What is meant by "Clone Only"

you might be on to something...

 

The plant in my avatar is a clone only from West Australia, that's precisely how I brought the genetics over seas with me.

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http://forum.grasscity.com/indoor-g...nal-two-weeks-into-12-12-a-3.html#post7906946



"The strain is called "Feralocity", it's an Australian clone-only that I later stress-forced to hermy for pollen to bring the genetics back over seas, but like most clone-only strains, I've yet to find a mother just like the original. Clone only's are usually rare finds in a line of varied genetics."

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It's one way they do produce the seeds they sell from clone-only strains/plants, however, the reason a plant is a 'clone only' is generally because it is one of those very rare, one in one hundred (maybe one in one thousand, or perhaps even more rare than that) plants, in a particular spiral of genetic make-up, that had those certain, specific desirable qualities.

When you do get your hands on those seeds, even if their very mother was the clone, your odds of achieving a plant similar to the mother are almost non-existent. It takes generation after generation (years) of selective breeding to create stable, uniformed offspring, and even then, it is very difficult to achieve results that are exactly like the clone 'mother'.

 

I've had many that were very similar, I've been very excited over a few ladies, but I've had none that were close enough to make me feel like 'my job is complete'. That's what makes it somewhat difficult to control the direction you want take with a strain.. when it's a highly varied clone-only, your earliest studs and breeder mothers are almost shots in the dark.

You just pick those that are most like the mother originally was (hoping (wishfully thinking) you may unlock even greater hidden potential along the way) and hope for the best.

Each batch or generation still becomes increasingly more uniform. I don't get any of the ridiculously bad (well, in my opinion) tall lanky, thinly-branched, highly Sativa dominant plants, that were more orange hair than bud from these genetics now, I remember that being a particular annoyance I had with her offspring for the first 4 or 5 generations. The original mother, like many of her offspring, produces the thickest most dense calyxes I've ever seen on a plant, but some of her earliest little girls were very bad apples who fell quite far from the tree.
I'd think all through veg I would be getting this great massive plant, just like the mother, but the bud quality was (again, just my opinion) basically, ridiculously horrible on almost a third of the plants.

But sure enough, the more time you spend breeding the plants you do find with more desirable traits, the less and less you see those plants you don't want around.

She tips the scales like original plant, and the nodal reproduction is equal (keeping in mind the mother exhibited more enhanced branching and nodal reproduction, due to the flowering clone/cutting method of continuing the plant, rather than utilizing a stable mother in a constant state of veg), and while the bud is very close, it's still not exactly like hers, and it doesn't exhibit the exact growth pattern.

But I've got her now, so that I consider all the bud she produces highly palatable, potent, and very smokable with no more pure 'hair buds', and so that she fills out not only larger pots from seed very much like her cloned great(etc) grandmother, but she fills nicely in pots a fraction of the size that I use more successfully for breeding, which allows me to increase my rooms and my plant count from just 6 or 10 massive plants, to 30-60 smaller-potted bushy monsters, in a room or rooms that are just slightly larger, which is far more productive for breeding on a small scale.

In pots that are only a few, 2-4 gallons, I don't expect to see the kind of 'girth' in the buds, that I'd expect from much taller plants in 10-15+gallons, however, the length of each individual bud is generally consistently up there with the larger pots, making it easy to pack a greater number of high-yielding plants, into a smaller space, even if they produce a good deal of branches.


Having the capacity to grow a greater number of plants while experimenting with different crosses and breeds, greatly reduces the hit I'd take, production-wise, if a few genetic failures surface early on in a new cross or breeding experiment.

But I digress, you can get a sense of the time and care (and patience) it takes to work with their offspring.

This is why they're considered clone-only, they're generally guarded closely, and they are never allowed to die out if one can help it. Because once they do die out, even if you're left with her pure seed offspring, it's all but impossible to recover unearth or duplicate the her precise traits in her offspring, especially as time goes on and you're left with nothing of the original mum to compare with.

In short, I'm very much looking forward to getting back to Australia so I can be reminded again first-hand how the mother tasted, because even with pure offspring and many generations over six years time, I haven't come close to recapturing her majesty.

I hope this wasn't too rambly or reminiscent. I've been hitting the hash pretty hard since late last evening and haven't had a wink of sleep since

 

Total Noob here trying to clone. 30% have lived in my two tries. My latest try after 3 days the ones that are not alive still have drooped over and the stalks or the fan leaves stalks are very red...any ideas?
I have a heat pad, clone dome and used gel for rooting and am very closely watching them. All under two 17 watt grow flos from W-mart. outside the dome but close. Let them be in darkness for 6 hours prior to tuning on the light.I have a temp probe and monitior the temp to not allow over 85 degrees. pH adjusteded water, with no nutes in rock wool 2 inch cubes. I open the dome every 12 hours to circulate air and have spritzed them all twice a day with water only. Skunk stock off pretty young clone mothers. Each one is about 4-8 incheds when cut from the mother. ANy help appreciated.
Thanks
Analogman

 

Very interesting BadKittySmiles! I have been wondering about clone only strains for quite some time now and am a bit perplexed. I had always been under the impression that a plant, or mother in particular, loses it's vigor and potency after a few years, and it was for that reason that people usually replace their mother every 1-4 years with a new one from seed. Is this in fact a myth? Also sometimes the mothers grow too large for peoples space but that's besides the point.

But I have been reading lately about some clone only strains that have been around since the 70's and 80's. One famous example would be Alaskan Thunderfuck. Would you mind shedding some light on this phenomenon and how it is accomplished/perpetuated? i.e. would you create a new mother from a cloned cutting every few years and discard the old mother, or do you need to actually keep the original mother to maintain the strain?

Take your Feralocity strain for example. If you were to obtain a cutting of the original mother (which may or may not be the actual progenitor of the strain), what would be your process for maintaining this strain indefinitely without it losing its vigor?

 

It's a well-insisted myth, yes I've never experienced a 'mother' losing vigor or potency, whether I had her for 5 years or 20, beyond that though, is still technically a mystery for me personally.

What we do, is instead of having one single 'mother', all the new cuttings are in a way, the mothers. The difficulty many folks run into with mothers, stems from keeping a single root system healthy for all those years, usually without the proper maintenance.

We take cuttings from flowering plants, the best time to do so is around days 21-25 of 12/12, although I've taken cuttings from plants I've flushed for the chop, at 50-60 days bloom (my last batch of 'mothers' in fact). Those cuttings are rooted, vegged, and just in time for the harvest and chop in the main room, they're large enough to be moved in.
This is how Feralocity/Aussie Big Bud was kept alive for nearly 30 years, possibly longer, that's just how long we've personally been keeping track of and caring for her.. as fun as it's been, I kick myself very often for not even trying to sneak cuttings over seas, and for thinking breeding could get me the same results before I'm old and frail, lol. But I digress.

So instead of having one plant in perpetual veg for cuttings-only, a plant who will continuously take up space in a veg chamber, sometimes requiring it to be operational only for her, a plant who will need pruning, and whose root system will need trimming and maintenance in order to stay healthy for years.. instead of all that, we keep the same strain alive by taking clones, from clones, from clones. It saves space for vegging plants that you intend on blooming, and it saves a lot of effort and maintenance.

There's no concern for the mother dying, or losing the genetics, because you should have a whole room (or two, counting a veg chamber) full of the exact same genetic material.

Even if you take it from a damaged plant, who's root system may not be saved, that cutting will be perfectly healthy. This rumor of genetic damage that can occur over time under harsh conditions, while I'm sure it's possible, I think it's a heck of a lot more rare than people realize, and I've never personally witnessed it.

For instance my last batch of mothers I took around August, have been through hell. I'm surprised they're even alive now, for how often I've neglected and forgot about them.

I'm selling my house, so I've had realtors, appraisers, and house-lookers coming through a few times a week, up until now. I've had to lock them up (30 odd plants) for weeks at a time in dark packing crates, keeping them in -shared- 10oz's of soil in party cups, two and three (even five) plants at a time, bonsai them for months, and they look like hell... stretchy growth that I had to 'fold' into the boxes to hide them, dying leaves around their bases, root systems completely without vigor. Reminds me a little of my first grow, more years back than I'd like to think

But the cuttings I took from them? Green and perfect, full of vigor, fantastic new root systems, and they've already lost their dying, pre-cutting mother leaves. You'd never know they came from the same plants, it's uncanny, and now that I've preserved their genetics, it's safe for me to either attempt blooming out the dying mothers, or cut them down.

I would think if you take clones, from clones, from clones, you'd face less of a risk of possible genetic damage, than would result from the physical trauma of keeping a single plant, stalk, and root system alive for years.

We're not exactly cloning cells in a lab, this is a different more natural form of identical-genetic duplication, plants do this on their own in the wild and have done so for years. For some, it's their only means of reproduction, and for others, if a branch snaps and falls into the mud, there's a good chance it will root and keep on going. You can't say that for a human hand, or our livers.

Cloning is almost too fancy a word for what we do, but it's still technically, perfectly correct. We just shouldn't equate it so closely to the cloning anomalies we run into, when attempting to jerry-rig a goat or other mammal in a lab

 

Thanks BadKitty that was very interesting and informative!!! It really got my wheels turning. I will make new mothers as frequently as possible now. The discussion makes me want to analyze the nature of genetic aging and particular, aging in plants. I am reminded of the case of Dolly the sheep who was cloned back in the 90's. When dolly was cloned, because it was adult cells and adult DNA that was being replicated, the cloned Dolly was essentially the same genetic age as the original Dolly i.e. any telomere shortening, genetic damage, mutation, and number of cell divisions were all passed on to the clone. I suppose we are talking about an analogous situation in plants. When we are cloning a plant, we are not renewing it's DNA by beginning with a fresh recombinant of two parents, but simply allowing a plant appendage to regenerate itself. So pragmatically, the clone will be the same genetic and chronological age as the mother, even though they appear as "infants" when we clone them, just like Dolly's clone. Even though she developed as an embryo, was born apparently as a calf, and grew into an adult, she had a lifespan the was equivalent to the original Dolly who had already lived about a quarter of her life (if I remember correctly) when she was cloned. I imagine that the same would be true for our plants, who are after all designed to reproduce sexually (not all plants of course). The lifespan of a marijuana plant is....um...well I don't really know how long it is? Is it the same as a tree which can live for hundreds of years? The point though is that, the repetitive cloning process might peter out after "x" number of years, but it might be so long as to be unnoticeable by our human standard of time.

One of the most poignant elements you discussed was root health, which seldom gets addressed when dealing with the subject of mother maintenance. I think many people assume that there is very little you can do to keep roots pristine over time, in soil or any other medium, and this is a point well taken, which is another reason why you'd always want to have fresh mothers; in order to maintain health and vigor. I admit, I hadn't though of it from that perspective, but it's probably the most important reason for making new mothers.

You also brought up the timing of cloning which is something that everyone differs on. I have no opinion one way or another, but many say you should only clone from vegging plants. Your method proves that this is another myth, and also makes things a LOT more convenient especially in the following scenario: let's say you are starting from seeds, looking for that rare, elite, genetic phenotype like Feralocity. Since such a phenotype is one in a thousand (or maybe rarer but for arguments sake, let's say a thousand), you'd have to germinate thousands of seeds to find it (half will statistically be male and must be discarded). So now you have thousands of seeds germinated; if at this point, you believed that a clone could only be taken from a vegging plant, you'd have to clone thousands of plants and number each one. Then you'd let the originals flower, and find the elite one out of those thousand. You could then discard all of the clones you took of the other originals that didn't produce that special phenotype or became male, and only perpetuate the clone of that particular, elite plant. However if you discovered the revelation as you say, that a clone of a flowering plant is equally effective as that of a vegging plant, you wouldn't have to clone a thousand plants, you could simply flower the originals, and then clone that special one in the last few weeks after you discovered how it performed and produced. Do I have that right?

What differences have you noticed in behavior/performance of clones you took in various phases of growth i.e. clones of vegging plants, 2nd week flowering plants, last week flowering plants?

was just reading the thread on cloning a reveg in the advanced growing techniques forum and here is a quote from one grower