Okie Dokie Folks were back from Delta9Labs(not the seed co. even though we love them) lately me and my lovely apprentice have been posting a few of our lab grade "secrets" with the people of the interweb
hahaha
Now we don't think were the best growers, nor have we been growing for 40 years. We just love to get down into the whole botany (plant biology) aspect of plants. SCIENCE IS FUN.....
Today we thought we would sit down and have our coffee and nibble on our cookie treats with everyone on "rollitup.org" and share some of our trade secrets.
Now we understand every strain and even phenotype, clones at it's own specific rate. It may take anywhere from 6-20 days to clone a cutting. We thought we would share our method of cloning which usually takes 7-8 days to fully root and ready for their next step. We all know that you need to maintain a certain temperature and humidity for cloning. With that in mind lets get started.
1. first we start with 100% sterilized equipment. Everything from your trays to your razor, to the gloves your about to put on must be clean and sterile.
1a. our method of cleaning the tools is a 50/50 solution of ISO and boiled tap water. dip your tools in and let dry. then same process but with H2O2 and let dry.
2. we like to sit next to the mother and take one clone off at a time (this prevents oxygen from entering the cells and essentially killing your plants (same thing with getting oxygen in your veins)
3. once you take your cutting with a sharp razor (angle your cut so you have a larger volume of area for the roots to develop from) start to lightly scrape your bottom stack so you create even more spots for the roots to shoot out of.
4. you then want to dip your stalk into a rooting powder or gel (powders is more sterile). try and cover all the scraped parts with the gel or powder.
5. depending on what type of cloning media you decide to choose you may have to either let your rock wool soak over night or what we do is let our jiffy pellets sit in a solution of root simulators for about 10 minutes prior to beginning the cutting process.
6. now gently but firmly push your clone into the cloning media and make sure you pat down on the top so your stalk is in no way loose, you want the media to FULLY and FIRMLY cover your entire stalks bottom half that you had dipped into the cloning gel or powder.
7. the rock wool or jiffy pellets should not be drenched but they should be wet.
8. label and place your clones in a "mondi" tray. You want to make sure non of the clones are touching, so go out and purchase more trays and domes if you must (only real risk we find in cloning is when the leaf touches another leaf, they can create diseased clone)
9. now that you have your clones labels and spaced correctly, you want to grab a spray bottle and mist your clones VERY lightly with mist and also FULLY mist the inside and the dome and then close and SEAL (make sure you do this) with tape. every single corner so its a little "bubble". also make sure the top slides are shut.
10. place under light and a cloning mat, and DO NOT OPEN IT until they have cloned. (we open our tops every other day for just a second and stick a c02 nozzle in then close the tops again. we try to replace the stale air, lol blowing into the tops also works if you don't have a nozzle in the clone area, just make sure you re seal after)
11. temps should be around 88F and 90-100% humidity
We believe there is two reasons why they clone so fast
1. the root simulators
2. making sure they have a perfect environment to root in, this means temp/humi/cleanliness all factor in for one great result
The strain we use, is notorious for rooting slowly, and we are always ready in 7-9 days MAX.
We love you all and hope you all enjoyed reading this and hope you picked up a few tips.
