September 17th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Hydroponics Secrets:Maintaining High Energy Mother Plants for Faster Rooting

Getting good production from your mother plants is important to ensure that your gardens are kept supplied with sufficient numbers of new plants. This means that your mother plants need to produce a lot of shoot growth, and in some instances under regular intervals. This places a lot of demand for energy on the mother plant.

Not only does the mother plant require a lot of energy to produce lots of healthy shoots, but the shoots removed from the mother will need a lot of energy to complete the rooting process.

Remember that once the shoot is removed from the plant, it will lose the ability to take in water and nutrients because it lacks a root system. Plants use water nutrients and light energy to produce the chemical energy they need to grow.

Healthy cuttings are the starting point in all successful harvests. If your crop starts off weak and stressed from the beginning, the plants may never fully recover and therefore never realize their true potential. At best, starting off with stressed and energy starved cuttings will leave you with mediocre results.

To unlock the true potential of your harvests, make sure that your mother plants are very healthy and vigorous. This way, the material you remove has the potential to become very vigorous once rooted. Through the rooting process, the cut material must go through tremendous change. The plant material must shift gears from vegetative growth and signal the rooting process. Typically, the rooting process lasts from 7 to 14 days. During this time, the cut stems must exhaust all of their stored energy.

If energy levels were low to begin with, rooting may be prolonged; if successful at all. When cuttings are rooting under stressful conditions with low energy reserves, the problem is further compounded.

There have been some techniques and horticultural technologies developed that help to increase shoot production in mother plants and build reserves of chemical energy in plant tissue. These techniques and technologies have satisfied the demand of professional horticulturalists, and are now available to the growing public. For any grower starting their crop from cuttings, it is absolutely recommended that they take a few moments to investigate these practices and technologies to unlock their potential for bigger yields.

watch a short video to learn more:


Hydroponic Secrets 31