Clean Clones

Clones started Jan-25th - in germination domes at 78 degrees
Care taken to maintain same stem size and leaf surface for each sample, 24 cuttings total

3 samples each, 1 rapid rooter and 2 rockwool cubes
- UC Roots
- Garden Friendly Fungicide (same strain bacteria as Hydroguard)
- Azos
- Root Shield
- SM-90
- Daconil
3 samples rockwool plain water
3 samples rapid rooters untreated

Vents will be closed for first couple days.
Domes will remain over clones for the duration.
Media will be rehydrated only if necessary.

Rahz said:

Clones started Jan-25th - in germination domes at 78 degrees
Care taken to maintain same stem size and leaf surface for each sample, 24 cuttings total

3 samples each, 1 rapid rooter and 2 rockwool cubes
- UC Roots
- Garden Friendly Fungicide (same strain bacteria as Hydroguard)
- Azos
- Root Shield
- SM-90
- Daconil
3 samples rockwool plain water
3 samples rapid rooters untreated

Vents will be closed for first couple days.
Domes will remain over clones for the duration.
Media will be rehydrated only if necessary.

Click to expand...

Let me throw another product into your equation - Organocide Plant Dr
http://www.yourplantdoctor.com/plant-doctor-systemic-fungicide/

This product is solid and I have used it quite a bit on cannabis and especially on tomato's and avocado.
This brought my outdoor tomato's back from a blight death to looking brand new.
Amazing stuff

Did you look at Orca or Companion by Growth Products?

Organocide is a plant oil based product similar to SM-90, might give it a try. Does it have that fruity smell?

I almost bought some Great White. Any thoughts on Great White vs Orca? Not real fond of putting clay based powders (not sure if GW is clay based) in hydro... but I don't have any issues using it on rockwool.

Thanks for the ideas. If every product works similar and I start having trouble separating the good from the bad I'll probably give up on the tests and call it temp/humidity/cleanliness issues. But if one product produces roots faster than others I'll be encouraged to continue testing other products.

Could be an anomaly but worth mentioning, all three cuttings in the UC Roots sample are wilted. They'll probably perk up but it's the only sample with all cuttings wilted. Several other samples have 1 wilted cutting.

Rahz said:

Organocide is a plant oil based product similar to SM-90, might give it a try. Does it have that fruity smell?

I almost bought some Great White. Any thoughts on Great White vs Orca? Not real fond of putting clay based powders (not sure if GW is clay based) in hydro... but I don't have any issues using it on rockwool.

Thanks for the ideas. If every product works similar and I start having trouble separating the good from the bad I'll probably give up on the tests and call it temp/humidity/cleanliness issues. But if one product produces roots faster than others I'll be encouraged to continue testing other products.

Click to expand...

Plant Dr is "Mono- and di-potassium salts of Phosphorous Acid", not sure if that is derived from plant oil's?
No odor to it at all from what I can tell - will stick my nose in there next time I open the bottle.

I have not used Orca yet but it is supposed to be clear and clean. Something I am considering giving a try in my hydro systems.

The Companion works well in hydro. It looks a bit nasty out of the bottle (molasses base) but at 1ml per gallon seems to clear up after circulating over night.

OneHitDone said:

Plant Dr is "Mono- and di-potassium salts of Phosphorous Acid", not sure if that is derived from plant oil's?
No odor to it at all from what I can tell - will stick my nose in there next time I open the bottle.

I have not used Orca yet but it is supposed to be clear and clean. Something I am considering giving a try in my hydro systems.

The Companion works well in hydro. It looks a bit nasty out of the bottle (molasses base) but at 1ml per gallon seems to clear up after circulating over night.

Click to expand...

Ahh, my mistake. The Organocide I looked up is "3 in 1 garden spray" and contains sesame oil.

Updates. It looks like the root rot in the growing station has been eradicated. The type of root rot I had would infect below the water line. I now have roots well into the water, still nice and white. It's possible it could return but I suspect there won't be any rot problems for the duration of the grow so I'll go ahead and post steps and update if anything changes.

Cleaning an infected system.

1- scrub/soak all equipment with a chemical agent such as bleach. Titanium lined chillers should be fine with high levels of bleach. Soaking for several days in 2-3% hypochlorite (20,000 - 30,000 ppm) is useful. Water pumps may have issues with strong bleach. While feet and rubber seals can be removed there may be internal parts that degrade. Suggest removing rubber parts and soaking in 1000-2000 ppm solution. Clean rubber with alcohol.

2- Prepare Recharge (brand of dry Microbe tea). Suggest initial treatment be brewed with warm water for 4-12 hours. This will germinate and invigorate the spores as well as deplete carbohydrate content making it less available to remaining pathogens. I used 1 teaspoon in a gallon, brewed then added to 5 gallons of water in the rez. My system uses more water but because the container was easy to sanitize I didn't see the need to fill the system completely. Enough water should be used to facilitate recirculating through pump/water chiller. Water should be kept at 72-75 degrees.

3- Insure equipment has been washed of chemical residue and reassemble. Add water and Recharge tea. Turn on pump. Turn on chiller if necessary. On day 3 add another teaspoon of Recharge directly to reservoir. On day 5 the water should be replaced and a new cycle started. This can be extended until new plants are ready. Timing the treatment 5 days prior to the introduction of new plants is ideal.

4- New plants (netcup/hydrotron/grow cube) should be inoculated with Recharge tea prior to being placed in the system. Initial nutrient solution should be PH balanced to 5.8 and around 4-500 ppm with Phosphorus below 70 ppm. Veg plants don't need a lot of P so it wouldn't be an issue to run as low as 20 ppm P.

5- Maintain this microbe friendly nutrient solution for 1-2 weeks. Beyond this it should be okay to resume a typical nutrient schedule with or without the addition of microbes.

Clone update: Day 8 no roots showing yet. The prior set of plants was transferred to a soil-less media and all of them have survived and are growing. Current set is still under domes. I have 3 heat mats connected to a single temp controller. I have been monitoring temps in all three domes. Variances of around 2 degrees Fahrenheit (76.5-78.5) have been observed. This seems acceptable to me. Hopefully we'll see some roots in the next couple days.

14 days, cuttings are healthy and no roots yet. I'm not sure what to do at this point to speed up the rooting process. I know that I can take unrooted cuttings and place them either in net pots or in soilless media and they will root so it's not essential that I get to a point where I have pretty roots poking out of cubes in 7-10 days, but it would be nice.

The main thing is avoiding root rot. I think I can accomplish that with any of the products I've been using including plain water. One thing I've learned about Pythium is that it doesn't have an airborne phase. It can get kicked up in dust but that possibility can be minimized by keeping the floors clean. Using sanitized equipment and grow media, washing hands prior to handling anything, all part of the practice to avoid unwanted microbes. Keeping the germination area well above the floor also makes sense.

Rahz said:

14 days, cuttings are healthy and no roots yet. I'm not sure what to do at this point to speed up the rooting process. I know that I can take unrooted cuttings and place them either in net pots or in soilless media and they will root so it's not essential that I get to a point where I have pretty roots poking out of cubes in 7-10 days, but it would be nice.

The main thing is avoiding root rot. I think I can accomplish that with any of the products I've been using including plain water. One thing I've learned about Pythium is that it doesn't have an airborne phase. It can get kicked up in dust but that possibility can be minimized by keeping the floors clean. Using sanitized equipment and grow media, washing hands prior to handling anything, all part of the practice to avoid unwanted microbes. Keeping the germination area well above the floor also makes sense.

Click to expand...

Can't seem to find in the thread - are you using any form of rooting hormone?

OneHitDone said:

Can't seem to find in the thread - are you using any form of rooting hormone?

Click to expand...

I'm using a cloning gel called Rootech.

One thing I've noticed, the cuttings in the rapid rooters look much better than the rockwool. I let things get a little dry and I'm sure that's the issue. So rockwool dries out much faster than rapid rooters. Whether this is good or bad depends. Having to hydrate the rockwool more often means more fresh air getting to the stem.

If they are still healthy in a few weeks in their final plant site, that will be the real result.
I gave up on rdwc because every fucking time after a few weeks bang rot Tried every product know to man, and the only thing it done was empty my bank account. A few years back I was growing in bubblers with no problems, was great. Water company are installing new pipes all over the country here atm so may well have something to do with it. So I'm back in coco for now. But will eventually go back to flood and drain table, rather liked it and simple to run. Have loads a kit to play with now lol.

fingers crossed, but i currently have my root rot beat.

took nothing less than a dozen bottles H202, pool shock chlorine, putting clean clones in dirt for a while and new tubs.

i got clean, long white roots again.

f me !!!!

don't want that shit again.

Roots! Day 23 and there are roots on a handful of the cuttings.

Without exception the cuttings put in rapid rooters are the ones with roots showing. I did let things get a bit dry at one point but not to the point they were wilting so I don't know if the rapid rooters are better than rockwool or just more resilient to neglect. Either way, I'm switching over to rapid rooters only.

Most developed roots are in the Azos tray. They are 1/2 to 3/4 inches while the other roots are just poking through.

Very happy to finally see some action.

Something else I want to do but haven't yet is use Recharge in some of these rooters. The directions suggest applying it after the cuttings have rooted but I think it might be okay to use earlier, like prior to putting the cuttings in them. Great White is a similar product which is listed for cuttings. The difference is, Recharge has kelp and molasses. It's possible the microbes will become to vigorous and damage the stems... we'll find out. It's also possible airborne pathogens could land on the rooter and use the molasses to gain a foothold. I'd also like to get some Great White and give it a shot.

The Hydroguard seems like a good product, but I'm going to try and start working with powders as much as possible. Powdered microbes are going to have a much better shelf life, be less prone to temperature variables etc. Live liquid cultures loose vigor 6 months at refrigeration temperatures. Spore based liquid cultures should last longer, but should probably still be refrigerated. I read about a test someone did and discovered various liquid based biologicals were either deficient or devoid of microbes. The main issue may be storage time prior to purchase.

I'll start a new test soon and provide data as it's available. Something else I'm going to play around with is to dilute the cloning gel into a bit of water, enough for it to have a liquid consistency, and use a syringe to apply it into the rooters.

Hey @Rahz , hope you got the cloning all sorted out...

Rapid Rooters may or may not be great - WAY too expensive per plug so I've never mad an effort to implement them.

I like Oasis but keep coming back to the 1.5" Rockwook cubes. They are just easier to source, root well, and are affordable.
Soak plugs in light nutrient ph'd solution, dip in Clonex (or your choice of hormone), and stick.
Been like 99.9% success for me for the past several years.
Just mist daily with straight water till roots are popping.
I use 2 Wally's tote's of the same size with one upside down for a dome slid over slightly for air flow.
Unless your running a commercial op you probably won't need full 10x20 trays of clones every batch.
Note my Grodan Grow Smart Tray or whatever it's called cut down to fit my smaller totes

I don't use many of the rooters so cost isn't a big deal. Yea, the system is still clean and no more root rot issues. I used some Recharge over the netcup and ended up kelping up the roots. Though it might be more root rot but it's all friendly microbes and organic matter. Just the same, switched back to weekly Hydroguard treatments which is clear and no buildup.

I disregarded the instructions and used Recharge with fresh cuttings (Instructions suggest waiting til roots form to use it). They did fine, all rooted and healthy. Took about the same amount of time as the Azos. I guess I'm just going to adjust and expect rooting this way to take 3-4 weeks. The upside is it seems like the chance of getting Root Rot again is near zero.

Next experiment will be Recharge -vs- Azos. I'm also going to try scrapeing the stems to see if it speeds things up a bit.

Great thread Rahz, I’m always looking for a new beni as I can’t get hydroguard here anymore .

At the suggested rates, Asos is pretty expensive. There are ways to expand a population prior to inoculation or post inoculation but how well it would work in an open environment I'm not sure so I'm not going to make any suggestions.

Recharge seems to do fine having molasses and kelp in the formula, perhaps due to the trichoderma. At any rate, Recharge is very cheap comparatively. Just used for cloning purposes the smallest bag will be out of date before it's used up unless the cloning op is large. Be aware Recharge is a fairly strong base. It could be used in place of PHup in a soil/soilless grow, and in hydro if you felt froggy. Point is, don't just mix it in water and use on clones. PH down to around 5.8 prior to inoculation of media.

Rahz said:

At the suggested rates, Asos is pretty expensive. There are ways to expand a population prior to inoculation or post inoculation but how well it would work in an open environment I'm not sure so I'm not going to make any suggestions.

Recharge seems to do fine having molasses and kelp in the formula, perhaps due to the trichoderma. At any rate, Recharge is very cheap comparatively. Just used for cloning purposes the smallest bag will be out of date before it's used up unless the cloning op is large. Be aware Recharge is a fairly strong base. It could be used in place of PHup in a soil/soilless grow, and in hydro if you felt froggy. Point is, don't just mix it in water and use on clones. PH down to around 5.8 prior to inoculation of media.

Click to expand...

I thought I read that it can foam up quite a lot .... true?
Edit: recharge I meant

Budley Doright said:

I thought I read that it can foam up quite a lot .... true?
Edit: recharge I meant

Click to expand...

It does foam a bit which is what causes the kelp buildup around and above the waterline. But really once a beneficial culture has been established in a reservoir it should provide protection for the duration.

As far as that goes, inoculating the grow cube prior to placing in the net cup will probably provide all the protection necessary provided the containers are sanitized between grows... I've just been overly cautious since the root rot problems. At some point I'll attempt to quit using Hydroguard weekly and just rely on the Recharge in the cloning stage, keep the P low during veg and see how that goes.