If you pick the little green parts, pistils, and calyxes off around the bared nodes your success will go up.
Also if you leave a bit of the leaf stems sticking from the stalks, about 1/8", again your success rate will go up.
If you use RO water, again your success rate will go up.
By stripping the sex parts off you are telling the plant that this is no longer an above ground reproduction site.
By leaving about 1/8" of the leaf stem you are leaving a much smaller wound that the plant must heal without external nutes coming in (no roots yet to eat with) so that saved healing effort can be redirected to root production.
By using RO water ph is irrellevant as the plants won't try to eat it, and without being fed they will pop roots quicker.
Those roots need to come from somewhere so the nutes get pulled from the lowest leaves 1st on the cutting. Bigger cuttings contain more transferrable nutes.
If you clip the leaves back to half size the plant can't photosynthesize as fast so it won't waste nutes building sugars, it will use them to root.
Cloning in soil you need to spray the leaves to dilute the solid nutes in the leaves and make them flow to the root sites.
The plant can't drink as it has no roots so putting it all in a crate and putting the crate in a clear garbage bag that gets sealed will keep the humidity up to negate the need to drink. Open it and exchange the air a couple times a day as you respray them.
Keep them fairly far from the light, a shady corner perhaps, as less light means less photosynthesis so again less nutes get used to make sugars so more nutes are available to the rooting process.
Then there is the moisture of your medium, which should be a low or no nute medium, like coco coir or hp mix. Put your clone soil in a tub, add lots of water until its too wet. Then take a handful and squeeze it until you can't get another drop of water out. Now grab a 2nd handful and squeeze it out but only until just a couple last drops are still in it, not quite totally wrung out like the 1st one. Thats the moisture you want. Fluff it back up and use it.
Too wet and the plants will drink until they starve without creating roots.
Now wait 8-14 days, depending on the strain, and just vent and spray the leaves.
I have found that using rooting hormone or not doesn't really matter.
Take pictures so you can recognize good cuts that rooted from those that didn't so next time you will take better cuts to up your odds.
All that being said, it you use soil on your smaller clones it works better than a bubble cloner, and if you use a bubble cloner on your big main top cuttings that are big enough to be hollow or hollowish in the stalk, you will get better results than soil.
At least thats how it works for me and I have cut a lot of clones over the years.
I take great pride in harvesting a beautiful plant loaded in buds that still has the clipped leaves from cloning still healthily growing on it.
To be able to do that you must eliminate delays so the cutting doesn't have to fully consume the leaves it started with.
By using my suggestions above you eliminate the biggest delays and nute drains.
You don't need to clip the leaves back, or use the spray and bag method on bubble cloner clones. They get enough moisture from below, but not too much to cause wet soil syndrome
I actually just did 2 different clone styles in
The Gee Spot - You Finally Found It .
One was a bubble cloner and one was experimental and still ongoing, but there are some good pics of the cuttings in there. Scroll back to about Feb1 and you will see the start of the cloning stuff.
