There is little so satisfying as seeing crops you started from tiny cuttings blossom into delicious, fresh produce. Instead of sowing your plants from seed, cloning cuttings from a mother plant will yield quicker results - and it's cheap. The best way to achieve success is to invest in some top quality equipment, follow some simple guidelines - and to get stuck in! After all, there's no better way to learn a skill than by getting your hands dirty and putting what you know into practise. And, each plant you propagate will react differently - so its good to keep a sense of adventure as you go.
First off, investing in some good equipment will get your plants off to a healthy start. The Basic Clone Propagation Kit is an affordable and top quality kit from One Stop Grow Shop (onestopgrowshop.co.uk) that provides you with everything you need. It's a collection of all the necessary items and it costs £53.50, which together would usually come to £60.10. Included are a medium propagator, soil, plugs, a lamp with a heater, a sterile scalpel, Clonex gel, a pistol spray gun and Canadian Xpress Clone Start spray for cuttings.
Ready to get going?
After familiarising yourself with the basics through a bit of research, you can begin propagating. When doing root cuttings, good tips to follow are to make sure all of your equipment and tools are sterile before you start, soak the Jiffy pots in water or a nutrient solution for half an hour or until they swell up before you plant, take the cuttings from the healthiest shoots of the mother plant, and once planted, keep the heated propagator's environment humid by misting the cuttings a few times a day. When you're selecting the mother plant, carefully consider how disease and insect resistant is and how heavy the flowering or fruit production was, if relevant. Once the cuttings have produced roots that are visible through the Jiffy plug, transfer them to soil or to a hydroponics system to begin the next phase of growth.
