Cloning techniques

[anneface011389]

What techniques do you use for cloning plants?

Aeroponics? Rockwool? Rapid Rooters? Vermiculite/perlite mix? Tissue culture?

Particular rooting hormone substances that you prefer? Liquid vs gel vs powder?

Do you soak clones in anything? Pretreat with anything? Special treatment for the moms prior to taking clones?

I am exploring options to help optimize our cloning process and cut our rooting time down.
What is the soonest you have seen roots appear? What part of your process do you think contributes most to increasing the amount of roots in the shortest amount of time?

Do you find that there are particular strains that have different preferences as far as the techniques that you use?

[garymorgan]

Ive only tried aeroponic cloning, so I cant tell you about other methods. I use the Botanicare PowerCloner and I’ve had 100% success rate with it creating 48 clones at a time. Botanicare gives you samples of Rhizoblast Hydroguard and Power Clone. They work so good I’m sticking with them.

It takes about 7-10 days before you start to see white ‘nubs’ of new roots. By 14 days you should have a good web of beautiful pearly white roots. I use hydroton so I like to have a good amount of roots formed before I transfer to growth modules. I imagine once the roots start to form you could transplant immediately. Id say thats 14 days from cut to transplant with an aeroponic system. The only thing I’ll change about the system is the pump location. I’ll likely move it outside the reservoir as the pump can heat the water beyond what I’d recommend.

[nathan]

Making Cuttings: What’s your methodology?

[Cody]

I’m not sure on all the details of your setup obviously, but a good solution to your resevoir getting too hot is to plug your pump into a timer. I haven’t experimented with varying intervals personally, but I’ve heard 30min on 30min off works nicely. Shorter intervals are fine as well. Some timers are built specifically for pumps at 4min off 1min on if I remember correctly. Save electricity and supply more oxygen (not to mention dissolved oxygen from lower water temps).

[Cody]

Great post. So much room for discussion. On my phone though so I’ll be relatively brief. The biggest difference I’ve seen, possibly even beyond genetics, is the health, overall plant age, and local age (where in the plant you take the cutting). I’ve seen cuttings do well or poorly in all different types of conditions, even some conditions commonly deemed unsuitable for clones. Proper mother maintenance makes all the difference no matter your technique. I suggest promoting axillary growth so when you take cuttings, they are all relatively the same age and will develop more evenly. Generally, younger mothers lend to faster rooting as do cuttings taken closer to the crown of the plant (effectively younger as well, though this might seem counter intuitive ). And of course, healthy moms make healthy kids; be sure you’re not seeing nutrient problems. Clones that start unhealthy often never quite catch up to their full potential and will be more susceptible to pests and disease.

[nicholas]

Bumping this topic for the newer folks.

[ShaneB]

Hi @garymorgan I was browsing through the thread and noticed you mentioned that you’re having to combat heat in your reservoir at times? If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to offer up some feedback that EZ-CLONE shares with folks when facing the same type of concerns. Not a sales pitch, haha, just some insight on our own in house R&D that might be helpful to you and others. Might help give some good insight, perspective and hopefully some concern relief!

EZ-CLONE ALWAYS recommends using our Clear Rez solution to all of it’s users. It helps keep your system running clean & is designed to keep reservoirs, pipes, pumps and irrigation systems free from build up and helps combat agains harmful bacteria and pathogens. The best part, it can be used during any stage of a plant’s development.

Our Clear Rez is suitable for all hydroponic, aeroponic and soil applications. All you would do is add
1oz per 5 gallons of water or nutrient solution, every 5 days. If used in an ongoing cycle, water should be exchanged every 30 days.

Based on our own R&D, we actually saw a much improved root rate with warmer water temps. We tested reservoir water temps up to about 85 degrees, while using Clear Rez, & saw no negative affects on the clones, I know, we were shocked too! So, in conclusion, as long as you’re using Clear Rez, or a Hypochlorous Acid additive, if you don’t want to use ours, water temps really should never be an issue or a major concern.

Another tip that may be helpful, incase you’re still concerned with water temps, is to place your cloning system on a concrete floor. Concrete will naturally draw any heat away from your system and will help with keeping temps in range. We recommend water temps remain between 70-75 degrees.

Hope you found this helpful and please, feel free to reach out to us anytime. Regardless whether you use our system or products, we’re here to help!

[ethan]

Now that the industry has been using vegetative cloning for some years. Has anyone looked at pathogen loading in the clones?

It would seem a priority for growers to do a small tissue culture test with heating. See if the resulting plans have an increase in desirable characteristics. In mum and geraniums it made a gigantic difference. The resulting crops were healthier, bigger, and produced in a shorter time. Growers saw marginal profits go through the roof.

We did this on viola oderatera in 1991 and saw a 60% increase in flowers produced. It took a marginal crop for us and made it very profitable.

The other potential for TC is playing with the genetics of know strains in an easily way. I little coltcine and we are on our way polyploid plants.

The old recipe was dissolving coltcine in indulebutaric Acsid

Would be a couple of easy ways to potentially distinguish your product.

[NateDakine420]

Root cubes soaked in our Atomic Root Powder 2g per gallon, after dipping the cutting in clonex gel. 4-6 days consistently.

[mike.c]

Yes!

TC is going to be extremely useful for future research into epigentics and regulating the metabolism and secondary metabolite production for cannahemp plants! I’ve seen this used in phenotypic selection of grapes and the time it saves is amazing.

imo, i feel like NAA/IAA is often left out in prop conversations. There is research that suggests NAA/IAA and IBA can have a synergistic effect on root production. IIRC, IBA and IAA are conjugates of each other in normal plant metabolisms and including both may provide the plant a shortcut to obtain the correct levels of each to optimize adventitious root dev. IAA has also been shown to reduce oxidative stressors for plants, which would help little clones focus more on growing than simply staying alive.

however, one thing i feel most users of plant hormones forget is that overdosing a plant on hormones is an easy way to kill/inhibit the most productive path for the plant. there are alot of hormone/auxin based herbicides (ALS, 2,4-D) that work by overstimulating the hormone responses of plants. putting too much rooting hormone on plants (indiscriminately dipping plants in full strength hormone powder/solution) can inhibit root growth or promote overcallous. doing a trial and developing a protocol with differing concentrations of rooting hormones is key to raising prop success rates as well as optimizing consumable overhead, imo.

[ethan]

Beautiful plugs.

[Dianna.Donnelly]

I’ve cloned a few times now and always use the gel product called “Roots”. I learned a few do’s and don’ts between my first and second major cloning attempt.

The Do’s: re-cut the clone in a dish of water with the cut end under the water. This keeps from getting an air bubble or air embolism.

Also, I sort of soaked my first cuttings and that was a mistake. It seems to burn them.

[ethan]

@Dianna.Donnelly

I’ve cloned a few times now and always use the gel product called “Roots”. I learned a few do’s and don’ts between my first and second major cloning attempt.

The Do’s: re-cut the clone in a dish of water with the cut end under the water. This keeps from getting an air bubble or air embolism.

Also, I sort of soaked my first cuttings and that was a mistake. It seems to burn them.

Hi Dan,

If the mother plants are healthy, I just never found a soak helpful.
On our first cloning of any line we would test each of the rooting products we liked. The product that worked best for the line was what we used for the main cutting production.

I never found any difference in cuttings under water. In Heartmans book on vegetative cuttings methods, they never found recutting underwater promoted survival rates of cuttings, except in some woody plants.

For a few funny plants we actually found that silver nitrate and no rooting products. These where all plants in genera anemone. They have a big bacterial problem.

So just vegetative clones? Do you control root zone temperature?

Have you thought of heat tenting one or two mother plants of a line? Think of orange grows with citrus wilt virus. The grows found that the heat treated trees had higher subsidence yields. This started the work in virus loads, in vegetative propagated plants.

Have you done or heard of anyone doing tissue culture cloning With a heat cycling?
TC is only really useful for really big growers.

[NateDakine420]

Thanks. People at the MJ Biz Con are super impressed and are going to be trialing my method for improving rooting time and efforts. Let me know if you would like a sample sent your way!

[ethan]

I haven’t actively done TC for years but, I learned in my late teens from a mushroom grower. The first plants I wanted to do where orchids from my collection…

I could not get anyone to teach me the technique. Finally used a friend a few years old. All our lab equipment was home made.

[BioNatural-Amrit]

Hey everyone,

Our growers have given us some interesting results regarding clones growing roots. They have gotten healthy roots in 4-5 days, with a certain method and application of our products.

48 hours prior to cutting they spray their mother plant with Taba (our de stressing product), then soaked the clone stem in a mixture of fulvic, aloe, oxygenated H20, and kelp extract for 24 hours. Before plugging they cut a portion of the old stem back and dipped in Bioplin (our nitrogen fixing bacteria product). This same application has been replicated over and over with majority of our growers and they simply love it.

I have attached a photo from one of our growers.

Feel free to try it out if you’re interested.

[ethan]

Do you have a link to the protocols?

[MK3_Pharms]

Tissure culture is super hot right now. However i still do it just like everyone here has posted. Everyone here is spot on.

[BioNatural-Amrit]

Don’t have a link but I can email them to you just message me your email.

[ethan]

Ethan@kayes.info msg me the domain for the email so it doesn’t get sucked into my spam folder