Cloning plants other than Cannabis

cues said:

Basil is incredibly easy. A 4" stem in a glass of water will produce roots in aout 2 weeks.
Some plants (i.e. willow) prefer to be cloned via hardwood cuttings in autumn.
Bending stems over and planting into the ground is called layering. A good way of propogating many trees.
Then there is 'air-layering' where a branch is 'nicked' then wrapped in a suitable medium and cling film. Good for rubber plants.
Commercial fruit trees are in fact generally grafted or budded onto another root-stock.

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I've done air-layering with aluminum foil before. Air-layering has a pretty high success rate, I've found.

what is that tree?

georgyboy said:

And to answer your question as many other people already have, you can clone almost any plant. It is ideal to clone marijuana to get uniform crops with consistent product. This is ideal for keeping all of the plants the same height and close to the light. No one needs this from their tomato and other veggie plants. However, at the end of the season you can bring in a tomato cutting and get fresh tomatoes through to next spring. If one season you have a particular hot pepper plant making especially large or hot peppers, take a cutting and keep it alive through the winter, then come spring you can take several cuttings of the little pepper mother you kept inside, and have several plants that will make the exact same peppers. For the most part though, taking cuttings isn't as practical for outdoor vegetable gardening as it is for the indoor cultivation of an expensive and illegal plant under lights. The fact that a 10 pack of seeds can cost upwards of $80.00 and that even if you pollinate a male and a female from that pack you are likely to stray from the original genetics you were looking for is reason enough to keep a mom and take cuttings.

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What's weird about peppers is that bell peppers and jalapenos come from the same species. Just shows how much variation you can get just by selecting traits in one species. Pepper plants are also perennials treated like annuals. I've seen a pepper plant as big as a small tree in southern Mexico. Well, I can't say that for sure, but I'm pretty confident it was just a plan Capsicum plant that was allowed to keep growing.

pacificarage said:

Actually it has a lot to do with the plant being photo-periodic. That means that they don't simply produce flowers when they are "ready" to. That's why you can't just clone an autoflowering Cannabis plant, because it's going to start flowering when the mother plant does. Which doesn't do you any good of taking the cutting at all.

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You can root a cutting from an autoflower plant, if you want to, just there is little point in rooting a clone of a plant that will die within a fixed time period.

Note that I think there may well be autoflowering sativa hybrids that can potentially keep flowering for months on end. In a case like that, it very well might make sense to try to clone one.

pacificarage said:

But did it actually save you any time? I wanna know what would happen if I took this Tomato clone indoors and put it under my grow lights. Would they stay producing fruit as long as I keep them alive? The frost is what normally ends their season. So if no frost, then what?

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Don't know enough about tomatoes to answer this, but I know tomatoes root very quickly, and you probably could save time rooting a cutting vs starting from seed.

There are "indeterminate" strains of tomato that I believe can continue to put out flowers (and therefore fruit) indefinitely.

I often wonder what to set the timers to when I try to grow them under lights. So far, my Lettuce hasn't complained about the 18/6 I've been giving it.

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Don't know about tomatoes, but herbs like mint or cilantro will grow just fine vegetatively under 24-7 if you're looking for max growth.

I grow jalapenos, cayennes and sweet peppers as 'bonchi's (bonsai chillies) and treat them as herbaceous perennials. Whilst being in the same Genus, they are very different plants. The jalapenos have tiny leaves, the sweet peppers huge, with the cayenne somewhere in-between.

I've "overwintered" potted habanero peppers, bringing them inside for winter, then putting them outside again in spring to get a second crop.

Nice thing about habaneros, is you don't need many!

This won't work with every vegetable, but it seems to work find with these.

I have cloned Rose bushes

Since this thread was started, I actually have cloned a tomato.

Just dropped a cutting in a bottle of water and it put out roots in about ten days.

Definitely faster than growing an equivalent sized plant from seed.

i cloned some locally sourced heirloom ROMA tomatoes last summer. it was suprisingly easy to do, and took fast.

i simply took a nice stem and cut it and cleaned it up. then made a nice surface area for the dirt to touch and put it right into soil. and boom. another plant.

does it work quite that easy for peppers usually too? i know peppers take longer to mature tho so its less than ideal outdoor.

how the heck would you clone Garlic Chives? i have some i brought indoor that kinda got intertwined into a geranium and i need to fix the problem. hoped i could cloned the chives somehow maybe?

Peppers aren't as easy, I find. They clone in much the same way as weed and i treat them as such. Worth it though as the hot peppers seem to be so variable when grown from seed.
I clone them in root riot cubes in a heated prop under cfl's, getting about 75% success in 2 weeks or so.
Over-wintering is a must for bonchi to get the fat stems required for a 'tree' look.
Garlic chives are bulbous and you just need to dig them up and split the clumps of bulbs into smaller clumps and re-plant. I believe they can be grown from seed but this would take longer.
Basil is another one that clones easily, only requiring a glass of water. When you grow it yourself, it can become a far different plant than the pathetic pots of seedlings they sell in stores. A single stem can produce a 2x2 shrub.
I grew romas the last 2 years in grow-bags but don't have the space now. Once tried it in hydro under my HPS and 1 plant outgrew the space in a couple of weeks!
Currently, I have 6 bell peppers, over-wintered on a windowsill (they say it can't be done, we will see).
Under the cfls in the propogation cabinet are 2 hot peppers, overwintered (1 cayenne, 1 Jalapeno, best of last years plants), 2 clones from them, just rooted and several seedlings taken from all of the above plus some ghost pepper seeds and a small basil shrub.
In 3-4 weeks, they all go under the 250w MH, some in soil, some coco, some hydroton flood-drain for about 8 weeks.
After that, they will be ready to come out early May (indoors) or early June (outdoors). Their final positions are undecided (want to build a kitchen window hydro-system by then)