There are a few reasons that makes aeroponic cloning ideal for my situation.
I like how easy is to monitor progress. Heck you can pull the plant up and look at the roots. You could open the entire lid and look at all the roots.
I like how set-it-and-forget-it it is. Plants that are harder to transplant may require more humidity which if you are not careful you end up with too much, promoting fungus and rot. Because all the humidity comes from the bottom spraying the top is not critical and can be optional.
I like the promise of hard to grow cuttings becoming a lot easier.
In Alaska I can start the setup in the middle of winter, have the plants ready by mid May to start transitioning outside, taking advantage of a full season of growth before the next winter.
They did every bit as well as the ones started in peat moss.
I’m in a place where spring doesn’t start until May so my two ways to get haskaps going is aeroponics and cuttings in March on a heat pad. Either works equally well.
The heat pad first as it is the one I get started with. In a week or so I’ll go out to trim my bushes and stick a bunch of cuttings on a bag with wet peat moss, then leave it in the cold garage on top of a heat mat. The dark and cold keeps the tops from leafing, the warm beneath promotes calluses and the beginnings of root development. Once they are over that hump (about a month) they take to potting medium readily; as long as you don’t forget and let them dry they’ll snap right up.
So by the time I’m potting those in mid April I can take more cuttings and put them on the aeroponic box. They develop roots in record time and readily catch up with the other ones.
One thing about haskaps is that they have two grow spurs per season; early spring and late fall. If you are in cold weather you want them to get started as soon as possible so they can spend the summer not necessarily growing outwards, but pushing roots. By the fall on the second baby grow spur you can tell that they are doing good.
I’ve tried rooting plants using traditional means: air layering, rooting in pots, rooting in fig pops, etc…I failed miserably at all of them! I couldn’t root anything. It’s definitely something wrong with my technique, since my local friends make it happen.
I suddenly had amazing success with rooting! Figs, solanum glaucescens, passion fruit, elaeagnus, and others root very well for me. I got rooting hormone, but I’ve generally found that I don’t need it…and the one time I used it seemed to cause problems. I also got a cycle timer, but I found that it wasn’t really necessary. I don’t put in fertilizer either; I put in water from my kitchen reverse osmosis filter, and change it every few months. Cleaning out the slime between water changes helps, probably.
There are a lot of mister cloners out there, and they all probably work great! I considered making my own, but the cost of the clone king was on par with the cost of making my own.
Yeah, aeroponic makes the easy trivial and the hard possible. I’m sure I mentioned this already but I particularly love the crimes of opportunity; if I find something interesting I cut a branch and stick it in the aeroponic box. Even if it doesn’t take the amount of effort was trivial.
Setting up an aeroponic cloner for for avocados has been on my to-do list for awhile, but I wonder if there’s any way for me to test the method without committing to building a big unit like that. I guess there’s no cost effective way to build a small test unit with just a few cells.
What has worked OK for me so far is storing cuttings in the back of the filter on a heated aquarium until they callus, then placing them in potting mix in the greenhouse, and misting them every once in awhile in winter, and every day or two in summer. They start to root if they aren’t dead yet after 6+ months.
I’d love a set and forget method, but not sure if avocados would respond correctly to aeroponics, I’ve never heard of anyone doing it.
As an update, I was able to stop the growth of slime by using one of the 3 watt aquarium UV cleaning lights you can buy at petco. I put it on a cycle timer, and I’ve been gradually increasing the time on to see how much UV my plants can handle while killing the slime. I’m at about a 70% duty cycle right now, and the plants all seem fine! The slime hasn’t stopped completely, but it has slowed down A LOT. All of my roots look nice and white instead of brown. I’ll probably try to further increase the duty cycle to see what happens.
I’ve taken the cycle timer off of my UV light, and I’ve noticed that my clones still all seem very happy with 100% duty cycle! The slime is mostly gone, and everything is working well!
I got the coralife biocube. Just take off the detachable external plastic enclosure to expose the UV light. Any UV light intended for aquariums should work well. This one was on super sale when I found it, so I bought several. They seem to burn out kinda fast.
Thanks so much, I really appreciate the info! I’ve been putting 1/8 tsp of bleach in my Clone King every few days to keep it sterile and that has been working well so far, but I would love to try something like UV.
That’s nice info on the bleach! I might keep that in mind if my lights all die. The lights are conveniently low maintenance for as long as they don’t burn out.
Having finally assembled my setup, I can say this is definitely not creating sufficient pressure for the high pressure nozzles I had ordered on amazon. Water just drips out.
Do you have specific models of pump you’d recommend, and nozzles too since maybe I got the wrong kind. These are what mine look like:
