Are your cloning results dependable ? Are you short on space but interested in phenotype hunting for new production stock ? Then re-vegging is for you !
This article will fine-tune your planning and skills for reliably reproducing your favorite new cultivars . Re-vegging is the process of reverting a flowering plant back to foliage production , or to the veg stage of growth . The main reason to “ re-veg ” a plant is because it allows you to preserve a special flowering cultivar from which new vegetative mother plants can be made . Those of you with more time and space will understandably stick with the status quo , which is to cut a few clones from all your teenage female seedlings before they ’ ve ever flowered , then flower those teenage seedlings you ’ ve just taken clones from , assess their quality , and only keep the now-rooted progeny of the best flower producers . The big downside of this method is the considerable amount of time , and especially space , it takes to pot the clones and care for them for the six weeks it might take to determine their value as their flowering mother develops . And all this knowing 95 percent or more of them will be destroyed , since great new phenos are quite rare to find . Bigger facilities with plenty of space do very little re-vegging because , for the preservation of a potentially valuable cultivar , it ’ s fundamentally more reliable to cut clones from it before it has ever flowered . This method also has the advantage of getting you up to full production on new cultivars a couple months sooner than re-vegging can do . It ’ s standard practice to take at least four clones from each prospective mother , assuming as a worsecase scenario that only one of the four survives . Labeling them accurately is critical . If , for example , you sprouted 10 feminized Huckleberry Soda seeds , you ’ d label each seedling and the four clones taken from it as HS1 ( you ’ d have five HS1s in this case — the original seedling and the four clones cut from it ), HS2 , HS3 , up to HS10 . Your HS3 seedling might turn out to be the best flowering plant , in which case you ’ d discard all of the HS clones except for the four HS3s . Those four HS3s would become mother plants , and you ’ d propagate out your stock from there .
CLONING and Saving Canopy Space
For those of us who are always looking to optimize canopy space , and we fashion ourselves as pretty good cloners , re-vegging is a more attractive option than cutting all those mostly doomed clones we discussed above . In this case , you put your female seedlings straight into flower without cloning
them first , knowing you can clone the flowering plant once you determine its value and revert those rooted flowering clones back to vegetative growth for further propagation . Yes , this takes two months longer in the end , but the delay isn ’ t usually a problem because growers already have other cultivars in production and aren ’ t in a hurry to rotate in new stock , as much as they prefer saving cloning and vegetative cultivation space . Okay , because we ’ ve decided we are comfortable rooting flowering clones , we will label and flower all of the female seedlings without cloning them first , knowing we can clone from the flowering plants once we identify the keepers . The keepers start showing themselves as early as four weeks into flower , but six weeks is more realistic for most of them . Within six weeks , you will see how stretchy the plant is going to be , if it ’ s got above average resin content , above average smell , strong flower formation , good vigor , strong branches , etc . You ’ ll know if it ’ s special to you and works with your cultivation method . At that point , you can cut two to four clones from the bottom of the plant . Be careful not to go overboard with lower branch pruning in the early weeks so you ’ ll have enough clones to choose from . It ’ s much better to choose lower branches because , with their smaller flowers , they revert more quickly back to vegetative growth , and because smaller flower clusters are less likely to get moldy when they are rooting under humidity domes . If you have no choice , you can clone a branch with bigger , more mature flowers , but in this case you have to be really careful about the humidity levels inside the dome and modest watering levels in the media during rooting because bigger flower branches , when sitting still without roots , are very prone to rot . All in all , the sooner you identify your favorite cultivars from the flowering seedlings , the better , so you can more quickly and effectively root a few branches from them and start re-vegging the successful ones . The most common time for me to cut clones from the lower parts of flowering plants is in week five of flower , but sometimes a keeper takes longer to show itself , in which case I cut clones as late into the flower cycle as it takes . If the clones fail , there ’ s one last chance to re-veg that cultivar by taking the whole plant and putting it back in the veg room without any cloning . This can be done at any time up to harvest . You can even harvest the best flowers from the plant and leave some lower shoots and leaves that will be sufficient for re-vegging .
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