Topped, Please clarify for a newbie

[Chronic Chrissy]

I FIMmed today(just a little proud of myself) hope I did it right, I'm trying to take a few clones too, with KP's help of course.

[kindprincess]

Cloning is a simple method of replicating your plants. In most cases a clone is taken from a mother plant and grown into a new plant that contains the exact same genetic code as its mother plant.
In a selection of 30 seeds you may find a nice mother plant that you wish to keep. You can sustain and keep using her genetic profile indefinitely through cloning.

Any cannabis plant can be cloned once it's been grown to a certain height and has developed a number of node regions.* The best place to take a cutting for cloning is above a node that has at least two nodes above it. The smallest cuttings on average are three inches in length. Once the cutting has been taken it is placed in the growing medium and should form new roots over the next one to three weeks.

Cloning straight to soil can have a low success rate and is very dependent on the type pf soil that you are using. Use the wrong soil and the clone will fail quickly. The best soil for cloning is a standard loam type with an even N PK ratio. Avoid using seedling or cutting soils as most of these have added hormones and nutrients that are not suitable for cannabis or cannabis cuttings.
Cloning in water also has a low success rate because the roots need air to breath once they have developed. If they remain submerged, the cuttings will eventually die. In water cloning, the cutting needs to be transferred to another medium, such as soil, rockwool or a hydroponics system. This means that the clone will have to move through a number of mediums before finally being transplanted to the main growing environment. Multiple transplants can lead to stress and the overall success rate can decrease because of this.

Some advanced growers like to use an aero cloning kit that acts like a miniature aeroponics systems for the propagation of clones.These systems can be expensive, however, and tend to require a lot of practice before getting cuttings to successfully root in the system.

The best medium for cloning is rockwool cubes or Oasis foam bricks. In order to increase your success rate with cloning you may wish to purchase a rooting solution, which can be bought from most grow shops.

Make sure you that use a clean instrument, or better yet a sterile instrument, when you make your cut. Try to take a piece of stem of no more than three inches between the cut zone and the next node level. The longer this section is, the more difficulty the cutting will have in the uptake of water and nutrients it needs to grow and produce roots. Take the cutting and dip the cut area into the rooting solution before placing it into the medium. Make sure that you close any holes where the cutting may have punctured the medium to prevent air from reaching the cut zone, which can stunt root growth. Do this by simply filling in any gaps with little pieces of the medium. Clones don't need much light to root. Try to avoid using the bigger grow bulbs for cloning as this can be a waste of electricity and bulb life. A simple window with some outdoor light is all you will need for the clone to root. Many people use fluorescent lights for clones.

When the clone takes root in the rockwool you will see the roots jut out from the sides of the cube. It is best to keep the cube size small so that you can observe the roots' progress. A two-inch squared cube is ideal for rooting cuttings. Any bigger and it will take longer for the roots to grow outside of the cube. When they do the clone should be transferred to its new grow medium: soil, hydroponics or aeroponics. This is the most successful way of producing clones. The great thing about cloning is that you can create hundreds of female plants from a single mother. Clones also flower more quickly and you know what you are getting in the end because you have already seen, smoked and grown the plant that the clone was taken from.

Although you can take clones at any time during the plant's life it is best to do so during the vegetative stage of growth. Clones carry the same age as the parent plant. Some clones used by seed-bank breeders are actually more than a decade old. They have been propagated for years and years by constantly taking cuttings from clones and then taking further cuttings from these cuttings. If you take a cutting a week before the plant is mature enough to display sex then the cutting should only need a week after rooting before it is able to flower. If you take a cutting during flowering the clone should be able to flower right away after it has rooted. If you want to revert a cutting from flowering to vegetative growth simply keep the cutting under 24 hours of light and clip away any calyx or flower formations that appear. After a short time under constant light, the cutting will revert to vegetative growth; however any manipulation of the photoperiod will throw the plant back into flowering almost instantly.

Clones that are taken from a plant during vegetative growth are much easier to control than clones that are taken from a flowering plant. That is why we generally take clones during the third or forth week of vegetative growth.

Growers can use cloning hormones or rooting hormones, which come in two main formats: powders and gels. Powder hormones are generally used for cloning in soil. The powder is tapped into a small hole in the soil and the cutting is placed into this hole. A small amount of the powder is then added to surface of the soil so that, with successive watering, the powder will seep down into the soil and promote root growth. Rooting gels are much better because they act as a seal, preventing air from reaching the cut zone. In addition, gels are not water soluble, whereas powders tend to be.This means that gels have a longer lifespan than powders.

A proper rooting hormone should contain the vitamin Bl (Thiamine). As an experiment, cut some roots from a test plant and place half of the 'dead' roots into a solution of water and the other half into a solution of water and vitamin Bl.The roots in water with added thiamine will continue to grow for quite some time, while the roots in the plain water solution will die.

The time it takes to root a clone depends on the strain and the cloning method used. Some strains, like Blueberry, are notoriously hard to clone. Others are much easier. On average it takes about a week and half for a clone to develop a root mass suitable for transplantation. Do not be surprised if you find that it takes a set of clones more than three weeks to develop a root mass.The best way to tell whether or not your clones are rooting properly is to clone in batches from the same strain. If some of the clones do not develop a root mass after the others have, chances are that these clones have failed to root.Take one of the clones without any obvious root mass from the medium and pull it up to check for roots. If none have developed then the cutting has failed to root and should be discarded.
You should never let your cloning medium dry out. Keep it damp (not soaking wet) and check for fungi development regularly. Cloning environments containing damp mediums like rockwool are ideal breeding grounds for fungi.

[bud luv]

On the other hand, some plants when fully grown without topping do not reach their threshold. The strain Blueberry is a good example of this. If you grow Blueberry without topping you won't achieve maximum bud production from that plant, but if you top the Blueberry, you will. Other strains aren't so flexible and the two top colas will simply share the same volume of bud that a single cola would have produced on the same strain.

Hey KP, it seems like you have a lot of knowledge of blueberry (among other things), a strain I'm growing for the first time. At which node would you recommend to top these babies? I wasn't even planning on topping these until I stumbled on this thread, lucky me! I'm doing a SOG style hydro w/ about 20 plants under a 1000w, so I wasn't necessarily looking for lateral bushiness, but since you said topping maximizes the BB strain I need to reevaluate. Thanks for your advice.

Your Boy,
BUD LUV.

[Chronic Chrissy]

http://s119.photobucket.com/albums/o124/chronicchrissy/
Here's a link to some pics, my pics are too big to thumbnail and I don't know how to shrink them. so I'll work through them with you, but backwards because I fucked up.

001(last one) Is my dryer set up with the odor nutralizer attahed to the exhaust fan at the bottom.

002 is a better pic of the tree stand and exhaust fan underneath.

003 is an inside shot of my grow op, right in the middle is the fan and stand, when the plants were smaller I had a screen overtop to sit the plants on but now they are to heavy, so we are moving up to the stage two of the dryer

004 the dark purple is Jaz, and the bright purple is Mrs. Bin Laden

005 Bella is the read one in the middle, and one of my unnamed ones is the orange(see the color difference? Orange is suffering from a little P deficiency) Orange got Fimmed

006 The middle one is foxy and the other two are unnamed(also P deficency for those two), all 3 got FIMmed.

007 is Petti next to her big sis Jaz. I FIMmed both Pettis tops today.

008 is a shot of one of Jazs leaves after flushing and feeding today we had a few blotches on a leaf the are dark green and crispy, also the very tips(less the mm) and most leaves either yellowed or went strait to brown, but it hasn't progressed at all. I dilluted my nutes today but at the same time increased my P to make up for the deficency so that could be it.

009 is one of my last leaves to heal and regenerate after the spider mites almost all other leaves hav healed and many were not quite so bad as that but still pretty patchy, but it's been almost two weeks since.

I flushed today and fed then FIMmed al the plants that weren't going to be cloned(only one from each of the other three) but I'll FIM them after. The clones I'm taking are either really shaded or right at the bottom, so I figured it would be a good chance to experiment a little. Anyways Thanks KP I read your post in my other post and it made me feel a little more prepared.

Let me know what you think guys I'll try to get the pics up here tommorrow and fill you in again. but I'll be kicking around here for a little bit.

[Chronic Chrissy]

I totally put that last post in the wrong thread, sorry.:jointsmile: :jointsmile: :jointsmile:

[kindprincess]

hey sweetie, everythings looking good (even the "not healed" one... spider mites are a bitch. rrrrr!) ok, i'm waking up now, so i'm thinking the pix are gonna be here

budluv, you know, i've completely ignored your thread... and i don't know why... hmmm with a hydrogro, you may not have the room for topping, as you are going sog style. what is the distance between plants? in answer to your question, i top after the tenth nod, which allows 20 main branches (yes, they ALL grow nice colas )

[kindprincess]

bl, after reviewing your threads, i'd say top after the tenth node (that's three threads now, you should catch me somewhere, lol)

love, kp

[kindprincess]

ok, it may not be 50-60 pix, but i hope it helps (shaking too much for macro)

taking a top from sage for cloning...

[kindprincess]

here's topping...

[kindprincess]

finished products...