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RE-VEGGING IS A MORE ATTRACTIVE OPTION than cutting all those mostly doomed clones .”
ROOTING Flowering Clones
If you decide to clone from the flowering plant , you can treat those clones almost exactly like regular clones . That means using low light , around 50-75 PPFD , 80 ° F root zone , 24 hours of light , moderate moisture levels in the plugs or stonewool , and maintaining medium-high moisture levels ( minimal condensation ) in the humidity dome . You ’ ll see roots in eight to 12 days and can then plant those clones in bigger cubes or pots .
RE-VEGGING the Entire Plant
If cloning flowering branches has not worked out , you can re-veg the entire plant , in which case it ’ s common to cut all of the best flowers off the top of the plant and leave enough growth at the bottom to re-veg . Just a few leaves and grow shoots is enough , although more is better . Just put the whole plant back into 20-24 hours per day of light and wait . This is where it gets interesting . You ’ ve basically just put a flowering plant back into veg , but it ’ s not going to grow like a regular vegetative plant . It will sit there for about a month in what seems like a state of confusion . Because it ’ s not producing new biomass or getting bigger , you should maintain low levels of light , water , and nutrients . It ’ s easy to overwater and overfeed transitioning plants , and this is probably the most common step of the re-vegging process that growers get wrong . Think of keeping the plant in a comfortable cozy kind of environmental homeostasis while it reprograms itself for veg growth . Four to five weeks into it , just when you ’ ve begun to lose hope , you ’ ll see new veg growth coming out from one of the flower clusters . It ’ ll be a tiny little sprout emerging from a random place . Now you ’ ve succeeded at re-vegging , but you aren ’ t out of the woods yet . The plant still needs gentle light , food , and water until the new growth really takes off . As the foliage emerges , you can cut back any remaining flower material on the plant since it remains susceptible to rot , given that it ’ s an increasingly old and moist flower cluster . After you see several new vegetative leaves and branches , you can clone the re-vegged plant to make new mothers . Some growers might try to turn the re-vegged plant itself into a mother , but I have found that re-vegged plants commonly have odd leaf patterns and branch structure . Thus , I prefer waiting until a few normal branches emerge and taking those as clones that will become the future mother stock for that cultivar .
Growers can be very creative , and so I ’ ll finish by saying it ’ s unusual , but not impossible , to actually re-flower your re-vegged plant . This has come up for me when I want to run the cultivar through a second flower test as quickly as possible . If I have cut a few good clones from the re-vegged plant and thus secured my mother stock , I can take the weirdly shaped re-vegged plant and put it back into flower while its clones are rooting and get another quick chance to see if it ’ s the awesome flowering plant I thought it was the first time . You ’ ll see some cultivars responding better to this type of whiplash treatment than others , but barring some kind of disease or nutrient problem , it should work out okay .
Good luck re-vegging ! I ’ d love to hear how it goes . Please reach out to me at MarijuanaPropagation . com or via editor @ maximumyield . com with questions , comments , and stories .
82 Maximum Yield