Clones never rooted??

Hey all,

I have grown a few crops, but always from seed, never tried cloning. I just tried to take two clones, one each from my two plants, and they haven't rooted. I think the cuttings are now dying. This was very discouraging, and I'd like to figure out what I did wrong.

I had two female plants that had been in flowering for about 2 1/2, maybe 3 weeks. I found a couple of shoots from the bottoms of the plants that weren't showing any noticeable hairs. I cut them so they had a few nodes, quickly trimmed the top leaves and stripped the leaves off of the bottom two nodes, cut the stem again at approx. 45 deg. angle below a node two nodes down from the veg. top of the cutting, dipped this node in rooting hormone, and placed the cutting into a rockwool cube that I had soaked in lemon-juiced water for like 48 hours. I then put these two cubes on a plate and put a large ziplock bag with holes poked in it over the top of the cuttings. I placed this under a warm white low watt cfl, on 24 hours a day, and periodically removed the bag for air and misted inside the bag for moisture.

the cuttings stayed fresh and green for a while, maybe 5 days, then started wilting. I assumed they were rooting. I gently peeled back the rockwool a few days later, and saw no root development. Now, about a week later, ones leaves have withered, browned and fallen off. It almost looks like it grew some tiny roots from the higher nodes I stripped off, but I finally tugged the plant and it pulled out of the cube, and had no roots at all on the bottom node. Im about ready to give up on these.

So based on that description, WHAT DID I DO WRONG?? It's very discouraging, because I had made all these plans for an outdoor garden based on clones, and if I can't clone successfully, I don't know what I'm gonna do, other than spend hundreds on fem seeds. Thanks for any pointers or demystification.

1. Cloning in flower is a biotch!

2. "lemon-juiced water" is not for cloning, but it sounds like a good marinade for seafood.

Thanks for the fast reply! Yeah, I thought maybe my problem was that I tried my first taking my first clones from a flowering plant. I guess that's tougher. As for the lemon juice, I used that to PH the water. I read that you should soak the rockwool in low ph water, like 5.5. I didn't figure it out very exactly, but I mixed maybe a teaspoon of lemon juice in with like a pint of water to lower the ph and soak the rockwool. I assume that wasn't the problem, as the cuttings didn't wilt or die right away when I placed them in their medium. So the medium must have been fine, right? What do you use to Ph the water for cloning?
It really sucks that it's so hard to clone flowering plants, because that means you waste so much time, space, and resources on taking cuttings from plants of indeterminate gender. I guess I'll try again next time right before I throw my plants in flower and hope I get mostly females.

1. cloning when they are flowering is near impossible. they all have flowering hormones, and then you try to switch them back to rooting.
2. dont put the bags over the plants, not enough circulation and sounds like too much water will make the stems rot. get a humidity dome, and you want the soil/medium semi-wet, not soaking. clones need air too or else they will rot.
3. lemon juice will change the pH, i would just use water.
4. misting the leaves will suffocate the clones and make some leaves rot. just keep the medium semi-wet, and make sure there is air around the stem

My boss used to grow years ago, and he told me that once you take a plant through a period of a vegetative state, you can switch them from your 18/6 vegetative light cycle and throw them into a 12/12 or 10/14 light cycle to push them into flowering to determine their sex and then once you've determined the sex, you can kick them back down into a 18/6 light cycle to bring them back to vegetating. I don't know at what age you can do this minimally, I just know he told me for how big mine were that I could do that versus wasting my time growing them up and flowering only to find out they're males and I'm trying to go for a sea of green.

you can switch them back, but it puts your plants under a lot of stress. It will take a week or 2 to show signs of budding, and then a week or 2 to get all the flowering hormones out and replace them with growing hormones. Also, always clone from the stems at the bottom of the plant, because they naturally have more rooting hormones in them. It is near impossible to clone from the top branches.

Thanks for all the good tips guys, I think now I may have done everything more or less right method-wise (though with room for improvement to be sure) but my error was in trying for the first time with plants a couple weeks into flowering. I did take the cuttings from tender lower branches, but even though they weren't showing more than maybe one pair of pistils each, they actually seemed to form more pistils after I cut them when they were just chillin in the rockwool. so they must have been too far along. I'll just try again. I might try putting a black wool sock over one branch of each plant each night to induce flowering in that one site, I hear this can work pretty well for determining sex without stressing the whole hormonal pattern of the plant. Also, do you guys think it's possible to veg out plants and sex them in quarter gallon pots before transplanting to five gals to finish? I know they'll be pretty cramped but if I water em a lot it seems they could do just fine, right? Thanks again.