When I worked in a nursery I was lucky enough to do several experiments with cuttings. We propagated everything from Pachysandra terminalis to Pieris Japonica, to Hydrangea to black nest spruce. Luckily I was able to talk the owner into letting me buy 9 tyoes of cloning gel, powder, and liquid. We took 10,000 cuttings and did a 1000 each (with one as a control) and left to root in a custom mist house I built. Mist top to bottom, kind of cool. Anyway there were varying results. I found that Rootech gel was by far the best with only losing 3 cuttings. When I was all rooted and the project over, I decided to store these rooting hormones of various makes and models in a refrigerator that we had in the nursery till I was able to use them again. Well it was about 3 months later I had to clone some Euonymus and broke out the root juices. About half were totally stinky and crap. The powders were still fine, the liquid was fine after a good shake of the bottle. The gels were cooked, except Rootech, and Olivia’s. This was only 3 months! Well I definitely dipped straight into the containers, because I was doing a 1000 cuttings. Long story short, I still have that jar of Rootech, some 4-5 years later kind of like a souvenir and it’s still orange!! Refrigeration definitely works to prolong the life of the hormones, but the quality of the gel is also key. |