Clone hlp pls:)

I'll try my hand at this, feel free to flame away if I miss the mark...

Cloning is to marijuana growers what 'taking a cutting' is to horticulturalists/gardeners. Basically, you want to use an already-existing plant to make a new, separate plant that shares the same DNA as the first plant (and therefore the same properties and, in the case of cannabis plants, the same sex).

The process of cloning rests on the fact that plants can grow new roots from leaf nodes. Here is the general process:

1. Select the shoot you want to use as a clone. You can use either a newly growing side shoot, or the main growing tip. The section you are using should have a few sets of leaf nodes.

2. Cut the shoot off the main plant with a sharp, clean (i.e. sterile) blade. Remove the pair of leaves from the lower-most leaf node (the farthest set of leaves from the growing tip)

3. Using your blade, cut the shoot diagonally, ever-so-slightly below the point on the stem where the leaves you just removed were growing out of (the node). Cutting diagonally creates more surface space of exposed stem, and thus allows for more root growth.

4. Dip the newly cut bottom of the cutting into some rooting hormone. This is not absolutely necessary but definitely helpful.

5. Create a hole in your growing medium (e.g. a pot filled with soil, peat pellet, etc) about an inch or two deep, using a pencil.

6. Insert the bottom of the cutting into the hole, and gently push the soil in around the cutting so that it can stand freely.

7. Cover the cutting to maintain humidity. I like to take a 2 litre pop bottle, cut off the end with the lid, and put it upside-down over the cutting and the pot/peat pellet. Since your new cutting doesn't have any roots, it will have a very hard time getting moisture and will be prone to drying out constantly. You will need to keep the humidity high inside the bottle (using a spray bottle to mist inside the bottle will help)

8. Maintain the cutting this way for a few weeks. You can test to see if the cutting has rooted by gently tugging at it, but you risk damaging the new roots if you do so.

* Alternately you may choose to place the bottom of the cutting in water for a few days, in which case new roots will develop in a hydro sort of fashion. Be sure to plant it carefully in your chosen medium after little roots form.

Hope this helps.

 

Well, if you take a shoot during flowering, the new plant will be in flowering (which has its occasional uses, but for general purposes should be avoided, because you probably want to grow it into a nice big plant before you flower it).

Any side shoot should do, but I would say make sure its big enough that it has at least 2 sets of leaves plus the little third set right under the grow tip. That way when you remove the lowest set, you will still have 2 nice fan leaves hanging out.

Here are a few sites that explain the process in other terms, although they are written to pertain to any plant rather than pot plants specifically:

http://www.greenfingers.com/articledisplay.asp?id=285
http://www.thisgardenisillegal.com/2006/05/softwood-cuttings-how-to-steal-shrubs.html
http://www.letsgogardening.co.uk/Information/Cuttings.htm
http://www.wikihow.com/Grow-Cuttings-from-Established-Plants

Good luck! Welcome to GC!

 

I have recently been fine tuning my cloning technique. I was able to get plants to clone using a aeroponic set up but I was having problems getting them into soil after they developed roots. My problem was that either the plants were drying out too fast and dying or getting stem rot from being too moist under a humidity dome.

Here is what I do now. After I take the clone and put it into soil (vermiculite and perlite) I place a clear 8 oz drinking cup with a small hole in the bottom of the cup over the clone. The next day, I widen the hole to allow more ventilation. The next day, I'll widen the hole again or create new holes in the cup to allow even more ventilation. By 3 or 4 days, I've whittled away at the cup that it's practically a cylindrical plastic sleeve with no bottom over the clone. By this time the clone has started growing in the soil and looking very healthy.

So the lesson here, was change the environment the clone was in very gradually. I was going from a very high humidity down to room humidity too quickly. Doing it gradually lets the clone establish its roots to extract water from its medium.

Warn

 

Good call delta, you covered a point I missed entirely: ventilation. You need to make sure that the clone gets fresh air. Like delta said, a hole in the top of your cover will do this.

 

Now I have read and read but my questin is, althought everyone says they only need a little light, no one has touched on lighting scheduale??

24/0? 20/4? 18/6

I'm thinking 24/0 but will someone tell me!

 

24/0 would likely be fine as long as the lights you're using don't create enough heat to evaporate the moisture under the dome too rapidly (especially if there's a hole). However at this point you would like your plant to focus on growing roots rather than on growing upward, so you may even want to knock it down to 18/6.