New Cloning Room Problems

Hi there!

I am working on a new grow and have to set up a new cloning room.

I've worked in other rooms before, that were set up by other people, where we had 95%+ success rate. We're working out of a temporary room right now and, well, ....... Not so much haha

So the big issue I've run into is Botrytis. It has really decimated two trays of 98 beautiful cuttings

My materials:

• 1.25'' rockwool cubes
• Clonex rooting nut. solution
• Clonex rooting gel
• Cubes housed on daisy tray inserts

My guesses as to what caused this are:

• Over packed tray (~98 decent sized cuts per tray)
• Too cool room causing increased evaporation under the domes- we are using heat mats
  
• Too much water- my fault, I think I misted too much and the cubes/tray were too wet
• Possibly incorrect cube prep? Lots of issues here, I'm not very familiar with rockwool and I think I may have made them too acidic and just got my timing wrong with soaking them

Also, after I saw all that horrible mold- around day 5, I pulled out the baddies and gave the tray a misting with a light H202 solution. I left the dome off for two days and just misted very often to keep them going. Now I'm keeping the dome well cracked and monitoring regularly. I haven't had any mold since but clones keep dying.

So, obviously, I would like to avoid this from happening again. I would love any advice on how to keep the cuts I still have alive and what I can do to my new room I'm building to keep the babies happy.

Thanks ya'll!!!

From experience h2o2 killed my seedlings and clones so don't do that. Im also struggling in rockwool to get clones to root. I followed the grow weed easy 7-10 day roots guide and they're just failing on me.

Are you using standard 20"x10" trays? If you are then 98 clones is way too many, I like to only keep about 40 per tray and give them as much spacing as I can between the plants. I also find keeping the humidity high helps but not too have things soaking wet. The cubes should stay moist but not over saturated. If your room is cool but your using heating mats then what's likely to happen is that the water is evaporating, hitting the cool outer dome and condensing, meaning your getting way to much moisture trapped. I would try not spraying the domes or opening the air vents to their max which should both help.
For PH I soak my cubes in 5.5 adjusted water what did you have yours in? Most rockwool will need adjusting before use.

@mjinc Yea I'm using standard trays. Next time I am absolutely going to do the 2'' cubes; I have a tray next to these sickly ones that is 2" cubes and those cuts are doing great.

I did soak them in 5.5 pH water I think. I added a little bit of rooting nutrient for the initial soak, which I don't think is correct, and I was a little sloppy with checking my pH so it could be that the pH was lower?

Thanks!!

JDMase said:

From experience h2o2 killed my seedlings and clones so don't do that. Im also struggling in rockwool to get clones to root. I followed the grow weed easy 7-10 day roots guide and they're just failing on me.

Click to expand...

I dont know if what I did was the best, but all 5 of my first clones I ever cut rooted in rockwool cubes. I had tiny clones too, maybe 4" long max with rooting gel.

-tray with lid on for 5 days, spraying inside of lid to keep moist, in low light
-watered cubes lightly, daily after lid was off, tap water, medium light
-sprayed with tap water a few times per day
-roots out the bottom of all cubes around day 12
-temps 70-80
-transplanted to coco, watered with .25ec, 5.8ph ro water
-off we go!