This is a typical 'Sea of Green' or SoG op. Clones receive zero veg time; once they have a good set of roots, they go in to flower.
This diagram shows the flow of plants through the op:
You can build this op in any scale you like, from a single mother and just one plant put in to the flowering area every two weeks up to as big as your needs require.
The idea is to grow only the top cola of a naturally growing plant with none of the lower branches and the small buds those branches produce. All branching, pretty much everything on the lower 1/3 of the plant, is snipped off in about wk 2 & 3.
Plant at 6 wks flowering, note lower branching is removed
The method of putting clones in to flower with no vegging time keeps plants relatively short, to about 33-36" (~1 metre), which better suits artificial lighting.
Even powerful HPS lighting can only penetrate foliage so deeply, so a metre tall is just about perfect. I find that big lights give better bud density, so I use two 1000W HPS, one over each pair of 820mm^2 (~2.7 feet^2) flood trays.
The mums are maintained under 24 hour 400W HPS. HPS is used as the 400 was the flowering light some 7-8 years ago and was spare after the 1000s were installed in the flowering area. It works fine in this application, so I never changed it to MH, but I'm planning to buy a MH-HPS conversion lamp for the mums soon. The clonebox has 6x 18W fluoro tubes (24"), usually on 24/7 but shut off for the first 6-8 hours after doing a new batch of cuttings.
Clones go straight from the clonebox into the flowering area- no vegging required. They grow a little bit vegetatively for the first 3-4 weeks but then stop getting taller in wk4 and start making bud weight.
I keep about 6-10 mothers and do about 30 cuttings every 2 weeks from them. I choose the best 20-23 clones to be put in the 4-tray flowering area.
Leftover clones become replacement mothers or are discarded. Mothers are replaced one by one, about every 4-8 weeks as needed.
As each batch of clones goes in to tray #1, a batch comes out of tray #4 to be harvested, every 2 weeks.
Tray #1, wk0-2
(plants pictured are at 2 weeks flowering)
Tray #2, wk2-4
(plants pictured are at 4 weeks flowering)
Tray #3, wk4-6
(plants pictured are at 6 weeks flowering)
Tray #4, wk6-8
(plants pictured are at 8 weeks flowering)
The mother vegging area is in the same room with the flowering plants, but has a lightproof curtain (just a double layer of panda film, looped over a 2x4 screwed to the ceiling, white sides toward plants) to prevent interrupting the flowering plants' lightcycle and has its own ventilation system as well.
Each tray in both the veg & flower areas has its own pump, reservoir tank and timer, allowing the watering rate and nute mix to be tailored to the plant for vegging as well as for each 2 week phase of flowering.
See also my
photoessay on cloning in rockwool.