Update: The Cloner Prototype Worked And Roots Grew

5 weeks ago I started the process of attempting to take clones from my existing garden. I took my first 50, saturated the stems in rooting gel and planted them directly in soil (in small pots).

I succeeded in killing 41.

All was not lost because I learned from this process and 9 of the toughest girls lived.

As a result of the dismal outcome @knarly327 built (what @ganjafarmer shared ) was actually called a deep water culture.

ganjafarmer (57) · 21 days ago
And your system is called deep water culture. I have done it before and it does produce some excellent results. I have a feeling that your next round of cloning is going to be a lot easier.

And I have found that using too much cloning gel actually inhibits rooting.

This is coming from a huge fan of cloning gels... Or was...

I took 50 more clones.

After 3 weeks with continuous bubbling action, a root structure was achieved.

No shit. It surprised the hell out of us too. Considering the bubbler or deep water culture was made with approximately $100 worth of “off the shelf”, readily available components.

If you missed my “how to build a do it yourself bubbler” post, you can find it here:

https://steemit.com/cannabis/@rebeccaryan/propagating-cannabis-round-two-the-diy-cloning-rig

In the photo (below) you can see what the clones looked like after approximately 14 days in the bubbler.

Yes, there are a lot of yellow leaves, so we haven’t got the moisture level quite right yet, we don’t think.

With the tray lifted (in the photo above) you can see what the roots looked like 7 days ago.

With more established roots, the clones have a much better chance of becoming established and growing into strong plants, themselves.

This is what the root structure looked like after growing for 21 days.

In the photo (above) you can see that the roots have started to grow right through the rock wool planting plugs.

We transplanted all 50 into blue solo cups because the red solo cup had already been filled up and quite frankly gets all the action so I thought it was only fair to give blue a try.

This was added to YouTube by Toby Keith on Oct.10,2011.

Blue, you’re more than fantastic
and you can believe me because I’m not the least bit sarcastic...
when I say it’s all I can do, not to be in love with you. ;D

After cutting 2 drainage slits in the sides, at the bottom of each cup, I filled them half full of soil. Then coiled the roots around before adding more soil.

Here we are:

A blue solo cup that I filled up with Purple Bubba
Then I wrote her name in Sharpie pen and did that again exactly the same way for all ten.

We cloned 5 different strains, 10 of each for a total of 50.

To this, we will add the 9 survivors from my first cloning attempt.

After watering with nutrients the newly transplanted clones were parked under lights in a vegetative staging area. They’ll stay here until we are ready to harvest our current garden in a couple of weeks. This is because we currently don’t have enough room to grow these in vegetative stage and finish our current crop in flower stage, inside. We are about 4 weeks away from the risk of frost becoming a non-issue so it’s too dangerous to plant outside in our area, yet.

With our next gardening we are planning to grow 9 plants inside and the remaining outside during our summer season. This will also let us segregate our grow room into 2 separate rooms.

This will allow us to always have some plants growing in all 3 stages (clones, veg, and flower) at the same time.

Here’s what I have learned and have changed or will be changing:

• It was very apparent that the clones that had good water bubbling action around them, grew better roots. As a direct result, tube style aeration will replace the 12 inch straight bubblers that proved to be inconsistent. They didn’t give even air distribution.

In the photo (above) you can see a very spindly clone on the right hand side of the photo. It didn’t receive as much aeration as its stronger sister did, beside her.

• Rooting hormone powder worked better for me than the gel rooting hormone. (Just like @ganjafarmer shared.)

• I am also going to place the stem of the cutting, closer to the bottom of the planting plug to encourage faster root growth. (You can see in the picture (above) that I placed the stem in the middle of the rock wool plug instead of closer to the bottom.

I welcome your comments and I invite you to follow me on my journey...I’ll be honest it won’t hurt my feelings not to have to handle a blue solo cup for awhile. ;)

~ Rebecca