air layering/ grafting

[JamaicaJoe]

has anyone ever air layered or grafted different strains on a plant? if so ide like to see some examples

 

[Brick Top]

has anyone ever air layered or grafted different strains on a plant? if so ide like to see some examples

Air layering is a way to make clones from strains of plants that are difficult to clone. Select a branch you want to propagate from, come down 12 inches from the tip of the branch and make two parallel cuts 1½ inches apart with a sharp knife. Don’t cut through the branch, just cut deeply enough so the outside bark peels off. (What you’re going for is an exposed wound.) Next coat the exposed area with rooting hormone to speed up the rooting process. Next you wrap the wound with moist sphagnum moss (or potting soil), then cover it with plastic wrap to form an airtight pouch. (This is the hardest step – and it can be amusing just trying to keep the moss from falling off the limb while getting the plastic wrap securely around it. To make the task a bit easier place the moss or potting soil in the plastic wrap first, then wrap both around the wound at the same time.) Then put rubber bands around the ends of the plastic wrap. (So now you should have a ball of moss wrapped in plastic wrap around the wound.) You cannot allow sunlight to strike the newly forming roots so you will need to cover it with something. Black plastic cut from a trash bag will work but aluminum foil is a better option in that it will not only block light it will also reflect some light rays keeping the newly forming root-ball cooler. Then you wait (and wait). To determine if a cutting is fully rooted, periodically check it by removing the aluminum foil to see if roots have grown to the edge of the plastic. Once you know that the cutting is fully rooted, it’s time to clip and then plant your baby plant as you would with any rooted clone.

So air layering is taking a clone from a plant, it is removing part of a plant, not adding too a plant, not grafting onto a plant.

As for grafting there are several ways to do it but in the end the idea sounds keener than it is useful.

You can take a plant that is growing, or one that has been harvested like is done when you re-veg, and you could graft onto the growing plant or revegging plant any number of different strains. Everything above each graft would remain 100% genetically that strain so you could have one plant that was say … Willie Nelson, Western Winds, Bubblegum and maybe Masterkush. In the case of using a revegged plant it would also have some branching so you would also have some of it.

The problem is rates of growth and in some cases differing nutritional needs, like if a heavy feeder like Neville’s Haze was grafted onto the same plant as a Blueberry graft, and as people know Blueberry is nute sensitive, so you can get into problems in that sort of way. Another problem is harvest time. Unless you pick strains that will all finish very close to each other once you harvest the earliest finisher you just hacked and slashed your plant and there will be shock and what is left and needs to mature and fill out and finish will suffer because of it.

About the most useful way to graft is to use a re-vegged plant to have a well-established root system to rely on from day one and then only graft one strain-type onto the re-vegging plant to avoid the various problems.

 

[whiteflour]

Any idea how long it takes for a graft to take hold as opposed to cloning? I'm guessing it's not too practical or people would probably be growing a lot of hops to establish clones faster.

 

[JamaicaJoe]

thanks brick top but i know what air layering is haha . but good info man WHITE FLOUR!