Hey Dudegrows! Love the show new subscriber/supporter of this lovely community! Quick question, I used rockwool cubes and over watered the cubes. The cuts stayed in veg instead of switching to clone stage. Used clone-x, 45Β° cut, and every other tip I could find on the show and other YouTube channels. Only found 1 video! If you could explain the proper way to water your clones that would be awesome! Thank you and stay evergreen!
Over watering clones!
by Kyle | Jun 5, 2020 | Grower Questions | 9 comments
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I was a little confused by your wording. Do you mean your cuts are not rooting when you wrote “cuts stayed in veg instead of switching to clone stage”? A soaked media and stem will not form roots fast. In my cloning guide, I explain how to remove excess moisture from rockwool. Soak the cubes in a solution adjusted to a pH of 5.5. The rockwool has a neutral pH of 7. The most important thing to do before sticking a plant in rockwool is to buffer it’s pH down to around 6. Depending on how many cubes you soak, their neutral pH will raise the solution they’re soaking in up. I’ll let it get as high as 6 after a 3-4 hour soak with a bunch of cubes in a bucket. Pull each cube out of solution and GENTLY squeeze it at an angle until the water stream starts to drip. I’ll “fluff” the rockwool back out if it compresses. This is the perfect moisture content to put a stem in. My cuts in rockwool have roots poking out after 6-8 days. A soaked cube could take 14+ days with every other environmental condition identical. A cut that roots in 6 days takes about the first 3 days to “harden up”, another day before roots start to form on the stem and another 2 days to make it out of the cube. This can only happen if the stem is semi-dry. Cyclical aeroponic waterings do better than water culture cloning for the same reason. The stem is not soaked with moisture. Do not add any water to cube until roots pops out. This is the biggest mistake growers make when cloning. Wet your media once, put in cut, wait for roots. Here’s my cloning article link.
https://www.dudegrows.com/mystro-cloning/
^^ dang, thats good stuff. Listen to him Kyle π
Thanks for the help. All I meant was the clones continued to grow instead of pushing out roots. I appreciate it π―!
Maybe too much light.
Too much nitrogen during rooting. If you have any “bloom booster” products laying around you can use that (very diluted) as a cloning solution along with rooting hormones for enough nutrition to aid in root formation but not grow. A little less intense light will prevent upward growth also like JustCoolin mentioned.
So it was a trifecta of mistakes. Fck me right lol jk. I appreciate all the input and at least I learned from this mistake. Just finishing up today’s episode of dgc. π₯π¨
Glad to help. Scotty sent me some Grow More powders a few years back to test. They have a 5-10-40 for late bloom. I use it only for cloning. The small bag Scotty sent me years ago is not even half used. That half bag has probably made 1000 clones. I’ve found the best results during cloning when using that powder at 1ml/gal as a cube soak with Clonex and a pinch of Recharge. I’ve seen roots popping out of rockwool with that in 5 days with a few strains. Most are 6-8 days. If I don’t see roots after 8 days the clone will get culled. Always make extras. π
My recharge will be here Monday, I’ll have to go get a bloom boost only thing I have for bloom is a bio-thrive bloom. I kept them in my 4×4 tent so had to much light from my led, and way too much water. I will make these critical adjustments asap! I’ve been a recreational outdoor grower for almost 3 yrs up in WA and we always got our cuts already done and either roots showing or transplanted already. I knew this would be a learning curve and it was!! Again appreciate everything! Funny how when I started seeds it was 100% success but clones 0% success. The more you know I guess. Haha stay evergreen shout out from the 509
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