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Clone along

My current grow soil is a mix of coco coir, perlite, peat and compost. It's just aggravating to not do it on command. I think stepping up to a bubbleponics based set up would be better. I normally put 2 cuttings in each cup but last couple of times all took so this time I risked it. All I need is one for seed and one for cup challenge in that order. Fingers crossed
 
I'm doing the same thing! I mostly grow out of boredom, since it's easy, once you've gotten to where you can predictably end a grow in a harvest, to have far more pot that I can ever smoke. I actually stopped for a year since my first outdoor grow ended up with the worst tedium of trimming for WEEKS, and several pounds of really sticky buds.

But now I'm bored again, so I'm growing more, and giving away a lot more, etc. etc. But yes, I'm doing a bunch of clones, just to do the clone along AND the solo grow, with a couple of auto seeds thrown in because why the hell not?

Anyway, I appreciate all your sharing, I'm learning a shitload o' new things to try with all these pot-tribbles.
 
I’m a cloner by nature because A. Why wouldn’t I want a free cutting and B. It just makes for a more harmonious canopy when you run the same cut. I use an aeroponic cloner because my preferred medium is DWC, but the techniques are good practice regardless of how you choose to root the clones. Like I said before, it all starts with everything being sterile. I run a 5% solution of bleach through my aeroponic system followed by 2 rounds of straight water before every cloning attempt. I select a fresh cup for my cuttings and make sure I rinse the shot glass I use for the clonex gel. I wipe my fiskers with vodka before I take each cutting. My aeroponic cloner is filled with pH 5.8 water for the run. I spray the clones with water from the reservoir, freshly gathered every time. The stems and leaves know nothing but the same water and the leaves are only sprayed when it is absolutely necessary, water intake from the leaves will slow the rooting process. We want to force the cutting to grow roots in order to take in water.
 
Just be sure to rinse the system throughly when using bleach, it’s great at killing everything but at the same time it’s great at killing everything!!
 
Thanks for writing that up, Obi-Wan, very detailed. I'm a little sloppier, I'm going to clean it up a little bit and wipe my scissors and even my scalpel blade down a little more frequently, and some of the other incidental points of possible infection that I've been ignoring.

Bleach is definitely a blessing! It disperses with a few days of aeration, kills absolutely every pathogen, requires very low concentrations. As a former army medic, I have a deep appreciation for Dakin's solution (bleach diluted 1:20 with some baking soda equates to a spray you can buy called "veterycin" which costs about $20/pint). Excellent wound disinfecant.
 
What's in a Fisker martini, funny you should ask?

Ps
Thanks for the info on bleach. A huge difference in price points

For whatever reason, i stayed away from bleach for my hydro gear

Do you scrub airstones in the same solution?
 
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Bleach is great, but you must scrub the surface with water after it dries. Otherwise it leaves a thin film of salt that can accumulate over time.
 
I run all my hydro equipment through the same regiment after every grow. I don’t scrub the air stones, just run them through the same 5% solution. Again, 2 regiments of straight water afterwards to cleanse the system. I replace my air stones and tubing every year as well as my top feed tubing every year. For that matter, I completely breakdown my entire hydro system once every year and replace all of the tubing. The only components I don’t replace are the buckets, lids, pump, and manifold.
 
The best thing about bleach is that it breaks down to sodium, chlorine, oxygen and hydrogen within a few days of adding it to the water. It breaks down a lot faster if you aerate the solution, like within a few hours.

There is NO residue.

Unless you consider chloride an unnatural residue.

But that would be preposterous.

Unless you knew absolutely nothing about chemistry.
 
Toker1, as opposed to the nutrients we use in dwc. At a certain point it’s hard to tell what is nutrient salt and what is bleach salt. It’s all sodium something....I work in food service and if you want to kill microbes, bleach is your go to. Again as I’ve said 3 times now in this post, rinse it thoroughly because bleach literally kills everything.
 
Obi-Wan you mean you let your DWC buckets go dry? Maybe I misunderstood your last post.
I work in food manufacturing and we use alcohol. Kills everything then evaporates off the dry surface.
I am not knocking bleach, just an added step to rinse clean.
 
The buckets never go dry but with aeration there is always a residue of salt, not chlorine. Alcohol doesn’t kill everything, it kills most but not all. The combination of chlorine and salt kills everything. The basis of my post was for cloning purposes, a little salt won’t make a difference, a little chlorine kills the whole batch. To be honest, clones that survive a higher sodium environment stand to do better in most growing environments anyways, given most growers use salt based nutrients. Darwinism at it’s finest.
 
Yeah... SQF requires alcohol for sterilization, not bleach. These standards were not developed by me, but they are good manufacturing practices that are required by law in my industry. You lost me with that last one bro. I get the best cloning success ratios when I use plain tap water with no salt or additives. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
 
You lost me at SQF, FDA food code requires low temperature sanitizers to be either Quat based(chlorine) or Iodine based. Not sure what kind of food manufacturing you’re doing outside of the FDA food code but them’s the rules. Maybe alcohol works for high temp but that just don’t make sense to me.
 
Safe quality food. It’s the program that all food manufacturing companies must follow. Yeah, we use bleach too... just not in the every day cleaning, that’s when we take the shit apart and deep cleanse. Point is it gets rinsed off afterwards. It’s sanitized with alcohol on a daily basis, no extra rinsing required. It’s a common practice in the industry because of reasons detailed above. Bleach residue can make people sick if not properly removed from food contact surfaces. I treat my plants that same way.
 
Hydrogen peroxide is another good option for cleaning hydro/aeroponic gear. Breaks down to water and oxygen. Doesn’t require any extra rinsing.
 
Funny, the low temp dish machines we use are required to have a Chlorine based sanitizer for the final rinse....no extra rinse required and they are the most common commercial dishwashers used across the US because otherwise you would need a high temp dishwasher which in a commercial environment would require 3 phase electrical. Again FDA food code requirements, maybe you have a local variance, but these are the rules across the country as set by the Federal Government.
 
No, we don’t have a dishwasher. We use a steam cleaner. Possibly the solution is diluted to where is doesn’t cause an issue?
Thanks for this great convo!
 
Chlorine evaporates 100%, sodium is the only residue that is left behind. There is no such thing as chlorine residue, it can’t chemically happen.
 
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