Question About Mother Plants... How To

So, I've been growing a little over a year now and I'm starting to feel a little more confident in my skills.

When I first started like most I had no clue what I was doing. (Not to say that I know everything now). Unfortunately, I screwed up a lot, but managed to learn from it. In my screw ups I never managed to really hone in on phenotypes of the strain I was growing.

That leads me to my question. I have always taken my clones from the plants that I was transferring from veg into flowering. I've found this to be very inefficient in the long run and I was never really able to establish a strong pheno. I'm really curious about developing a mother plant to pull my clones from. I would think that while I could keep a mother plant alive in my veg room it wouldn't take too much to basically rape her of all of her nodes. Is there an art to this? Am I missing the strategy of doing this properly? I want to make sure before I order my next beans that I have this element figured out so that I can establish the best phenos and keep them for the long haul.

You have the right idea. Once you have a mother you like you keep her going. Clone her, but leave enough for her to live. Also, if you veg her clones at all you can trim some clones from her clones before you put them in flower.

If done right you can go perpetual with just the clones going in being the mothers to the next generation.

Best of luck.

you have to be very selective when picking moms.
if your not familiar with the strain your going, heres a good way to get a mom:
plant a large batch of seeds, preferably feminizied seeds if you can afford them.
grow a complete veg cycle untill you get alternating nodes and are sure of plant sex.
select the best branches of the plants that look good to you, and clone them. you will need a good dozen at least.
take care to mark the plant and the clone, this is critical.
while the clones are rooting, put the plants into flower, and document there progress.
start the clones on a veg cycle.
by documenting the progress on the mothers budding you will know which clones that are vegging came from the best stock,
take the best 3-4 plants and using there clones, repeat the process untill you have a stable mom you want to work with.
once you have your mom established, and by saying established i mean you have weaned out all the weaker plants, all you need from this point on is just one cutting to make the perpetual mom, but if you have several phenos that are just too good to lose, then you can just have several moms...
moms need roots, so whatever medium your using keep that in mind.
i use a combination of lst and topping to get crazy colas. sometimes i will even force a mom to flower for a week or 2, then put it back in veg. this takes a month of time, but the end result will have crazy branching, which is great for taking cutttings.
my 2 current mothers have been vegging since august 09, and i have no plans on letting them flower anytime soon.

Kepping mother and taking clones from it is esentually a good idea if done correctly. The strain of the mother plant will also ditermind a lot.

Alright so I believe I understand what you all are saying. Let me do a step by step here.

1. Pop the seed and veg
2. Take clones from each vegged plant, noting which plants they correlate to
3. Place original seedling/vegged plants in flowering
4. Veg new clones
5. Determine best phenotypes of strain from the plants in flowering
6. Isolate the best phenotype from the clones that were taken. This plant now becomes mother plant.

I believe I understand. Then once the mother many are using LST and topping techniques to develop more usable clones.

Based on this system if the mother plant were to have some issues a clone could be taken and vegged to become a new mother plant. Wouldn't this insure the continuation of the pheno?