haole420
Active Member
my first few attempts at cloning failed miserably. thanks to friends' advice, the generosity of people who know what they are doing and take the time to post youtube videos, and a few weeks of trial and error, here's what i've discovered.
like anything else, there's a million different ways to do this, but here are the problems i encountered and here are the solutions i came up with.
most of the clippings were taken between the 3rd and 4th nodes from the tip of a branch on my mother. some were scraped, some were not. some were split in half, some into quarters, some not split. in general, i don't recommend splitting the tip of the cut stem. within a few seconds, even when submerged in water, the cut ends curl up and make it hard to stick into the hole of the cubes/plugs.
i do recommend scraping the last inch or so of the clipping. when the roots start to show, they erupt from what looks like a pimple. removing the "skin" from the stem in the rooting zone will allow the roots to grow out uninhibited. practice on a piece of leftover stem first. if the stem is so narrow that you have a hard time scraping it, then the clipping is probably too small to have a good chance of making it anyway. use a larger clipping. thicker stalk, bigger leaves means more stored energy to sustain life until the clipping has rooted.
some of the larger leaves were trimmed in half, some weren't. the ones that were NOT trimmed actually did better. don't halve leaves unless it's really a huge fan leaf that is going to interfere with nearby clones. i would rather halve it than prune it off. any lateral growth within the first 2 inches above the plug was removed.
i starting using small rockwool cubes and cloing gel. a lot of people seem to like rockwool for cloning, but almost all of the clippings that i put into rockwool drowned and the stem rotted to mush by about the day 4. runoff from foliar spray easily oversaturates rockwool.
(germinated seeds i had in rockwool in my DIY aero/fog/dwc system also had lots of problems with really slow growth until the roots grew out of the cubes into the aero/fog chamber. again, i think they just drowned from being too wet and not getting enough air. i think rockwool is probably ideal for something like ebb/flow but definitely not for aero.)
switching to root riot plugs solved the drowning problem. the plugs look like little brownies but have the texture and strength of a kitchen sponge. it has what looks like soil, peat, and/or some other natural medium incorporated into it.
i soaked them in RO water with a little superthrive, then squeezed them out like a sponge. the air bubbles in the sponge material do a good job of allowing drainage and lots of air into the root zone. they didn't seem to get soaked by runoff from foliar spraying.
using the blunt end of a bamboo skewer, i reamed out a hole larger than the diameter of the clipping into the root riot plug to a depth of about 2/3. at first, i dipped the stem of the rooting gel, but there's a few reasons not to do this: (1) you can potentially contaminate the entire container of rooting gel with mold/mildew spores, insect eggs/larvae, etc; and (2) most of the gel gets squeegeed off the stem when you stick it into the plug. instead, i use a 22g needle and 5cc syringe to inject the gel into the hole. each hole took about 1.5cc to fill. the gel will soak into the cube within a few minutes, so overfill the hole a little and stick the clipping in as soon as you can.
the other nice thing about the root riot cubes is that you can carefully tear them open to inspect the buried stem to see if you have roots yet. they spring back together when you let them go and are held together snugly when you drop it back into the tray.
instead of foliar spraying, spray the dome lid with a fine mist of RO water. i have my domed tray sitting on a milk crate that's on its side. inside the milk crate are two small halogen desk lamps that generate plenty of heat. supposedly, they have special heating pads to do this, but i had a few old desk lamps sitting around. i'm sure a 40watt incandescent light bulb would've worked too. i put a few ounces of water in the bottom of the tray. this helps keep the temperature constant and humidity up. this all sits under a T8 tube about 18" away (unscrewed the rest of the bulbs). distance of halogen lamps from bottom of the tray adjusted until temperature constant around 80F, relative humidity 90-99%.
by day 3, some of the lower fan leaves i left on clippings started to wilt. foliar spraying with RO water didn't help. foliar spraying with 400-500ppm veg nutes 2 or 3 times a day seemed to spruce the leaves up again within a day. some of the smaller clippings were actually bent all the way over and had limp, almost dead leaves. the 1/4 strength foliar spray brought them back within a few applications. once the leaves turned brown/purple, they were too far gone to bring back and pruned off. likewise, once the stem turns brown/purple, it's dead. if there's enough stem above the rotten area, just cut off the dead part and plug into a new plug.
no need to dip into solution for mold/mildew control. assuming your environment is relatively clean, mold and mildew only grow on necrotic (dead) tissue. if it's got mold on it, that leaf or that clipping should be removed. if the mold is growing on the surface of the plug, it's rotten inside, so toss it and work on removing moisture from your environment. probably too wet.
in general, smaller clones (around 4" tall) didn't do too well. about 1/2 died or struggled to survive. the one huge clipping that barely fit under the dome (around 7 or 8" tall with several true secondary nodes) seem to be the happiest. never seemed to even notice that it was clipped from the mother plant! i recommend taking clippings as tall as possible but short enough to fit under your dome.
by day 3, the surface of the plugs seemed a little dry, so i sprayed plugs with RO + superthrive. also added more RO water to the tray.
on day 5, i cracked open several plugs to inspect root development. white pimple-like bumps had grown on most of the stems. by day 7, they had eruped into little fishbones. at that point, i removed dome and used foliar spray when leaves looked a little limp.
for aeroponic, i used 3" neoprene collars. i left the 1cm center plug in. by about day 4, it was apparent that the stems were being choked by the collars. notching the center plug by snipping a triangular "slice of pie" out of it with a pair of sharp scissors did the trick. no more choking/rotting. next time, i'm just going to make my own collars from foam. some of the stems were long enough to just cut off the rotten 2" that was choked off and push another 2" of stem below the collar. i didn't even reapply rooting gel and they still rooted by day 7!
i offset some of the collars to allow fog from the chamber to blow out into the dome (a clear rubbermail bin flipped upside down) and foliar feed as well as keep the humidity at 99%. removed dome after 3rd day.
the root chamber for my DIY aero setup is 14" tall. there's about 3" of solution in the bottom for a little DWC action (once the roots get down to it). a triple ultrasonic fogger that is on a cycle timer: on for 50sec, off for 150sec. if you run it constantly, it heats up the res temp. because the chamber is deep, most of the fog sits at the bottom. the 70psi nozzles come on for 5sec every minute. this stirs up the fog to fill the entire chamber. timer is hooked up to a sprinkler solenoid valve. when i have guests and have to switch to stealth mode, i turn off the air pump and 1HP shallow well pump (with tank) and use a 4" computer fan hooked up to 2 D-cell batteries to blow air into the chamber and stir up the fog constantly. fan normally runs on 12v but still runs on 3v DC, just slower, which is perfect for this application. root chamber drains to lower res, which is where i mix the nutes and the shallow well pump pulls solution from.
hope this helps! would like to hear about your successful (and unsuccessful) cloning experiences as well.
like anything else, there's a million different ways to do this, but here are the problems i encountered and here are the solutions i came up with.
most of the clippings were taken between the 3rd and 4th nodes from the tip of a branch on my mother. some were scraped, some were not. some were split in half, some into quarters, some not split. in general, i don't recommend splitting the tip of the cut stem. within a few seconds, even when submerged in water, the cut ends curl up and make it hard to stick into the hole of the cubes/plugs.
i do recommend scraping the last inch or so of the clipping. when the roots start to show, they erupt from what looks like a pimple. removing the "skin" from the stem in the rooting zone will allow the roots to grow out uninhibited. practice on a piece of leftover stem first. if the stem is so narrow that you have a hard time scraping it, then the clipping is probably too small to have a good chance of making it anyway. use a larger clipping. thicker stalk, bigger leaves means more stored energy to sustain life until the clipping has rooted.
some of the larger leaves were trimmed in half, some weren't. the ones that were NOT trimmed actually did better. don't halve leaves unless it's really a huge fan leaf that is going to interfere with nearby clones. i would rather halve it than prune it off. any lateral growth within the first 2 inches above the plug was removed.
i starting using small rockwool cubes and cloing gel. a lot of people seem to like rockwool for cloning, but almost all of the clippings that i put into rockwool drowned and the stem rotted to mush by about the day 4. runoff from foliar spray easily oversaturates rockwool.
(germinated seeds i had in rockwool in my DIY aero/fog/dwc system also had lots of problems with really slow growth until the roots grew out of the cubes into the aero/fog chamber. again, i think they just drowned from being too wet and not getting enough air. i think rockwool is probably ideal for something like ebb/flow but definitely not for aero.)
switching to root riot plugs solved the drowning problem. the plugs look like little brownies but have the texture and strength of a kitchen sponge. it has what looks like soil, peat, and/or some other natural medium incorporated into it.
i soaked them in RO water with a little superthrive, then squeezed them out like a sponge. the air bubbles in the sponge material do a good job of allowing drainage and lots of air into the root zone. they didn't seem to get soaked by runoff from foliar spraying.
using the blunt end of a bamboo skewer, i reamed out a hole larger than the diameter of the clipping into the root riot plug to a depth of about 2/3. at first, i dipped the stem of the rooting gel, but there's a few reasons not to do this: (1) you can potentially contaminate the entire container of rooting gel with mold/mildew spores, insect eggs/larvae, etc; and (2) most of the gel gets squeegeed off the stem when you stick it into the plug. instead, i use a 22g needle and 5cc syringe to inject the gel into the hole. each hole took about 1.5cc to fill. the gel will soak into the cube within a few minutes, so overfill the hole a little and stick the clipping in as soon as you can.
the other nice thing about the root riot cubes is that you can carefully tear them open to inspect the buried stem to see if you have roots yet. they spring back together when you let them go and are held together snugly when you drop it back into the tray.
instead of foliar spraying, spray the dome lid with a fine mist of RO water. i have my domed tray sitting on a milk crate that's on its side. inside the milk crate are two small halogen desk lamps that generate plenty of heat. supposedly, they have special heating pads to do this, but i had a few old desk lamps sitting around. i'm sure a 40watt incandescent light bulb would've worked too. i put a few ounces of water in the bottom of the tray. this helps keep the temperature constant and humidity up. this all sits under a T8 tube about 18" away (unscrewed the rest of the bulbs). distance of halogen lamps from bottom of the tray adjusted until temperature constant around 80F, relative humidity 90-99%.
by day 3, some of the lower fan leaves i left on clippings started to wilt. foliar spraying with RO water didn't help. foliar spraying with 400-500ppm veg nutes 2 or 3 times a day seemed to spruce the leaves up again within a day. some of the smaller clippings were actually bent all the way over and had limp, almost dead leaves. the 1/4 strength foliar spray brought them back within a few applications. once the leaves turned brown/purple, they were too far gone to bring back and pruned off. likewise, once the stem turns brown/purple, it's dead. if there's enough stem above the rotten area, just cut off the dead part and plug into a new plug.
no need to dip into solution for mold/mildew control. assuming your environment is relatively clean, mold and mildew only grow on necrotic (dead) tissue. if it's got mold on it, that leaf or that clipping should be removed. if the mold is growing on the surface of the plug, it's rotten inside, so toss it and work on removing moisture from your environment. probably too wet.
in general, smaller clones (around 4" tall) didn't do too well. about 1/2 died or struggled to survive. the one huge clipping that barely fit under the dome (around 7 or 8" tall with several true secondary nodes) seem to be the happiest. never seemed to even notice that it was clipped from the mother plant! i recommend taking clippings as tall as possible but short enough to fit under your dome.
by day 3, the surface of the plugs seemed a little dry, so i sprayed plugs with RO + superthrive. also added more RO water to the tray.
on day 5, i cracked open several plugs to inspect root development. white pimple-like bumps had grown on most of the stems. by day 7, they had eruped into little fishbones. at that point, i removed dome and used foliar spray when leaves looked a little limp.
for aeroponic, i used 3" neoprene collars. i left the 1cm center plug in. by about day 4, it was apparent that the stems were being choked by the collars. notching the center plug by snipping a triangular "slice of pie" out of it with a pair of sharp scissors did the trick. no more choking/rotting. next time, i'm just going to make my own collars from foam. some of the stems were long enough to just cut off the rotten 2" that was choked off and push another 2" of stem below the collar. i didn't even reapply rooting gel and they still rooted by day 7!
i offset some of the collars to allow fog from the chamber to blow out into the dome (a clear rubbermail bin flipped upside down) and foliar feed as well as keep the humidity at 99%. removed dome after 3rd day.
the root chamber for my DIY aero setup is 14" tall. there's about 3" of solution in the bottom for a little DWC action (once the roots get down to it). a triple ultrasonic fogger that is on a cycle timer: on for 50sec, off for 150sec. if you run it constantly, it heats up the res temp. because the chamber is deep, most of the fog sits at the bottom. the 70psi nozzles come on for 5sec every minute. this stirs up the fog to fill the entire chamber. timer is hooked up to a sprinkler solenoid valve. when i have guests and have to switch to stealth mode, i turn off the air pump and 1HP shallow well pump (with tank) and use a 4" computer fan hooked up to 2 D-cell batteries to blow air into the chamber and stir up the fog constantly. fan normally runs on 12v but still runs on 3v DC, just slower, which is perfect for this application. root chamber drains to lower res, which is where i mix the nutes and the shallow well pump pulls solution from.
hope this helps! would like to hear about your successful (and unsuccessful) cloning experiences as well.
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