Cloning help...I suck at cloning. Help!

bryan oconner said:

ok first . there is some very shitty info . not many good post at all ! first step to root a good clone . snip a branch off of a health plant . any size branch . can be 2 inches or 1 foot don't matter .. you can cut it any way you want 45/ angel or a stoner cut to high to see ! or .straight . it does NOT make any difference . next step . trim the leafs in half . they should only be half the size after trimmed. your trying to grow only roots at this point . ok then put it into your hydro cloner about half inch of the stem sticking out of the rooter able to make contact with the water . run the cloner 24/7 under a small ( 40 watt or so any color bulb or best yet a purple led works best . a regular bulb is just fine . light intensity should be very minimum . I suggest 18/6 lights .work best put the bulb about 4 or 5 foot above . weak light .. and throw that damn water heater mat into the trash ! you need to keep the water at under 70f . best to have it at 60f . NO rooting hormones .NO nutrients . NO humidity mats . not required running hydro . have a small fan running 24/7 to prevent any power mildew mold . in about 10 days check them they may be ready to transfer into soil or other medium . should get a 99.9 success rate . water not distilled . can be tap or bottled. never distilled water ever . ph needs to be at 5 . those pics you posted are forming root rot . if you can trim those and put them back in do so . or they will dye

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This is the best post so far. Only thing is you don't need to cut the fan leaves, you don't need rooting hormone or gel or any other rooting bs for any cloning method. All you need is light, humidity, and water. That's it. Bigger cutting generally root faster than small ones in optimal environment because there is more leaf surface area to provide energy to make roots. Where do you think the little ones get their energy, lol?

You can literally rip a branch off of a plant and throw it in a cup of water by your window and a lot of the time you'll get roots. People make cloning seem like a lot more work than it is. Im using a gallon plastic bag an old washed out mushroom container from dinner last month and jiffy plugs. 100% success rate. Lol.
Just tap water, no root hormone bs or phing.


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I love it when it's reduced to what's actually necessary and marketing isn't involved. Kudos bryan oconner.

N

So, last night the Aerogarden cuttings were drooping badly. Well, all but the cutting that I had recut from the last failed attempt. The cuttings I put into Rapid Rooters were drooping a little, but not as bad as the ones in the Aerogarden.



This morning one of the new Aerogarden cuttings had rebounded almost completely, the other was wilted quite badly. I blasted it with a spray bottle filled with water a couple of times today, and it rebounded nicely and both are doing well as of now.



I also started working on a "KingRalph" clone of an EZ Cloner. I grabbed an 18 gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck and $5 worth of those foam gardening kneeling pads. I cut 35 holes, 2" in diameter into the lid and 35 plugs out of the foam pads. Now I just have to glue together the PVC piping and attach it to my submersible pump (Ecoplus ECO396).

Well, I just fired up the Clone-o-matic 9000 and it seems to be working. Well, it's spraying on the inside, anyway, and quite a bit on the outside when I took the lid off to see if it was working. It was. I ended up getting seven 2" net pots, with neoprene plugs, as well as my home made ones. I cut the bottom out of the net pots, though I don't know that they are better than my ghetto plugs. Have a look:

hey no cats around your plants . cats pets bring mites . if your cat goes out side keep it away.

He's an indoor cat, and a resourceful one at that. If he wants to, he can always find a way to get at my crops!

The good news is that the Clone-o-matic 9000 appears to be working well. The first night there was a mishap though. Somehow, two of the empty plugs were mysteriously pushed through the lid and into the reservoir...almost as if a cat or something had tried to climb on top of it, sometime during the night. I can only assume that the water, which came spraying up through the openings, surprised whatever mysterious force knocked them out in the first place, since it hasn't happened since.

Here's a pic from this morning:



The Aerogarden cuttings are still chugging along nicely:


And the rapid rooters are mostly doing well. One of them has continued to wilt so I blasted it with the spray bottle this morning.

Where r u getting your cuttings from???

damnsmoker said:

He's an indoor cat, and a resourceful one at that. If he wants to, he can always find a way to get at my crops!

The good news is that the Clone-o-matic 9000 appears to be working well. The first night there was a mishap though. Somehow, two of the empty plugs were mysteriously pushed through the lid and into the reservoir...almost as if a cat or something had tried to climb on top of it, sometime during the night. I can only assume that the water, which came spraying up through the openings, surprised whatever mysterious force knocked them out in the first place, since it hasn't happened since.

Here's a pic from this morning:

The Aerogarden cuttings are still chugging along nicely:

And the rapid rooters are mostly doing well. One of them has continued to wilt so I blasted it with the spray bottle this morning.

Click to expand...

I like the looks of your cloner. I've bought a submersible pump and 360 degree sprinkler head to make a five gallon bucket cloner. Haven't put it together yet. Will have to soon.

TC {from TGA} has a video that helped me a lot with sizing the cuts. They guy in the video uses his hand to measure the cuttings, that way they are all the same size.

Greenhouse;save said:

Where r u getting your cuttings from???

Click to expand...

I have a mother plant, that I grew from a cutting, from a plant that I grew from a seed.

Larry {the} Gardener said:

I like the looks of your cloner. I've bought a submersible pump and 360 degree sprinkler head to make a five gallon bucket cloner. Haven't put it together yet. Will have to soon.

TC {from TGA} has a video that helped me a lot with sizing the cuts. They guy in the video uses his hand to measure the cuttings, that way they are all the same size.

Click to expand...

That's a great and simple technique for getting consistent sizes for cuttings, I'll have to try that next time!

So...follow up:

The Aerogarden clones are looking a little rough:



But looking underneath, I noticed that one of the cuttings has formed some nice roots:


The cutting that has sprouted the roots was the one from my first attempt at cloning in the Aerogarden; the one where I trimmed the leaves and made a clean cut on the bottom. It's definitely interesting, in the sense that the older cutting has progressed farther than the two newer cuttings. they were looking a bit rough, so I put a bit of Grotek's Kickstarter in the basin. I also trimmed off two of the sickly looking leaves.

The clones I put in rapid rooters seem to be doing well, as do the clones in the Clone-o-matic 9000 (that I am considering renaming Cloney McCloneface in honour of this boat: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboatface-what-you-get-when-you-let-the-internet-decide.html). Neither of these groups are visibly showing roots yet. It's been about 2 weeks for the Rapid Rooters and the Aerogarden, and just a bit under for the Clone-o-matic 9000.

Make sure you have plenty stem sticking out of your collers(beneath) and as I've already mentioned........a dome to hold the humidity would defo benefit your new cloner immensely........it takes time to dial it all in .........but.........when you do....and you will..... probs will be a thing of the past..........throw a clear plastic bag over them on your next set of clones and I think you will be pleasantly surprised.......

What a difference two days makes! I can only assume at this point that it's the Grotek Kickstart solution that has done this. For two weeks, nothing. Then, in two days, I get this:



Sure, the one that had roots got a lot of growth, and who's to say that it wouldn't have done that anyways. But what is interesting is that both of the newer cuttings are now showing roots; I may even transplant the older cutting today.

My local hydro shop suggested that I chuck some earthworm castings in a nylon and throw them in the Clone-o-matic 9000 to speed things along.

Greenhouse;save said:

Make sure you have plenty stem sticking out of your collers(beneath) and as I've already mentioned........a dome to hold the humidity would defo benefit your new cloner immensely........it takes time to dial it all in .........but.........when you do....and you will..... probs will be a thing of the past..........throw a clear plastic bag over them on your next set of clones and I think you will be pleasantly surprised.......

Click to expand...

Yeah, I have to find a better way to keep the humidity in for the Clone-o-matic 9000; right now, I just have the Mondi bubble sitting over top of it, unsealed. I'm not sure that it's any improvement, what I might do is grab two of them and make one bigger one that fits over the whole container.



As for the Aerogarden, next time I can try running some Saran Wrap around it, that should do a good enough job of keeping the humidity in check.

Giant clear trash bag will be easy option.

The oldest Aerogarden cutting was looking pretty solid this morning, so I moved it to a beer cup full of pro-mix and put a new cutting in its place. I also dumped some Kickstart into the Clone-o-matic 9000 in the hopes that it will speed things along as it did in the Aerogarden.

Roots are looking nice. I saw over in the gardening thread where a fellow made a greenhouse for his tobacco plants by turning a 4 foot table upside down and wrapping the legs in stretch plastic. You might do something like that, or make a frame with 2 X 2's

Larry {the} Gardener said:

Roots are looking nice. I saw over in the gardening thread where a fellow made a greenhouse for his tobacco plants by turning a 4 foot table upside down and wrapping the legs in stretch plastic. You might do something like that, or make a frame with 2 X 2's

Click to expand...

Good idea......I like this sort of thing .....I made a freestanding light by using the carcass of a single bed......have a look......

Greenhouse;save said:

Good idea......I like this sort of thing .....I made a freestanding light by using the carcass of a single bed......have a look......

Click to expand...

I like to re-use stuff too. I cobbled together a green house with scrap 2X4's from when we re-roofed the building where I work and used plastic from a local nursery.

On a cloning note, I got my hole-saw put together and cut six 3" holes in the lid to a 5 gallon bucket. I have the sub-pump, tubing, nozzle and timer. All I need now is for my plants to get big enough to clone. I do have some pepper and tomato plants big enough, but I'm not going to start with them.

Okay...much to report this morning: I transplanted 3 of the rapid rooter clones that were in the cheap-o tray with not much but a bit of water. One had very long roots, one medium and one, just a few small roots sticking out of the rooter. The other three had shown no signs of root development yet. Again, things started to happen quickly when I put a bit of the Grotek's Kickstart in the water, in the tray. Could be co-incidence though.

Here they are sitting happily in their beer cups:


And here are the other three, still on the tray. Just a reminder that these were started on March 10th, so just over three weeks to get half to take root.:


Here is the one that I took from the Aerogarden recently, it appears to be bouncing back a bit:


And, speaking of the Aerogarden: Here is the current progress, as you can see, the older one at the back is doing quite well and I may transplant it this weekend. The new one that I put there a few days ago had completely flopped. I blasted it with a squirt of water on the leaves and it has since bounced back. I think plastic wrapping the Aerogarden will do wonders for it, and I am quite happy with the results of this little experimenmt now. It still has the water with the Kick Start solution in it:


The one at the front is also doing well now, too:


I'm curious to see how far I can take these plants in the Aerogarden, I may leave some in there to maturity in the future.

Now for the Clone-o-matic 9000. Not as good, I'm afraid to say. I dumped some more solution in the bin a few days ago and topped up some more water this morning. There are only three cuttings that are showing any signs of roots; all of which are in the store bought net pots with neoprene inserts, and they all look, pretty much like this:


I am not certain what is causing the slow progression, but I suspect that it may be temperature related, as it is sitting on a cold concrete floor, in a corner of my basement. I'll have to put in a thermocouple to verify this.

So...the take away, as far as I can see, is that humidity should be maintained, probably at least for the first few days, but should be decreased to force the plants to squeeze out some roots. Then things can always be tweaked to improve performance, but simple works too.