. Remove it from its container without mangling the root ball. Cut away about an inch of the soil/roots all the way around and from the bottom. "Repot" back into the same container, substituting your usual soil/perlite mix in place of the volume that you removed. Then, knowing that you just removed a relatively significant percentage of the root mass, remove a comparable percentage from the plant so that it isn't overstressed by trying to support itself with an insufficient amount of roots. The parts of the (above-ground) plant that you trim would make good cuttings, or compost. Someone posted a thread about doing this a year or three back; you might be able to find it by using either the forum's search routine or by doing a "site-search" via your favorite web-search engine, assuming you can think of a good set of keywords to use.