Care and Feeding
Once you have successfully taken cuttings of your cannabis plant, now the challenge is to keep them alive long enough to root. The cuttings are obviously very vulnerable at this point and must be handled with care. If you follow the steps below you should have few problems.
1. Once you have your cup (s) in the growth medium mist them with spray bottle filled with water and put them in the bin. Mist the inside of the clear humidity dome and place dome on the hill.
2. Remove the dome and mist cuttings 2 or 3 times a day. This prevents the cuttings from drying out and also change the air under the dome. This step is fundamental, courts have no way to replenish lost moisture because they have no roots. Fog on the inside of the dome and replace on the board. Humidity under the dome should be about 90% until the roots appear in cuttings. Cuttings should be between 72 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot or cold inhibits root growth. If you live in a cold climate, you may need a heated propagation mat.
3. The cuttings of cannabis are going to need light, you need bright light, but not too intense. Dappled sunlight if you are leaving your cuttings outside. Indoors you can use a double tube fluorescent fixture with both a cool white bulb and a warm white bulb in the fixture (or two “grow” tubes). This will give a good, balanced light spectrum. Fluorescent light doesn’t penetrate so you must keep the lights very close to the cannabis plants (1-2 inches above the cannabis plants).
If you are using a Metal Halide or High Pressure Sodium fixture you must keep the cuttings much further away (2 – 3 feet away for 175 – 400 watt bulbs and 4 – 6 feet for a 1000 watt bulb).The lights should be turned on for 18 to 24 hours a day.
4. To water the cuttings you can use either plain distilled water (or other Good Quality Water), or you can add a very mild fertilizer such as Olivia’s Cloning Solution or Wilder’s Clone Root Concentrate, you can also use a 1/4 strength general purpose hydroponic fertilizer solution. Don’t forget to adjust the pH of the water / nutrient solution (5.5 for rockwool, 6.5 for most everything else).
5. Water the cuttings every 2 days unless you live in a very dry climate then you should water every day. Never let the growing medium dry out. Do not let it set in water either, or the stem will rot.Small Hydroponic systems are available to automate the watering cycles of the cuttings, greatly reducing the amount of manual labor.
6. After about a week you can test to see if your cannabis plants have started to root. Remove the humidity dome and leave it off for an hour or two. If the cannabis plants have not wilted at all then they probably have enough root development to support themselves. If no wilt is noticed leave the dome off, if they are wilted, spray the cuttings and dome and replace the dome on the tray. Once you have determined that the cannabis plants can support themselves, stop misting the cuttings and leave the humidity dome off.
7. If the lower leaves start to turn yellow and die, don’t worry, it is perfectly normal. It is the cannabis plant feeding off of itself to sustain life, moving valuable nutrient and water from the older growth. Do not remove any dead growth until the cannabis plant is well rooted. If you remove the dying growth the cannabis plant can starve and die completely.
8. When the cuttings are completely rooted you can move them into your hydroponic system or the soil.
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