What Are Mothers, Clones, and Genetics?
Let's start with genetics because that's the base layer of everything within the cannabis industry from my perspective. Everyone talks about strains, you'll hear people mention strains like “I like this strain or this strain”. Examples of strains would be Electric Lemon G or Bubba Kush or Blue Dream. Strains are the names of each individual type of cannabis that's out there for sale.
Oh, here's a little buzz tip for people that are new to this industry. If you hear someone talking about strands, like “oh, I have the best strand”, or “we know about strands”, that tells you right away they don't know what they're talking about. I'm hearing this a lot now, and it’s a key giveaway that they‘re people that don't know what they're talking about but are pretending to. They misheard the word strain, they instead heard “strand” and they just went on their own way. It's strange.
Anyway, from my actual grower’s perspective, we get away from strains because strain isn't even specific enough for us to care about. Let's take Blue Dream. It's one of the most famous, world renowned strains. It's out there and everyone in the cannabis industry knows about Blue Dream. I grew up Blue Dream, I have Blue Dream in my grow and it's great. We love it. It's a great strain, but it doesn't mean it's always good, because the Blue Dream that I grow is not the Blue Dream that’s being grown in California. It's not the Blue Dream being grown in Colorado. It's not the Blue Dream being grown in the grow 20 miles away from mine. Every grower’s strain is different even though it's the same strain, and that has to do with phenotypes.
When you start out, you start from a seed, right? You take a seed, you put it in the ground and you grow it. Now let's say I have a hundred Blue Dream seeds and I plant them and I get a hundred plants to grow. Let's assume 10 of those are going to die for whatever reason. So now I have 90 plants. The 90 cannabis plants come in, some are male and some are female. Female plants produce bud and males produce seeds. We don't want seeds, so we kill all the male plants. Let's say half of our 90 plants were male, so we're down to 45 plants that are now growing.
I take those 45 female plants and we grow them up. We observe how they are growing. If we find any plants that have genetic defects, like they are growing all twisted and weird, we kill those. We find the ones that seem to have some type of a weird genetic thing going on. For example, all the leaves are curly or the plant just won't take nutrients, some plants just don't work, right? So we eliminate all those. Now we're down to let's say 20 plants that are growing. There’s a lot more processes involved, but we’re skipping over some things for time purposes.
We take those 20 plants and we're going to flip them, bloom them, and then we're going to start producing bud from them. Now we examine what terpenes they produce, so what smells and flavors does this plant produce? What level of THC do they produce? What's the yield? How much weight, how much actual smokeable bud is produced per plant? You take those factors to determine the good plants that are producing the best product. You look for the ones that had the best smell, the best flavor, the ones that had the highest yield, that produced the most product per plant, and the ones that are super healthy and strong.
Now you might be down to three plants out of the 100 you started with. So those three plants are going to be your Blue Dream plants, and you're going to mother those up. What that means is you're going to turn those into a perpetual vegetation state, you're never going to let them produce bud. They're always going to be just growing and growing and growing. We call these “mothers” because we take cuts from those mother plants.
When we take a cut, we just take a branch and we cut it, put it into some Rockwool or some other grow medium. That produces a plant from itself, and that is called cloning. So we take a branch from the mother, we put it into the Rockwool, and we produce a whole other plant from that branch. Now we have that particular strain with really good genetics and that is called a phenotype. Out of those hundred seeds we planted, we had a hundred different phenos, and two or three of them produce great quality product and are strong and healthy.
So we end up with three phenotypes and we'll call them Blue Dream 1, 2 and 3. Pheno 1, pheno 2, and pheno 3 produce the best product overall, and those are the ones that we wind up growing and producing rooms full of product with. That's called Phenohunting. We find the best phenos out of all the different possibilities that we're given.
Now, the best genetics is that one plant or those couple of plants that produce the best overall flower and bud. That's a genetic trait of that plant. That's why from a growing perspective, genetics are way more important than a strain. Someone else may have a great strain and you'll have poor genetics, which means your strain sucks. Or someone else may have a horrible strain, but you took it and for some reason you got lucky and you have a great genetic pheno and now you're killing it just because you had great genetics. So the genetics are what's important.
From a grower's perspective, if you're talking to someone that really knows what they're saying, they're going to tell you, “we’ll get you great genetics. We know how to source good genetics. We know how to phenohunt. We know what the processes are”. If they know what they’re doing, they won’t say “We have the best strains”. If someone tells you they have the hookups on the best strains or “strands”, they're really not that top level grower that you want to be working with.
We will be posting more questions, answers, and industry tips regularly, so be sure to sign up for our email list to be notified to your inbox! Also, we will be releasing the full length version of the podcast on these talks at the end of the week as a wrap up for those that prefer to just listen to the full podcast in one sitting.
Cheers!
.: Adam