I tried cloning roses in my lab 🥀

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:01]What's in the box?

[00:00:03]Did you guess 10 lbs of loose petrified moss? If so, you are correct. The reason I got this moss is because I have a really sad looking terrarium at the moment. And I have a vision for it that involves three terrestrial orchids and 10 lbs of petrified moss. When I'm at the plant store for the terrestrial orchids, I also want to pick up a blueberry plant and a strawberry plant.

[00:00:28]I am woefully uninformed about the growing seasons of outdoor plants, which surprises a lot of people. So hopefully they have both of those. And then the last thing I want to pick up is a bouquet of roses for myself. How romantic. I have this idea for a video where I clone a bouquet of roses. And I just can picture a thumbnail of that video really popping off and getting like a million views. So, I'm going to do that and set up that project in the laboratory today after we go to the plant store. If you never hear about that project again and I never make the video, just know it didn't work.

[00:01:13]Big daddy blackberry.

[00:01:16]Okay, I think I see the blueberries over here. Can you grab one of these for me?

[00:01:21]Oh, look. They have blueberries already on them.

[00:01:25]Thank you. Okay, so just carry that around. Okay, they have the terrestrial orchids here, guys. So, I'm going to get three of them. They have bigger ones, but they're kind of expensive. So, I think I'm going to go with these.

[00:01:39]Okay, we're checking out. I got like $150 of orchids here.

[00:01:45]And Matt got our blueberry plant haul.

[00:01:48]three of the same plant.

[00:01:56]That's everything from the terrarium.

[00:01:59]This is going to look good. I can tell.

[00:02:01]Also, here's what these are if you're curious.

[00:02:11]Okay, guys. This is the final product.

[00:02:15]What do we think? I think it's kind of cool. It definitely looks better than before. Now we're going to go to Trader Joe's and get the roses to tissue culture. I just got back in from Trader Joe's. I didn't film in the store because it was so busy. The checkout guy was very nice, but he did unfortunately ask me who the flowers were for. So, I had the choice between saying they're for me or I'm going to go clone them in my laboratory. Uh, so I chose the first dialogue option. Made it to the laboratory. Welcome. Here's what we've got going on. I've got the rose media here. That's what I'm going to be using today. And then I have some plants that were sent to me up here. We had a ton of contamination from these plants, so I didn't end up showing them on my channel, but these are cool. These are like alocacia bambino ghost. I don't know. It's some special variegation pattern. Oh, lava. Lava is like the new thing, guys, in case you haven't heard. And then I have a bunch of Monstera Bulbasaurs. The Bulbasaur were like one of the only things that did not get contaminated.

[00:03:20]Uh so these are those guys. And then moving this way, I just have some Drosa callus. I posted this on Instagram already. Some airplanes that got sent to me back there. These are African violets that I've been transferring inside of the still airbox.

[00:03:37]Shout out to the still airbox. And then up here I have variegated macans, which I just love the look of. I think it's so pretty. Um, that plant's not doing well. Don't look at that. Media for the next couple weeks. And then most of the other plants that we're using for videos are down here.

[00:04:07]That's how the sausage gets made. So, basically what I'm going to be doing with these is removing the nodes. And for roses, the part of the plant that I want to use is basically where you see leaves coming out. Like this. This is a node. This is a node.

[00:04:23]That's a node. As I'm removing the nodes, I'm going to be putting them into this container that contains just a little drop of tween 20. And that's just going to clean them up before we do the actual sterilization with the bleach solution.

[00:04:39]That's trash.

[00:04:41]That's my node. You guys can see what it looks like, too. That's our node. I have a feeling these are pretty dirty. I need to research more what cut roses are sprayed with cuz my hands were getting sticky with something and I suspect they spray like chemicals on them to make them last longer. So yeah, we want to wash all that stuff off if that is the case.

[00:05:01]This is a behind the scenes that you don't get to see. So, at this point, I got the nodes on the orbital shaker or magnetic stirer, but I forgot to put the stir bar in there. So, I need to get one.

[00:05:15]I do not know what this is.

[00:05:19]Sketchy.

[00:05:22]There we go.

[00:05:25]And they're off. That's probably too fast.

[00:05:28]No.

[00:05:34]The reason I never film like talking in the flow hood is because it's so noisy.

[00:05:39]You can hear it. It's annoying.

[00:05:46]I'm not going to lie. I did just spill the tween 20 everywhere. I tween 20ed all over my shirt. I got the nodes in the bleach, so they're going to stay on for 20 minutes. And we just set a timer for 20 minutes.

[00:06:03]Hello, it's voiceover lore. The first thing I needed to do was I rinsed the expplants in sterile water. Uh, this is water that I autoclaved in media bottles prior to starting the experiment. When I sterilize all my tools and trays, I also like to autoclave water so that I have it just for when I need it, like today.

[00:06:24]Uh, the only time that you ever really need sterile water during the TC process is just when you're sterilizing expplants. This is one of the steps people accidentally skip, I think, when they're new to doing TC and then they wonder why everything gets contaminated.

[00:06:40]Uh, if you rinse with tap water at this point, then you just pretty much undid the last hour of work that we did to get those nodes clean. Uh, and if you're curious why I sterilized the nodal expplants in two different jars, it's not that deep. I just had a lot of expplants. I'm following the plants and jars protocol for growing roses in TC.

[00:07:02]If you are curious, I sell all my protocols on my website, which is plants jars.shop.

[00:07:09]I also sell really dope t-shirts. I've worked with roses in TC in the past a number of times. They're actually a pretty easy plant to TC, but I haven't cloned them from a bouquet before, like this. In the past, I've used chute tips as expplants from an actual rose bush, not from cut flowers from a grocery store. Uh, I've never seen anyone do it this way, so I'm excited to see if it works over the next few months. I was not expecting these Xplants to be so thick with a capital T. They were really hard to get through with the scissors. I felt like I needed a sterile pair of pruding shears to remove the tissue that had died from bleach exposure on either end of each node. That's not like a real thing, but I felt like that's what I needed. I find that 95% of the time I can get by doing TC with scissors instead of a scalpel. But I think at one point while I was filming this, under my breath, I literally said, "I wish I had a scalpel right now." It was also extra painful because I know I do have some scalpels at home, but I didn't have any in the laboratory on this day. Yes, incredible planning on my part. Anyways, I did my best with the scissors, but you can definitely see bits of plant tissue flying all over the place at some points.

[00:08:32]I'm going to be repeating the experiment today. I found the disposable scalpels in my craft closet. And if you can't guess where I am, I'm back at Trader Joe's, baby.

[00:08:49]Here's our nodes from a few days ago. It looks like most of them look pretty good. This is the only one I noticed right off the bat that has a little bit of what looks like slime mold inside.

[00:09:01]So, I'll probably dispose of that one.

[00:09:03]Actually, I definitely will dispose of it. I'm just looking through for any obvious signs of contamination. It's still early, so if there was contamination, it would not necessarily already be showing up. Uh, but sometimes if it's bad enough, it will show up right away. Here's a good example of what contamination can look like. You can see this one's pretty obvious here.

[00:09:25]Because the contamination is not touching the actual plant itself, I am going to try to transfer it into a new container and see if that helps. But first, look how big this Venus fly trap got.

[00:09:40]He's huge.

[00:09:53]That is some nasty looking contamination.

[00:10:01]Kind of a cool view because you can see the difference in the variegation between the old leaf which has the typical mayari variegation and the new leaf which has the mutated variegation.

[00:10:18]Hopefully that doesn't get contaminated again. I just got done cutting all the nodes. I have them in my jar right here.

[00:10:26]I have less nodes than last time cuz I have less media to use today. And I'm going to do something I didn't do last time, which is I'm going to scrub these nodes under the sink before I wash them on the magnetic stirer with the tween 20 to just try to get them a little bit extra clean. Because like I said, I think there's something like coating the outside of these nodes. The nodes are on the magnetic stirer. I'm going to leave them in here for about 30 minutes just in the water with some tween 20 before we do the bleach sterilization solution.

[00:11:02]Voiceover lore in the house. This time I did an alcohol dip. Before going into the bleach solution, I dunked each node in 70% isopropyl alcohol for about 20 seconds each. Then I rinsed all the nodes in water and I place them into the bleach solution. An alcohol dip before bleach is basically a preclean slashfast kill step. It's not strictly required by every protocol, but people use it to stack the odds in their favor, especially with tougher or dirtier expplants. These ones are very tough as we've seen. From there, I'm essentially repeating the experiment. I do three rinses with sterile water exactly like last time, but this time instead of using scissors, I will be wielding two disposable scalpels. I really thought that using a scalpel was like this big brain move that was going to make this process much easier, but it turns out that the expplants are also really difficult to cut through with a scalpel.

[00:12:03]So, I'm still just fighting for my life against a stick. It's worth noting that roses are woody plants, not herbaceous like most of the tropical plants that I usually work with. So, they're just harder to cut through in general. If I do end up repeating this experiment a third time, which I think I probably will, I'm only going to use the nodes from the top 1/3 of the plant. That way, it's newer growth and hopefully a little bit thinner as well, therefore easier to cut through. Uh, if you go to Trader Joe's in the next couple weeks and all the red roses are gone, just know Pish was there.

[00:12:42]I think I'm going to also increase the sterilization time from 20 minutes to 22 to 25 minutes in the bleach solution.

[00:12:49]next time I do this. 20 minutes is what I use for shoot tips, but I didn't really take into account that these nodes are much thicker and more robust than the shoot tips I would typically use. So, I think I'll have a better contamination rate with the additional sterilization time. Uh, also, I know this style of content is a little bit different than what I normally do, uh, but I thought it would be fun to show a little bit behind the scenes. And also, I really enjoy vlogging. I know I'm not that good at it, but I want to get better. My next video is going to be all about plant trademarks, which will be more like the typical style content I usually make. So, if you liked the video about plant patents that I did a week or two ago, then you'll probably like that one, too.

[00:13:33]The final product.

[00:13:35]Here's everything from the other day, from today. Skinapsis