Clonamatix - With Pics!

[farmergiles]

Time for a thread about cloning.

Cloning rocks!

Seeds can be expensive. Jack Herer anyone? Mighty fine smoke as I remember. Incredible heart rushes .

But at £87.46 (and that`s a really good price for JH) for 10 seeds, some f2`s from Gypsy Nirvana or someone look tempting by comparison. Especially when you take into account that the "real" JH from Sensi exhibits considerable variation in pheno, it isn`t a stable hybrid. So you`ll probably need a whole pack to get one female plant of the real Jack.

Or what you could do, whatever your rolls royce of weed is, is get hold of it and clone it. All you need is one plant. Or just a cutting. Once you`ve got one you can make an army of clones.

Proviso- I`m not sure if this is true of all strains. More about this later...

So I`m going to demonstrate a couple of basic cloning techniques and shoot some bull about cloning. Two techniques and pics by the weekend .

Fuck The Monkeys

[farmergiles]

There is a major benefit to cloning.

Cannabis plants like to vegetate before flowering.

Different strains have different ways of reacting to light cycles.

Some strains may be fairly happy growing in a 12/24 cycle once they are rooted.

The majority of strains give best results if grown until preflowering under a Summer light schedule- (18/24 or more) before flowering- (12/24).

If you clone a plant that has reached preflowering the clone has the age of the parent. So you can put it into flower as soon as it has roots if you want.

[farmergiles]

First of all there`s cloning into soil.

The soil used should not be too heavily fertilised otherwise the clones will get scorched. I`m watering with plain pH adjusted (about 6.5) water. No nutes or anything are needed at this stage.

Pic shows 4 little pots of soil along with some rooting gel (contains hormones which encourage growth of roots).
Clonex is obtainable from hydro stores, any rooting gel or powder from a garden centre or wherever should work fine. In fact the rooting hormone isn`t absolutely necessary, this will work without hormones, they just speed things up.

The soil should be moist all the way through, not sodden.

[farmergiles]

Now we need a sharp, clean blade. Keep everything clean otherwise your clones can get fungal infections or other nasties.

I`m using a sharp pair of scissors.

You can see I`m taking a cutting from the bottom of the plant. You can take a cutting from anywhere, in some ways it may be best to take a cutting from the top of the plant. More about this later.

The cutting should have at least two or three sets of leaves, we may well lose the bottom set while the clone is rooting.

Taking your blade peel away the outer skin from the very bottom stem of your cutting, maybe 1 cm or a bit less.

At this stage some people like to leave the cutting in water (like you would a bunch of flowers) for 24 hrs. I`m not going to bother.

Dip the bottom of the stem into the rooting gel (see pic).

[farmergiles]

Place the cutting into a pot of soil as shown with maybe an inch or so of the stem in the soil.

I`ve now got 4 unrooted clones.

[farmergiles]

They`re going into a propagator (a box with a clear lid) to stop them drying out and keep them out of any draughts until they form roots. They are joining some other clones in rockwool I took earlier. As you can see it`s pretty humid in the propagator (maybe too humid but I`ve opened the vent a tad).

They`re going into my vegging chamber. It`s fairly warm in there and the lights are on 24/24.

They don`t need too much light at this stage.

I`ll keep an eye on them to make sure their soil doesn`t dry out but apart from that I`ll leave them to their own devices until they form roots.

Next- cloning into rockwool cubes...

[mothernature]

Hi farmergiles,

Is this open for discussion or would that be rude? I really don't know.

Thanks,

mothernature

[farmergiles]

Discussion welcome.

[mothernature]

In the pic with the gel... is there a leaf node on that cutting?

You said, "Taking your blade peel away the outer skin from the very bottom stem of your cutting, maybe 1 cm or a bit less"

I am curious about this. I have never heard this before. I am assuming that this increases the surface space that the plant can use to produce roots. What do you know about this? How does the root development compare to not peeling the cutting?

Also, does this technique take long? I know that the longer the time the cutting remains in the air, the greater the risk of an air bubble blockage and killing the cutting.

Which led me to another thought...

I wonder how much of the grow myths came from a single grain of truth? Like when I read that some people put their cuttings in water for 24 hours. I can't imagine the why of this except for the air bubble thing I mentioned. Or that there is something special about 10th or 20th generation clones. How do myths like that get so ingrained? (rhetorical question)

[Xil]

I've never grown, so this question might sound kind of noobish, im jsut trying to get my knowledge together for when i do start.

When a clone is taken, should the mother plant be in the flowering stage or the veg stage?
Do people tend to keep a plant constantly in the veg stage to provide a good source of clones?

[farmergiles]

@ mothernature- the peeling of the lower part of the stem is so that there is more surface area the clone can take up water from and therefore less chance of dehydration.
I think this also assists with root development. When I do the rockwool cubes later I`ll try 1 or 2 without doing this as a control. I`ve seen people successfully take clones of rose bushes and stuff without the "peeling".
I`ve never heard about the air bubble before. You can keep the cuttings hanging around for quite a while out of any medium as long as they don`t dry out.

@ Xil- good question. Normally it is best to take clones from vegging plants and yes, people do keep momma`s in permanent veg to take clones from. Apparently you can sometimes keep a plant in this state for decades, I`m not sure if there is any definite limit.
Personally I take clones, flower the momma(s), veg the clones, take more clones, flower the momma clones, veg the new clones, take more clones etc. So I don`t have permanent momma clones- I don`t really have space, I`d run out of headroom in my veg cab. My veg cab is under light 24/24. If I had a momma cabinet I`d keep the lights on 18/24 to keep them in veg but slow growth a bit.
You can clone a flowering plant but it takes a while for the cutting to sort itself out and re veg, prolonging the process the longer the parent plant has been in flower.
Sometimes if the leaf nodes were very close together I used to flower them for a few days before taking clones to space the nodes out. I`ve decided this is a bad idea, nowadays I just peel away the lowest nodes to get a bit longer a stem to go into the soil. I don`t bury the leaves as I don`t want any rotting vegetable matter in the soil- IMO this would encourage rot and fungus and stuff.

BTW- of course you can clone a male plant just as easily.

[farmergiles]

So now to rockwool. The process is very similar to soil.

First though I`m going to treat the rockwool cubes.

A little Formulex (weak 1 pack nutrient solution) is added to some water, v.dilute, and the rockwool cubes are soaked.

[farmergiles]

The cutting is taken as before.

I`ve shown a pic to illustrate the peeling of the bottom part of the stem. The cutting is dipped into the rooting gel and placed in the cube just as earlier with soil.

I`ve taken four with the lower part of the stem peeled and four without, just to compare.

[farmergiles]

Now there are another 8 unrooted clones in rockwool.

They go back in the veg chamber with the propagator top on to keep everything from drying out.

[farmergiles]

3 of the clones in soil are doing good, one is looking a bit wilted.

[farmergiles]

And here are 3 other clones I`ve just potted up. Hopefully our clones will be looking like this in a week or so.

[Dandaweedman]

Nicely done/doing

[Cerebro]

have you ever tried using honey instead of rooting hormone gel?
i always looked at the cutting into water thing as more to do with energetics, and osmosis. The water acts as a plug, stopping both energy and water loss.

[farmergiles]

Never tried the honey although I`ve heard it works. I`ll try it next time.

Used to leave the cuttings for 24 hrs in water before soil/rockwool/whatever but it doesn`t seem to make any difference if I skip this stage.

[mothernature]

I Googled the key words "plant propagation air bubble" and got this,

To prevent an air bubble (embolism) from lodging in the stem where the cut is, immediately place in a container filled with cloning solution or dip in cloning gel. Place cutting into your growing medium - transfer quickly if you are not using cloning gel, If using cloning gel, transferring time is not as critical as the gel will seal the stem.

If you Google "plant propagation embolism" you get the scientific hits.

Cerebro,
I think your point about energetics and osmosis may be valid. I would like to study up a little more on this. Give me some time please.

farmergiles,
You are absolutely a wonderful and kind human being for doing all this for us. Thank you very much.