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Cuttings for propagation in hydroponics - Part 1 · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hi, welcome back to Hydroponics Daily. Today we're moving on to propagation
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  and we're going to talk about taking cuttings, which is a very common way of
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  propagating your plants.
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  It allows you to maintain the genetics of the mother plant, so it's good for that reason.
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  And it's also good because you get a young plant very quickly,
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  whereas with seeds, some seeds can take many, many weeks to get to a young plant stage.
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  So with a cutting you're making
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  a clone that's another phrase for it so clones
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  or cuttings in hydroponics people tend to
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  refer to them as clones but in horticulture in general
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  it's cuttings and you take
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  young stems off a mother plant and
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  in supporting you don't take them off older tissue and also
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  from mother plants that have
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  never flowered because once they are flowered and
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  they've become mature then then the
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  success rates of what of
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  rooting is much lower this swiss cheese plant for example
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  here this is a juvenile leaf because it's not
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  got any indentation the holes in
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  it this is a mature leaf down here the stems
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  from the mature part of the plant would
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  be far lower success rate of rooting same
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  with eucalyptus they have two different types of leaves depending on
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  whether they're mature and so if that plant has flowered then your chances.
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  Of success are much lower you also want to choose upright
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  stems because they'll have more auxin
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  traveling down them from the top of the plant where side stems lower
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  branches far less auxin which is
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  synthesized in the meristem the bud at the
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  top it travels down the cells of the
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  plant and they accumulate at the
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  bottom where they promote rooting now if you've
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  got a side stem they're not going to much auxing
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  coming out of them so always try and choose them from the top a non-flowering
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  stem because the flower will just take up her energy as well so that that flower
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  wants to develop it's already got the the cells there it's already got the the
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  the all the apparatus needs to produce a flower and then you you cut it off
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  and then it's like well i'm not going to revert now to vegetative growth and so it just dies off.
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  That's the important part when it comes to the mother plant,
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  making sure it's disease-free, making sure it's pest-free, and making sure that
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  you harvest the cuttings.
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  Early on in the day, when the cells in the cutting are going to be full of water
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  because they've soaked up the water during the night, they're going to be 100% turgid.
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  Whereas if you did them in the midday or later on in the day,
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  they've evaporated, they've transpired,
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  and then they're waiting for that pull of the water to come up.
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  So success rate would be much better if you take it first thing in the morning.
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  And what else can we say about taking cuttings when you take
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  them if you're taking a lot of cuttings make sure you store
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  the cuttings in sort of
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  damp paper or hessian or tea
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  towels things like this so that they don't evaporate water while you're taking
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  more cuttings because if they're drying out on a table then they're dying and
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  the water they lose when they're cutting is critical because they have to keep
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  hold of that water for weeks until the roots are developed.
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  So try taking them in batches or one at a time and striking them,
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  putting them into the humid environment.
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  And so that's critical when it comes to choosing the time and the place and the plants to pick off.
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  Obviously, you want to choose good genetics, good plants to take the material from.
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  If you're choosing a variegated plant, you'll need to choose from the area of
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  the plant with the variegation that you want.
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  And it's important to note that some plants you cannot propagate via cuttings.
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  So certain conifers, for example, cannot be cultivated by cuttings.
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  Some conifers you can, but others you have to grow by seed or layering and things
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  like this. So that's important to note.
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  And also important to note that if it's a variety that is protected by plant breeders'
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  rights, if you're protecting the genetics then if you're propagating them officially
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  you need to pay some money towards the breeder of that plant to propagate it so for example.
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  I can't think of one black lace and a
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  type of elder that that would you'd have to play that pay the royalties to the
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  people who bred black lace down in east morling so that's an example of of a
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  plant or a strawberries strawberries are a great example all the strawberries
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  will they'll be a breeder for all the main varieties of strawberries.
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  Although, yeah, you don't use cuttings for strawberries, so what the hell am I talking about?
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  That's Hydroponics Daily for today. Cuttings, we're going to talk about the
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  techniques tomorrow. Okay, thank you.