Taking Cuttings

To take cuttings you will need a suitable mother plant or alternatively you could take cuttings off plants in the Veg cycle before you flower them. Please remember that you can only take cuttings off plants that are in vegetative growth (18-24hrs light). When selecting a mother plant or plants to take cuttings off always select the most vigorous and healthy looking plants as these traits will be transferred to your cuts.

Benefits:

  • Quick and Easy

  • with suitable mother plants large numbers of  cuttings can be taken

Disadvantages:

  • The health of your plants will degenerate with each generation of cuttings you take.It would take years not months for a strain to diminish.

You will need:

Get hold of a sealable container and fill with 1 Litre of tap water or if you're feeling a bit flush bottled spring water. Take a PH reading using your test kit or digital ph meter. You need to adjust this PH to read 5.5 so if it is too high use PH down, if it is too low use PH up.  Add small amounts using the pipette and continue testing till you hit the right mark. Avoid using up and down together and never mix them directly as they react violently to one another, instead if you go to far with the PH just add water to move the PH back in the other direction. Now drop as many cubes as you need in and seal the container then leave for 24 hrs.

Give each cube a good squeeze to remove 30 to 40% of the water. You're trying to keep the cubes moist but not wet although having them too wet would be preferable to letting them get too dry. This is to ensure the cutting has air to breathe when it takes and to encourage roots to reach out for additional moisture. If the cube is too saturated the cutting will take but you risk a situation where the cutting will rot at the base of the stem.

Now on to taking actual cuttings. I've provided some diagrams below of where and how to make your cuts. theres not much indication of scale but I've always found that size is important in that the bigger your cuts are and the more leaf they have the quicker they will root (week or less) but success rates can drop as a result. On the flipside smaller cuts have a bigger success rate but can take up to 2 weeks to root. I'd try and take cuts of about 5-10cms in size and leave on as much leaf as you can. Take your cutting and cut across the base of the stem at an angle of 45 degrees to expose as much of the base as possible. Dip the bottom 10-20mm of the stem in clonex and insert into the rockwool cube so that its about 20mm in and no more than 10mm from the bottom.

clonex demo pic1   clonex demo pic2   clonex demo pic1   clonex demo pic4



Set up your propagator, heated versions will automatically maintain a model environment, if you are using a basic prop try and maintain a temperature of 24 degrees Celsius and a humidity of around 70 to 90%. If using a twin 55watt fluorescent light like the sort we stock set this up 2-3 inches above the canopy of your propagator. Until rooted keep the vents on your propagator firmly shut.
Keep your cubes watered if they dry out they will die, you can do this making up a batch of feed like described earlier and dipping the cubes in it and letting them soak up some water, you can squeeze out excess water but don't squeeze too hard or you may damage the root zone. Once roots become visible you can drop off the humidity by slowly opening up the vents on your propagator allowing your seedlings time to adjust each time until they are fully open. Taking this one step on  you could harden off your plants further by removing the lid altogether for longer periods each day until you no longer need it at all.

Now just plant your cubes into bigger blocks or whatever medium you choose. If going into more rockwool remember to pre-soak the new medium, a bit of Canna Rhizotonic or BioBizz Rootjuice at this point is great for stimulating roots when transplanting.


Last Updated: May 16, 2008