Article copied and pasted from
http://steephilllab.com/mother-plants-grow-old/
Mother Plants Grow Old
It’s an old story: the grower can’t understand why the last three batches of clones from his mother plant ‘Old Reliable’ keep getting lower and lower potency values “….no matter how I change up the lighting, micro-nutrients, etc… originally my plants tested 15% CBD-A and 6% THC-A, now they down to 9% CBD-A and 4% THC-A.”
Then we ask “And the plants themselves, how do they appear compared to earlier clones off the same mother plant?” The answer “
Not as robust as they used to be, and more mildew problems.”
It’s a common story, and is primarily all about old proteins and old DNA. All living organisms have a built-in clock, their ‘
Circadian Clock’, which pretty much starts at Zero the day they/it are born/hatch/sprout. As you grow older, so do the proteins and DNA in your body, and as they get older, they breakdown, first slowly, yet over time the cumulation of damage starts to have appreciable effect on the organisms survivability.
The older a organism is when you clone from it, the more damage that is transferred into the new clones, therefore clones from the mother plants first year contain many less damaged proteins than clones taken during the mothers 3rd year. Bottom line: the longer you keep a mother plant, the poorer quality the clones will statistically be, and there is no way around it if you keep using the same mother plant.
This is why it is wise to seed out a small portion of one of your early clones, then safely store those seeds for long term storage, so you have a ready supply of new mother plants. Of course, bio-diversity being what it is, different seeds will have sprout to form different phenotypes, so you will need plenty of seed to get the new phenotypical mother you are interested in. IF the phenotype just happens to be the common phenotype, then this is easy since 50% of the seeds will be that common phenotype. If on the other hand, what you want is a rare phenotype, then your probability of getting what you want is much less (1/4, 1/8, 1/16/1/32, etc), so you will need a larger quantity of seed to find your desired plant.
edit: highlight main point