A week in on the new clones and all are looking quite happy still. The domes came off a day or so ago and everyone looks like they made it through fine so, so far, the top dressing is showing no ill effects.
*****
A couple of months ago I popped two seeds of The Black, looking for a keeper female. One was the first to come up and the other lagged badly for several days, but then it took off and is probably the healthiest looking plant I've grown yet. Makes me think it's a male.
Meanwhile, the other, the first to pop, has struggled and lately has the look of plants that have shown thrips damage. I scoped the leaves pretty thoroughly and couldn't find any although there were some little dots that were too small to identify so those could be the newly hatched version of what I'm used to seeing.
This is the only plant showing signs of pest problems and is also the only established plant that is not in my new GroMix with the added meals, so today I up-potted it from a 9oz cup to a 32oz/1L container in my new mix. Hopefully, after a good dousing with my IPM spray mix, and the new soil with the meals, this plant will turn things around. I probably do have to wait a week or so for the roots to grow out and start taking up the neem and karanja meals, but the new mix seems to be working great on all the others.
The thrips could also totally be a seasonal issue and this lagging plant was the first to be susceptible to the invaders, so we'll have to wait a few more weeks to see if the others start having damage or if the newly up-potted plant confirms the effectiveness of adding the meals either to the mix or as a top dressing.
I am also going to integrate the meals into my propagation routine. I'm going to retire my popsicle cloner and replace it with the larger 9oz cups I'm using this round, with the various dome vent options. The upgrade next round is I'm going to put my normal grow mix in the bottom third or so of the cup and then my normal cut mix in the top two thirds. Then, once the cut roots and they find the normal grow mix at the bottom, they'll have access to the stuff that has the others growing great and has the IPM bug meals built in for protection from the start.
Using the larger cups to root has multiple advantages. First is not needing to disturb the newly rooted cuts by having to up-pot the clones right away, and so should help ease the transition to growth mode. It will cut in half the number I can take at a time, but I don't need very many to begin with and usually only keep the best one or two anyway. It will also provide the opportunity to dome or re-dome individual cuttings rather than the all-or-nothing group approach I had with the popsicle version of things. So this will give me fewer rooted cuts to pick from but other than that there shouldn't be any other negatives and the new positive aspects should make a big difference.
At least that's the plan. Let's see how we do on execution.
Day 15 and the cuts still look great, just like the day I took them. Still no roots though, although this should be the week I see some.
Today I'm going to conduct a new experiment to try to speed up the rooting process. Instead of the mixed mix in the cup strategy I mentioned in the above attached post, I'm going to try three different things. And I know that's not following appropriate scientific methods. I should be trying one different variable at a time. I know that, so don't @ me.
p)
The three changes will be
temperature, cup mix, and aloe. I'm going to take 4 cuts of the ACDC CBD plant today, and 2 cuts tomorrow from each of the two The Black seedlings that are just starting to throw alternating nodes which means they are sexually mature and I'll be able to sex them in the flower box once they root.
-
Temperature. I've seemed to have had faster results with temperatures around 80*F. Currently my cab sits in the high 60's-low 70's. I have the cups on a heat mat but the taller cups mean the temperatures are not as warm in the rooting zone as they are at the base. So, for this round I made up a whole new batch of cups that are only 4oz and about half as tall as the 9oz cups. This should keep the overall mix closer to the temps I want.
-
Cup mix. My last round was 2:1 ALM (aged leaf mold)/sand and it works pretty good. Wicks water well, drains well, and holds moisture well. All attributes I want in a rooting mix. The challenge is the sand makes it heavy and difficult to tell when it dries out and needs some water. So for this round, I'm going to do half the cuts in this sand mix, and the other half in a 2:1 ALM
erlite mix which should have all the positive attributes of the sand mix but be easier to judge moisture levels by lifting the cup to check the weight.
-
Aloe. I've used it in the past and haven't for the last few rounds, and they have taken a week or so longer than usual to root. Is it the lack of aloe? Don't know, so I'm going to test it this round. Like the cup mix, half the cuts get dunked in fresh aloe before sticking, half go au natural.
All cuts will go through the graduated vented dome process that seems to work very well. By taking the cuts on two successive days I only have to have one set of each of the different domes. Each set consists of 5 covers. The first is no holes, the second has one level of holes, the next two levels and so on. I have 5 different levels of domes which makes the venting and hardening off process as simple as replacing one dome with the next in the series, but really, how many of these things do I want to keep track of? Since each cup gets the next dome one day later, I can have one set that does double duty if I space the taking of half of the cuts on successive days.
All of the cuts will first get a soak in my KNF cutting solution which has aloe, kelp and willow extracts added to water. And, since I don't know yet as to whether or not the top dressing of my worm castings and ALM helps the process in any way, I'm going to leave it off this round to not complicate things any more than they are.
So, that's the plan, Stan. Once I see which of the variables I prefer, I'll use those as a base for future experiments because, you know, there's always something new to learn.
)