A Guide to Long-Term Clone Storage, 2+ Months, And a Continued Experiment to Reach 6+ Months

[Naptown916]

Hello OG!

I wanted to create this post to share a technique I have been refining for long-term clone storage. I believe through these techniques and our ensuing trials, 2-4 month clone storage should be easily attainable and going up to 6+ months may very well be possible.

Before I go any further, I do want to give a shout out to @budderton. One of his posts stimulated the idea in me to combine traditional cut flower cold storage techniques and techniques from tissue culture to create a more efficient method. Without his having humored some of my questions and sharing his experiences, definitely never would have tried this.

A little about the origins of this technique. Storing cut flowers and cuttings in refrigerated environments is nothing new. This is routinely done in the commercial flower industry to store plants and flowers until they are ready for sale. Retailers regularly store flowers for a month or so before they go for sale and even most store bought flowers are refrigerated until sale to maintain freshness. When discussing this with @budderton, he indicated most of his issues were around mold and bacteria developing in the bags he was storing them in and photos showed just general decline in health like you would expect. Having past tissue culture experience, I saw an opportunity to use some of those sterilization and storage techniques and combine them with cold storage. Essentially, this is tissue culture without a sterile media to sustain the plant long-term.

The Guide will be organized into the following posts for simplicity. It’s a lot of information and photos so I thought it best to break it up some

1) Sterilization
2) Creating Vessels for Storage
3) Preparing Sterile Water

I will continue to post monthly updates with the trials from that month as I continue to try to see what the time limit is and how it might otherwise be improved.

[Naptown916]

This is essentially the first step. You will need to make sure you have your materials prepped first but once your rinses and vessels are prepped you’re ready to go. Instructions for any needed prep are below.

Step 1
You’ll need to select your plants and decide how you want to group your cuttings. Whether it’s per strain, per plant, etc you just need to decide who will be in what vessel. You’ll want to do this process per vessel. This is an all or nothing technique so once you clean the cuttings and put them in your vessel, you cannot come back and add more later or take one or two out.

Step 2
Prep your rinses. There are 3 rinses, you’ll need 2 separate bowls and your previously prepared jars of sterile water. Make sure the bowl size is appropriate for the number and size of your cuttings. You’ll need to be able to fully submerge all the cuttings at once for this to work.

Rinse 1, Bowl of 70% Isopropyl Alcohol, Use straight 70% out of the bottle. DO NOT DILUTE IT, DO NOT USE STRONGER THAN 70%

Rinse 2, 10% Bleach Solution, DO NOT USE STRONGER THAN THIS, To create this mixture use normal household bleach at a mixture rate of 1/4 cup Bleach per 2 1/4 cups of water, plus a DROP of dish soap. I prefer Dawn but any standard dish cleaner is fine.

Rinse 3 will be your Sterile Water. See separate sterile water prep guide.

Step 3
Now you need to take your cuttings. For long-term storage, I recommend looking for stems pencil width but we are using smaller for the test and they will work just not as well. The one thing I highly recommend, is setting the length of your cutting just below a node on the branch. This will allow the cutting to start rooting while in the vessel and most plants show some sign of initial rooting out of the vessel. If you don’t do this, you may still obtain good results, but it will take the plants longer to root and you will not have as good a success rate.

Step 4
Now it’s rinse time. I recommend setting your rinse bowls next to each other for an easier process. I keep my sterile water in mason jars simply because you can remove the lid ring and then wait to pop the top before you throw the cuttings in. This allows only a brief air exposure before you can seal them again to rinse. Step by step here we go…

Rinse 1, Cuttings into the 70% Alcohol. They should be in here only a few seconds, fully submerged, and then quickly moved to Rinse 2.

Rinse 2, Your 10% bleach solution. The cuttings with be in the bleach for 10 MINUTES. During this time you need to move them around every once and while to keep them submerged and make sure all areas have been contacted and cleaned. You’ll then move them to the final rinse.

Rinse 3, Your Sterile Water. As mentioned earlier, I prefer to remove the lid ring and have the top ready to pop. I pull the cuttings from the bleach bath, give them a quick shake to knock any excessive bleach water off, pop the top, shove them in the jar, and replace the top. You’ll now keep them in there for 10-15min. Shake the jar as they’re in there, don’t be afraid to shake it like a paint mixer.

Step 5
They need to dry in a clean box for just a bit. Building an actual clean box is a hassle and unnecessary for this. If you have one great but otherwise you can do this. While you’re rinsing them, take two dinner plates of the same size. Spray them with alcohol to clean. Take 2 pieces paper towel and then fold them “hotdog style” to have a long ways folded over paper towel. Spray the inside of the towel lightly with alcohol. Dip your fingers back in your alcohol bath to clean them, then immediately go to your water and pull the cuttings and set them on the paper towel you just misted with alcohol. Put the 2nd plate on top and you’ll have a sanitized protective dome. This is more than adequate protection for these purposes.

Allow to dry for about 30 minutes inside the dome.

Step 6
Now it’s time to jar them on up. Take your prepared vessel, spray some alcohol inside to sanitize, wipe out with a paper towel and then immediately pop the cuttings from your dome into the vessel and seal and that’s it they’re done.

STORAGE

You will want to keep them in a refrigerator. For the purposes of this test, I used a standard home LG refrigerator. The temp is set to 35 F and they are stored in the back of a shelf. Make sure not to keep them in a light proof space. This will increase the odds of mold or bacterial growth.

[Naptown916]

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN VESSELS

This will outline how to make your own vessels for storing your cuttings. There are tissue culture vessels you can buy but most will be too small for typical cuttings. You can buy specialty ones but they are expensive.

The easiest way is to reuse old jars and modify them slightly. Easy and cheap to do compared to buying vessels or vented caps.

I recommend Pace Salsa jars if you need 10 or less cuttings. They have the hourglass shape that makes it easier to get them in and out and cruising the grocery store aisles, it’s one of your cheaper jar options in general for this size. No worries if you can’t completely remove the salsa smell from the jar, won’t harm anything. Otherwise, normal mason jars will work too but they’re much more bulky in the fridge. I can fit 20 of these in a side by side counter depth fridge no problem on a single shelf.

After you clean the jars and remove any labels do the following to prep the lid. Friendly tip, a Scrub Daddy sponge is great for getting labels off.

Step 1
Take the lid from the jar, and nail some holes through it. You don’t need a ton, just a nice even dispersal. On a Pace lid I do 5 like you would see on a dice. If you nail down through the top it will create ridges on the exterior that will affect your sanitized seal we’re about to install. That’s kind of hard to word so it should match the picture.

Step2
Cover the holes with Bandaids. Bandaids are sanitized obviously and the patch on the bandaid will create a breathable sanitary seal. This will allow airflow in and out of the jar to control humidity and prevent mold but prevents bacteria and spores from entering through.

TA -DA, you made your own vessels.

[Naptown916]

How to Prepare Sterile Water

1) Fill Glass jar with water.
2) Microwave Four Minutes.
3) CAREFULLY remove from microwave and replace the cap
4) DO NOT SCREW ON THE LID UNTIL THE JAR HAS COOLED.  Tightening the lid while the jar/water is still hot can have some bad results.  Once prepared, this water can be stored until needed, just don't open it.

Additional Tip
If you want your water very clean you can add an additional chemical called “PPM”. This is by no means actually needed. A link to an example is below.

Plant Preservative Mixture (PPM)

[Naptown916]

onemore post to go

[HumblePie420]

@Naptown916

Plant Preservative Mixture (PPM)

HUGE thank you for showing us this method! You rock @Naptown916

[FieldEffect]

This is really cool! I’m surprised that works, that they can handle being in stasis for months.

I’ve heard of cuts coming back after weeks, this is fantastic.

Thanks for sharing the great documentation and methods!

[imstinky]

This is really cool and I will for sure be keeping an eye on this journey. Thanks for the interesting write up!!

[CrunchBerries]

Appreciate the tutorial homie!! This will definitely come in handy!!

[Rhai88]

I really like the idea of this method. Would be nice to be able to store and go back if a plant going full term ended up being worthy of being a keeper. Saves quite a bit of time and effort. Medium, rooting hormone, space and everything else.

I see you say 2+ months. How far have you taken them so far?

[m0sirys]

thank you for sharing this with us! great write up!!!

[Naptown916]

Thank you for all the responses everyone. Glad this seems like useful information to everyone. I posted this info now because there was a lot of chatter about it and it seemed like a good time to throw it in. I was originally going to wait till 3 months to post this when the initial trials were done but we can do that part together.

@Rhai88
I say 2+ because it’s already easily attainable to hit 1 and @Budderton is currently able to get 2 without any special tech. That said, using this storage technique, the plants are still green and healthy at 2 months and should remain viable beyond that. I believe thicker stemmed cuttings will be viable longer up to that 4 month mark and then I’ll begin working on adding medium to increase the time over 4 months. That’s more complicated because I’m TC you’re working with sterile hormone and in this method you would have to sterilize a nutrient solution which will have complications.

This group of testers was taken from 3 plants 2 months ago. Every month I’ll continue to try to root the next batch as proof of concept, and then I’ll work further to refine that to a more efficient approach.

At the time of cutting.

2 Months Later

[Star_Dog]

These are interesting articles it’ll be interesting to see how long they can go?

I kept clones in the fridge 10 weeks iirc then rooted and flowered them.

It was a bit of a learning curve, i bleached the 1st ones i tried, the next ones i left in ambient light for a day then put them at the side of T5s and they’re were fine.

[NoCal]

Good write up . I put some cuttings in the fridge about a month ago and wish I had done some of these steps.

Really interested in the longevity using these techniques.

[Naptown916]

Yeah that’ll be the interesting part, already learning lots for this next batch.

[Budderton]

Right on @Naptown916 ! Great write up. I feel this is important stuff, especially for the home growers with limited space. Making it fairly easy to keep back ups of everything your hunting without the traditional investment in space and resources of keeping cuts alive in the veg room.
Thanks for making this thread.

[HumblePie420]

This is a game changer for me

[Pannonian]

Thanks for sharing and presentation.
How much condensation(if any) is there in the jars while they are in the fridge?

[Mr.Christmas]

Great thread, I saw someone referencing this tek yesterday and was going to ask more about it.

For the vessel, is parafilm acceptable instead of the bandaids?

[Naptown916]

Just a small amount on the glass. The bandaids will allow any excess moisture to dry out.