I grow mainly from regular seed and often take the tops off new plants once they have 5 nodes or so and toss them under 12/12 light to force flower to determine sex. Sometimes in a glass of RO water or dip them in cloning gel and plant into screened ProMix. They all end up with roots and if I want to grow them out I up the hours of light to 18/6 and let them reveg or toss them out.
I've been cloning for 20 years at least and one thing I can tell you is almost anything you do will get a plant off a cutting. I've hung cuts into a DWC at 1200ppm and it roots. Drop one by accident into a bucket of scummy dugout water and a week later there's a root happening.
I do take good care of cuttings I need to root but long ago stopped worrying about them. For great results . . .
#1) Make sure there is a cleaned node going under the dirt/rockwool/?
#2) Use low light levels but make sure they get 18+ hours per day.
#3 Keep them under a dome but spray the dome and not the cuttings to keep RH high.
#4 Take the dome off twice a day to make sure they get lots of fresh air.
#5 Don't be a helicopter grower! Leave them alone to do their own thing. They want to grow!
I've used cloning gels, powders and nothing and it all works. Cloning gel then dipped in powder for the win and it works too.
Tiny little cuts from dying plants that looked dead themselves but came back to be robust plants a few weeks later.
It's the genes in those bits that determine a plant's life and not it's condition when you decide to make it a new plant.
A clone's age is the same as it's mother so clones are always ready to flower at full strength unlike plants grown from seed. They can still be flowered early but will be less able or as vigorous than an equal sized clone.
Just try rooting any piece of plant you are going to toss in any way you want for practice if you're new to cloning. Lollypopping your girls gives lots of cuts so stick some in water and put them on the shelf and some will likely root.
The scummy water clone. A broken off tiny lower branch that fell in the bucket of dugout water that was there to add moisture to the grow room. Probably at around 2000ppm when that sprig fell in. Grew into a great plant.
The kind of clones I get from my DIY DWC cloner in a couple weeks. 1ml each of my 3-part nutes in RO water and a dash of 29% peroxide under a fluoro light. Just bare stems. I scraped the last inch of each stem but the scraped part turned black and all the roots you see grew out of the clean stems above the scraped areas. Didn't seem to matter if there was a node or not. 4 out of 5 bare cuttings gifted by a friend rooted and two are flowering now in 4gal pots of ProMix. Critical Mass. The other two are vegging in a spare bedroom/veg room. Never grown them out but hear good things.
The main thing about cloning or growing in general is just chillax. Too much tender loving care kills a lot more plants than neglect. I should know because I neglect the hell out of my plants but haven't run out of killer bud in 40 years,
