Please Help With Aeroponic Cloner

[DLL333]

I normally grow from seed, and have only been doing cloning a few months, and I'm terrible at it. I have an aeroponic EZ cloner and my success rate is dismal. Sometimes I'll get a couple to root but it is not normal.

I cut the clones at about 45 degrees and peel off about a half inch of the outer layer of stem and dip it in rooting compound. I pH the res water to 5.8, and add in a little Great White, res clear, Heavy 16 roots, and hormex (B1 and hormone.)

I don't cycle the water pump, its pretty much always on. They sit under LEDs for about 16 hours. (Should the lights always be on?) The res water is pretty foamy. I get the little white spots all over the stems but they rarely seem to go further than that.

The picture is the clones after about 8 or 9 days I think. Is there too much going on in the res water?

 

[SmokingWings]

I have taken cuttings off of my Rosemary herb plants and rooted those. Cuttings off of many different types of landscape shrubs and rooted those. I have taken cuttings from house plants and gotten those to root. I have plans on taking cuttings off of some shrubs next year and feel confident that I will be able to have small shrubs to plant in the yard within a couple of months.

But, this dang Marijuana stuff is a lot harder to get to root so don't feel bad. My thoughts are that the temperatures and light levels are important and most of the time I cannot keep them in the best range. But, if I get them to root I can get a decent clone out of them. Just getting to that point is the hard thing.

One thing that helps is to not scrape the entire surface of the stem off like you did. I just do one scrape and I scrape just the barest of the surface off. The vascular part of the cutting is located right under the surface and if you scrape to much off then there is a good chance the cutting cannot take up enough water and it ends up relying on the stored nutrients in the leaves.

I have tried a cloning machine similar to yours, tried every additive anyone could recommend. I would pH the water to whatever magic number people recommended. I am back to sticking the cutting into soil. Or, on occasion, just putting the cuttings into a jar filled with whatever water I have been using.

Good luck.