Flush Mother Reservior?

After I did my regularly sched nute change today I got to thinking: Since I've been having trouble cloning lately, maybe all these nutrients are building up and making the mommies angry. SO I'm wondering if I should do an occasional flush with straight PHed water in the res for my mother plants? And if I should then for how long? 1 to 3 days seems right to me. Thanks in advance people!

Yes flushing your plant will help improve your cloning rates. Since it's hydro i'de flush 3 days prior to cloning with plain water PH 6.5.

6.5 is a little high for hydro. Keep things under 5.8; 6.0 is the highest my plants seem to tolerate without a noticeable difference in growth. I have read in many places that too high of a concentration of Nitrogen in the plant being cloned can slow down the rooting of said clones. I cannot verify this information personally as I haven't done a side-by-side comparison, so do with this info what you will.

That being said, we don't really have enough information about your particular setup which would allow us to draw an accurate conclusion. You are quite obviously growing in hydro, so let's start there. What kind of system are you using, i.e. DWC, Ebb n Flow, Multiflow, NFT? Secondly, what kind of nutes and more importantly, at what concentration are you running them at? Are your mother plants exhibiting signs of nute lock? What sort of cloning method are you using, rockwool, peat plugs, aeroponics? Are you using some sort of rooting compound?

Your problem may not be your mothers at all. Since you said "lately" in your post, that leads me to assume that in the past you have had success in cloning. Have you changed anything in your grow/mother/clone environment which could account for the difference?

Sorry for asking so many questions, but they all need to be answered so that we can help you figure this out.

Right on Johnny, I was going to type all of that initially but I thought I'd spare you. It's a homemade aero system with 2 moms about 3+ mos old. only 18+ inch tall because I keep em trimmed well. Using GH 3 part + H2o2 and up until this res change it's been a light veg formula. Today I switched over to a light flower formula (I just learned this will promote root growth in cuttings) PH always at 5.8 +/- .3 max. I change res about every 2 wks.I'm thinking after every 3 or so res changes I should run PHed water for about 3 days. I had to start over from seed with this strain (wonder woman) she has cloned successfully in the past in my EZ Clone 60 but with VERY limited results. I'm trying to eliminate reasons why this might be and I'm thinking it's just the strain. I have some PPP that needs to veg out before I can take cuttings from her, as well al 2 other strains. I'm also running side by side test using Clonex and RooTone in Jiffy plugs to see if I have better success there. I'm only about 3 days into this so results are still due on that project. (If that's the case I'll be needing to get rid of a nice, barely used EZ Clone 60, ha ah)


Well there you have it. That's all I got I think.
Thanks

anyone else with some advice?

Seems to me you have everything pretty well under control. All variables eliminated, it sounds like the culprit is a finicky strain. Some strains just don't like being cloned. That bit about switching to bloom nutes is probably as a result of the reduced nitrogen in the concentration. If you must flush, I recommend FloraKleen. You won't need to run it for 3 days, especially if you've got your aero-pumps turning on several times a day. 24 hours really should do it.

Good luck!