Hydroponics Unlimited Blog

Here is a great article I stumbled across. It covers cloning gels and solutions. Brought to you by http://growhydroponix.com.   Check out the full article at http://growhydroponix.com/.

From Hydroponix:

What makes a good Cloning Gel or Solution?

There are four main ingredients in a cloning solution: water or dry base, the active ingredient, vitamins/minerals, and antibacterial/antifungal elements.  Each element is an important ingredient and plays a major role in promoting root development.

The water, sometimes gel, combines the active ingredient, vitamins, minerals and antibacterial elements.  For some cloning solutions, the water is replaced with a dry base.  In other solutions, the water is combined to form a gel which helps to remain in place around the plant stem increasing the amount of time the stem remains in contact with the solution.  The water or dry base also helps to seal the end of the cutting preventing water loss and other harmful elements from entering.

The active ingredient is usually a hormone or a group of hormones.  There are several that are commonly used at various strengths.  This ingredient is what initiates root cell formation.  Common hormones are IBA and NAA.

The vitamins and minerals provide essential elements to help feed the newly formed roots as well as keeping the plant nourished.  A common vitamin is B1.

The antibacterial and or antifungal ingredients prevent bacteria and fungus from growing.  Rooting usually takes place in 5 – 10 days which is a sufficient amount of time for bacteria or fungus to enter the cutting and take over.  These ingredients help to neutralize these harmful elements.

Not all cloning solutions are created equal.  A number of them are missing one or more of the essential elements.  Some may have too much or too little of each important element, particularly the active ingredient and antibacterial or antifungal elements.  Always do your homework and talk to others to find out their success with a particular product.

Hydroponics comes from Latin and means working water. In its simpliest of terms it is growing plants without water, but in reality it is a lot more.  We won’t go into the many methods of hydroponics here — we’ll save that for a later post — but below we’ll take a look at a laundry list of benefits of hydroponics, as well as a few disadvantages.  To an avid hydroponics grower they would use no other technique, but why?

1. The environment is sustained and controlled minimizing the usage of water, green house gasses and does not contaminate the environment.
2. Hydroponics grows more plants and more vegetables and the production quantity directly increases by ten times than the natural environment.
3. Ground water gets saved as you do not have to irrigate large patches of land.
4. Control over nutrient balance.
5. Significant reduction of soil pests and diseases.
6. pH and nutrient levels are simple to measure and maintain.
7. When you use less pesticides the quality of taste of the fruits and vegetables is much higher and is also less harmful to people who eat them.
8. Hydroponics cultivation can be done within city limits and fruits and vegetables can be grown in urban areas — less distance between producer and buyer.

A few disadvantages that have been noted are:

1. The cost of starting a hydroponic garden are greater than soil gardens, but these trends are starting to change.
2. Pumps and other electronics such as Timers susceptible to power outages — but this is easily fixed by having back up pumps and other equipment.
3. Another often noted disadvantage is that hydroponics is more technical — this may be true, you can’t just throw a seed in the ground and water it, but if that was your gardening method you’d probably never get into hydroponics.

Hydroponics has the ability to change the way the world looks at food production.  We can produce much larger yeilds in smaller spaces than traditional soil gardening using less water.  All these things will be very important as populations continue to grow and land, water and food become less readily available.  Let the hydroponics revolution begin!