Cloning Plants in the Home Garden
Do you like to do gardening as a hobby? Or is it like that growing plants is among your top passions? Either case reflects your love for plants. There is usually a plant in the corner of your garden or orchid that yields the best flowers or fruits. You try growing another one of the kind but it doesn’t appear like the other plant at all. And there you go wondering what could possibly have gone wrong? However, without worrying too much, you can now clone your favorite plants and produce their multiple copies. But the question is how?
The plant tissue culture is a collection of techniques to maintain or grow tissues cultures of plants under a sterile condition and in a nutrient culture medium, whose composition is always known. This usually costs a fortune and has commercial applications. The processes are carried out in large laboratories. But the good news is that you can set up your home lab too to produce clones of those special plants.
Cloning Plants in the Home Garden
The first step to preparing plant tissue culture in home is to grow small pieces of plant tissue on gel made from nutrients, agar, vitamins, sugar and hormones. After dipping them in rooting gel, you may either plant them or put them in larger jars and root them in the tissue culture. After a few weeks shoots and leaves will blob from the culture. Once the plantlets in jars have started developing, you could extract tissue and start growing them again or put them in new culture jars to let their shoots and roots grow large enough. As soon as they are large enough to be potted away, take them out and place them in potting soil.
Plant tissue culture could be done on many plant parts including buds, stem, roots, leaves, corms and bulbs. This technique is fun for gardening hobbyists and might open up opportunities of developing an orchid in the backyard and to express the ever increasing love for plants.
