First time cloning, some questions and experiments

Hadez411

Well-Known Member
Hey all,

TLDR: Cloned some mainlined tops, they look kinda delapidated and shiny, some look like they might have tried to flower. Was missing a fan til now. Used some questionable cloning practices and some slightly hot worm casting fertilizer. Running (2) 5000k full spec white 30W LED "corn" bulb. How do they look? The pale new growth seems wrong to me.

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I cloned for the first time. Used some tops off of plants that were happy and healthy but were crowded.
I could use some opinions on how it's going. Seemed great until they showed some pale and deformed growth.

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They were tops taken from one mainlined indica and one sativa. I found they did really well, especially compared to my buddy's. They may have been 1 day in to flower lighting, then I gave them a day of indirect light. Seems to me like the sativas may have flowered and then gone back to veg, they stretched like mad and grew super thick stems. Topped them, but they had like 3" internodal spacing at the top. Before I topped, I moved lights closer and they got stressed, started rolling over leaves etc. So I moved them back. They look very bushy at the bottom and extremely stretchy at the top, perhaps I monster cropped? The indicas are lower and slower. Topped them all to the same height for now.

They rooted the entire sides of a solo cup within a week of transplanting from roxul and they're growing out of my soft bags 3 days after transplanting from solo cup to a roughly 2-3 gal pot. The roots are even poking out of the soil. I used a 2:1 ratio of low npk potting soil mixed with worm castings and organic fertilizer mix in the cups. When I re-potted I ran out of the potting soil with perlite in it, so some of them got potted up with pure organic worm castings and fertilizer (0.5N 0.5P 0.5K). Golf Green is kinda impure btw, I've been getting plastic chunks, strings and the odd weed. My plants seem to like it though.



Things that I did which go against most suggestions that I read:

-cloned tops instead of bottom branches
-left all the big leaves on, didn't hack them down in size either
-allowed the leaves to lay on the ground
-used 3" squares of uncompressed roxul that had been on the ground in the rain, no clue on their PH
-transplanted to dirt when roots just started to show, as opposed to letting them get an inch long.

What I found was that the clones with leaves whose undersides were touching the wet roxul rooted the fastest, by far. I had the tent at a nice high humidity and the rest of them were nowhere close to rooting as much as the ones where the two lowest fan leaves were either jammed down the side of the solo cup between the roxul or laying on the surface. What I read is you wanna spray the bottoms of the leaves to give them water, it seems you can do the same much more hassle-free by leaving the fan leaf bottoms in contact with moisture. I was spraying plants and the humidity was 70-80% for the first couple weeks. Only the ones with leaves touching had 1-2" roots.

They're quite glossy and had a round of deformed and pale growth though. Neut lock? They had some slightly nitrogen burnt looking tips at one point.

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