I've experimented with water temp, ph, tds, hormones, cutting/not cutting leaves, shaving/not shaving stems, splitting/not splitting stems, putting nodes in the water, cutting across nodes, age of plants into flowering clones were taken from, size of clones themselves, condition of plants clones were taken from, temp of the air in the room, humidity of air in the room, air circulation in the room, type of light, height/intensity of the light, timing of the light 18/6 or 24/0, etc.

Spectralmagic, what you said about the flowering hormone being turned on and off is exactly why I said to take them not later than 1 week in. Every month or so I'll come across a thread where someone is asking, "why aren't my rooted clones growing?", and it's the same thing every time, they waited too long into flowering. They'll usually root, but won't grow up top, or they will very, very slowly continue to try to flower, and just not work, even under a bright light on 24/0. I've experimentally had rooted clones sit for over a month doing nothing because I waited too long into flowering to take them. Sometimes they will recover and grow a bunch of little offshoots, they look really weird at that point, very distinctive, I'd be able to tell if I saw a plant that looked like that exactly what had happened to it. But you can avoid all of that bs by simply taking them 1 week into flowering, no later.

I actually suspect that this works even better than taking clones from a mother growing lazily under 18/6 or 24/0, because during the first 2 weeks of flowering, there is a huge growth spurt, and I suspect if you take clones halfway during that, you can keep some of that vigor going during the cloning process. In other words, plants growing aggressively clone better than plants which are being held back, as a typical mother plant is.

Hello,
This is my first post to this forum. I am finally ready to clone my plants. I have had them since October and they are now nearly 7 feet tall. I knew the lights I had on my plants for the winter was not sufficient but I did not have anywhere in the house to hang the light hood. I kept my plants in the bathtub all winter and I bathed at my daughters house so it wasn't too much of a hardship to have the plants in the tub.

Now the time has come to do some cloning and I am lost as to how to actually do the cloning so that I have some success. I have tried to get plants cloned when I accidentally cut off the end of a plant stem. All of the clones have died so far and I am using cloning powder and cloning water.

I would really appreciate it if someone answered my post and gave me some pointers. I am not going hydoponic. I am using Frog dirt and bat guano.

Thanks,
~Keeper

Hey brother - if you remember that old house we grew up in in Cmack there was a big old willow tree in the yard.. uncle son had a couple as well.

I'd refer you to spectralmagic's excellent reply to the original poster above. He went over the whole process in a straightforward way.

My first attempts weren't very successful, here's some of the things I was doing wrong:

- Fertilizing clones before they had roots
- Letting rooting medium get too wet or too dry
- Placing too close to a HID
- Bad hygiene! Use clean utensils, sterile rooting medium. Old/used soil or soil from outside often fails thanks to various microbes.

Anyone got any more tips?

Yeah.
Go hydro, dwc or an ez cloner.

Harvey, why are you telling a new grower to worry about temps, ppms, ph, even dwc ?? You've forgotten what a newbie does and doesn't know...

KISS is my mantra, and it works. I routinely get 80-100% success rate by keeping things simple. Here are a few points I need to bring up, to correct the damage done above.

- trimming leaves increases root development. Keep the leaves small
- carefully remove the outer layer of cells around the cut end of your clone (or alternatively you can bisect the stem a few mm's from the cut ti). This increases the rootable surface area, increasing your changes of success.
- rooting gel or powder, imo, also increases the odds in your favour, as the hormones incorporated in these products triggers root production.
- do not feed the cuttings until transplanted (and therefore has a decent root system).
- keep the clones in a moist but not drenched environment ie. a humidity dome.
- do not take cuttings from flowering plants, if at all possible. This adds both delay and a chance of ending up with a hermie.
- keep a mother of any strain you wish to grow again. This allows you flexibility in timing your grows, a large number of cuttings will be available any time, plus you have a backup copy in the event of a disaster.


This has been discussed to death somewhere else here, so I'll stop repeating both myself and others.

I haven't forgotten anything about being a newb, I just said what I said because I wish someone had told me all of that when I was first starting out.

I've read books that had no specific info, only vague generalizations that are worthless in the real world. I don't ever want to give out info like that. So while a newb might not know what tds is now, they might learn, and be able to come back and use this specific info later.

People are intimidated by hydro because they assume it's more difficult, and/or expensive. But cloning in DWC is not difficult, and you can get nearly everything you need even at wal mart. Yeah, not the best equipment, but it works, and it isn't expensive.

To be 100% clear on this, everything I wrote, and am writing about, is from my own experience with DWC, I don't know about it applying to anything else. For example, I believe the cutting leaves thing came from the desire to drop transpiration in a medium that is not as wet as dwc or aero, before hydro became popular.
Same thing with humidity domes. Not really a dwc or aero thing.

You say cutting the leaves "increases root development", well, my experiments didn't show that at all. Side by side, 24 clones with normal leaves, 24 with cut leaves, they all rooted about the same, except the ones with cut leaves partially yellowed another set of leaves higher up, not just the lower ones. So I stopped cutting the leaves.

And the stems, when I experimented with this, like I wrote, the clones that I had shaved, split, or messed with, if a clone failed, it was one of them, due to the stems rotting. Not all of them failed, obviously, but of all the clones that did fail, every one of them was one I had done something to the stem on. What kind of conclusion would you draw from that? I concluded that anything you do to the stem makes it weaker, more susceptible to rotting, and more likely to fail. You look at my pic, you'll see roots popping out wherever they want. I even had a pic (it might be in my old cloning thread in the hydro section actually) where I partially submerged a stem with leaves and everything, and the roots grew out right next to the leaves!
Maybe the shaved stem thing works with methods other than dwc or aero, I'm not claiming anything about that, just with dwc.

As far as "do not take cuttings from flowering plants, if at all possible. This adds both delay and a chance of ending up with a hermie." As I said, I've taken clones from plants in veg to plants almost all the way to harvest. I did not observe any difference, or "delay", in rooting time between clones taken from plants in veg vs plants 1 week into flowering. I did see an increase in failure rates with clones taken later into flowering. I have more detailed info on that in my above post. As far as the hermie thing, I've never seen a clone from a flowering plant hermie. Have you? I have had plants hermie, but never under 18/6 or 24/0.

And what I do IS simple. That's the whole reason I do it this way, it's easy, it works and I don't have to think about it anymore! I just cut the clones off the plants, dip them in the gel, and put them in the neoprenes. All I ever do to my cloners is add a litte water and nutes, and a little nitric or ph down to keep the ph on target. It takes like 2 minutes to do that. I don't even change the solution in the cloners.

DB, if you think something I said isn't true, don't just say you're going to undo the "damage" I've done by writing a contradictory post. Why don't you give me something to think about, a source, some kind of evidence, or the results of your own experimentation, if they're different than mine?

You guys don't want to go hydro, that's totally cool with me. It's not like I'm going to be offended by that. It might seem like I have an ego about this stuff, but I really don't. I fuck up all the time, and I admit it freely. Lol. But I usually learn from my mistakes. And I'm not getting paid for this either. I'm just putting this up to attempt to help other people. If you try some other methods and they don't want to work, this dwc technique does.

Sorry for the long post.

KISS. Get a EZ cloner. Fill it with RO water. Take cuts. Plug-in. Keep your room at 70. Roots in 10-14 days. Can't get much easier than that. If you don't wanna fuck with ro use tap and run the machine 24 hrs, or so before the cuts go in. No ph, no ppm worries. I will bet my ratio is as good as anybodies. 57 outta 60 last go. And I screwed 2 of em up myself bein' stupid.