Re: Personal experience with plant rooting hormones

Don't make any assumptions that alcohol based plant rooting homones are
great cause they are used by commercial growers.
The sanitation issue is result of the care of the cuttings.
If you have dirty cuttings then no matter if you dip the basal end only in
an alcohol.
It is better to sanitize the cuttings with dilute bleach before doing ANY
processing and to use sterile media!

The main reason that commercial growers use an alcohol base product is
because they do not know any better.
The active ingredient (mostly IBA) is water insoluble so the maker of these
products use alcohol to dissolve.

I suspect that commercial growers "do know better" , their survival depends on it. It takes a fraction of the time to dip a handful of cuttings into solution and get even coverage vs trying to do that with a powder.

This is not the only answer to the problem...Phytotronics has a water
soluble IBA which eliminates the problem
( http://www.phytotronics.com  and http://www.fredgloeckner.com )

The IBA tablets were almost worthless in the Dr. Manners' study you quote below. In fact, in the study below the IBA concentration of the powder used for the "best" results" were 8X higher then the "excellent" results of the "Dip n Grow" trial. Dr Manners notes this in his discussion of results.

If you take a look at Dr Manners pages you will see that he too was
surprised that for difficult to root roses the dry dip powders work better
http://members.aol.com/mmmavocad4/hormone.html

I'm still interested in impartial opinions/experiences. A controlled scientific comparison/experiment would be interesting.

Best Regards
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