What is a better option...clone help plz

[yota]

Well what can i use to ventilate a small room. What kind of fan should i use for the clone/mother room?

[Al B. Fuct]

Personally I would clone from a vegging 'donor', veg the donor till it's recovered, and put the donor into flower.

 

You can flower your old mums if you like, no worries. As long as their roots are in good shape and haven't picked up any bugs (ie gnats) or fungal problems while being your source of cuttings, the old mums should yield very well. They will come up very bushy and will take a lot of flowering area floorspace, but as long as you plan for that, she'll be right.

 

And with the clone/s I would veg them till I'm nearly ready to turn them to flower, take clones from those clones and continue the process "ad-infinitum" as Al put it.

 

If you've flowered your mum and are relying on plants you later intend to flower for material for your next batch of cuttings, you're still stuck with the problem of having no fallback source of veg mode material should your clones fail to root.

 

I don't flower old mums for two reasons- they take up too much space in the flowering area and in the time that they spend being donors, they tend to pick up gnat problems in their rootmasses. Seems that ye olde gnats are very attracted to the 24H light in my mother area. I would not want to introduce a rootball with a gnat problem into the flowering zone.

 

It takes gnats a while to get a good foothold in a rootmass, usually longer than a plant spends in my flowering area... but they don't need any help! I replace mums so frequently that the gnats never really establish well enough for their larvae to start chewing up the roots of the mums. Were I to put an 8-10wk old mum in to flower, the gnats which have made themselves at home would be getting an 8-week free kick amongst the flowering plants.

 

I devote a grand total of about 0.35 sq ft for each of my mums. I do use a lot of light on my mums (400 HPS, 24/7), but that seems to be about right to recover a heavily pruned mum up to about 24" tall in 14 days, when I'll need my next batch of cuts.

 

mums after cuttings and then 14 days later

 

Not everyone needs as much cutting material, nor takes cuttings as frequently as I do. You can get by with fluoros on a donor plant which only provides cuttings every 6-8 weeks, such as for a very small grow. However, you won't get tall, thick (>6-7mm) stems from a mum raised under fluoros. I prefer very tall (compared to conventional wisdom e.g. most grow books, which suggest small cuttings, even suggesting cutting leaf blades in half) clones for my SoG, so the 400HPS is the go for mums in my op. I used a MH->HPS conversion lamp for a few weeks. It produced shorter (by 1/3 over 2 weeks), denser growth on the mums, as one might expect compared to vegging with HPS. This simply doesn't suit my style of growing. I switched back to the HPS and the MH conversion lamp is in mothballs. Anybody want it? Yours for the asking (and postage).

 

Mums are no trouble to keep. They don't need much attention between passes of cuttings. They're also tolerant of conditions which would spell big trouble for a heavily flowering plant, such as higher than normal humidity. I mathed it out- at my electricity rates and considering mixing up a new tank of nutes 2x a month, my 10 mums cost $46.56/month to keep. $4.56 per mum per month is a total bargain when you consider what I'm able to do with them.