I typically take my cuts right before I flip the room to bloom. What would you do in this situation? Also, how do you know when they’re good to come out of perlite? A situation I had play out was, they didn’t root in the perlite for a week or two so I put them back into a cup of water then they started throwing roots like crazy. Thoughts?
Taking them right before flip works. Takes me 10-14 days to get roots given reasonable conditions (temp and humidity), but I just leave them in the cups for another couple of weeks typically so they can better develop their roots.
I find brand new roots are
really fragile and don't transplant very well, so getting a bit of age and size on them helps.
One thing the perlite is great for is checking on the roots without ripping them out of a growing medium. I tip the container on its side and slowly dump it out using a knife or fork or something at the edges to get the pile moving and try to support the stems as best I can. I sometimes do 5-10 in a 4" pot, but I take small clones. There's
always one or two that are clearly superior to the others so those are the ones that get planted. It's Darwinism, baby!
You could also float them out by submerging the container in a slightly larger one filled with water. But, if you do that and they're not developed enough you have to put them back and now you're doing so in perlite that is suddenly much wetter than it was and I like to try to maintain a bit of stasis so there aren't too many changing variables.
The perlite a bit messy to work with since it seems to stick to everything, but it's easy to strip it from your now clones by dunking it in water.
I don't like the glass of water idea because I want roots accustomed to growing in aerated medium and I've found water roots are different from soil roots. That said, plenty of growers have no issue planting 'glass o water' clones right into soil.
But I don't like the theory, so I think the perlite is better. At least for me.
