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Hi, I am Cristina Brusco, the General Manager at Darwin Colombia.

We are a 15-hectare size farm located in the central part of Colombia, at the savannah of Bogotá.

Most of the perennials in production across the globe start out as a vegetative cutting from a farm like this.

The savannah of Bogotá is the ideal place for unrooted cutting production.

High elevation, 8,600 feet above sea level, high light intensity, constant day length, and little seasonal changes throughout the year.

We have been producing vegetative perennial cuttings on this farm for over 24 years and ship millions of cuttings to over six countries.

My name is Carlos Martinez.

Currently, I am the Director of Research and Development and Propagation here at Darwin Colombia.

Today, I am glad to show you the clean stock program and we will start with the tissue culture lab.

Let's go.

Welcome, we are at Darwin Colombia's tissue culture lab.

We are very lucky to have an on-site tissue culture lab.

All the clean stock process begins in here.

This is a clean environment and this is why we have to wear all this gear to be protected inside the tissue culture lab and protect our processes in here.

We start here propagating plants from the very meristems of the plant.

This is how we achieve the first step to have clean plants.

Tissue culture is the best way to start our production process.

Here we start from single meristems, the very tips of the plant, disease and virus-free tissue.

We place them on carefully prepared media that contains the nutrients and vitamins that it requires to grow and form whole plants.

The environment here is controlled; temperature, light, and humidity give the plants what they need to grow healthy and happy.

Everything in the chamber hood is sterile.

The meristems were isolated from the cuttings, the leaves, and the external tissue was already disinfected.

So what she's doing right now is she's isolating the meristem; it's tiny, so that's why she needs that stereoscope to look through it to make sure that she's only taking the meristem.

That should be a really small, tiny part; that's why it's free of viruses and microorganisms.

What she will do next is place that meristem into the vial.

The vial contains specific media with nutrients, sugars, and vitamins that enable that small meristem to grow and develop, creating a new plant.

This is a three-week meristem.

This is a 12-week meristem getting big.

This is a small plant from the single meristem you already saw.

This requires a lot of skill from our technicians to make sure that the plants are nice-looking as this one.

After six weeks of the plant being placed into the media, we divide them into smaller pieces or nodes.

This way we can increase the number and multiply as many times as we need.

Remember that this is a process that takes planning and most of the time this multiplication process can be repeated up to five or six times.

This is the process of multiplication of a Monarda Bee Mine Red, one of the greatest Monardas in our assortment.

Once we reach numbers, the explants are placed in a new and fresh media.

The difference is that this media contains rooting hormones that engage the new plants to form roots, and they will grow and will eventually get transferred to our greenhouse.

Our next step in the tour.

This is a baby Monarda Bee Mine Red being produced in our tissue culture lab.

So the last step here in the tissue culture lab is when the numbers are fulfilled, plants are placed in the rooting media.

So basically we change the composition of the media, adding a little bit of hormone for rooting and hence the plants to form nice, beautiful roots like this.

This is what we will show you being transplanted into the next step of the tour, the hardening greenhouse.

And this is just the first part of how we can ensure the high quality and clean plants in our stock.

The next step in our clean stock process is to take these stage three plants into our hardening greenhouse.

First, we need to sort them out and guarantee that plants fulfill the quality that we require.

In order to keep our plants clean, we have a strict policy for entering a greenhouse.

Each person must step in the bath of disinfectant to clean their boots.

When you get into this in-between area, it's important to never open doors at the same time so that insects don't get into the greenhouse.

Every person wears a coat, gloves, hairnet, and sanitizes their hands.

Workers that are assigned to a specific greenhouse to work don't get into another greenhouse to further minimize the spread of diseases.

We don't want cross-contamination to happen.

Thank you, Catherine.

Now that we all know how to stay clean, let's see how the process looks like inside here.

The first thing here now is the flasking plants.

We take them to stage three tissue culture plants out of the containers.

Remember, it's important to keep them hydrated.

Now we start sorting the plants out.

Basically, we want big plants to go with the big group and small plants to get in a separate group.

It's important for us to sort the plants out by size and root content.

We can handle them better and take care of individual plants once we have them separated by size.

Thank you.

Once they are sorted, now we can take these tissue culture propagated plantings into liners.

Sanitation is really important.

Remember, we always encourage our workers to sanitize their hands and to be organized in every single step of their job.

Here the process is simple.

Just take the already sorted plants and take them into the pitmoss.

This is what we call a transplant.

It is very important here to avoid causing any damage to the root.

This will slow down the process.

We are now in stage one of the hardening area.

This is an important phase that lasts for around one week and a half.

Plants are placed here in the heavy shade cloth and heavy mist requirement.

It is very important to avoid overwatering the substrate.

Just mist is required for getting the leaves fresh.

Plants have been here for six weeks now.

This is stage two.

You can see more light and less humidity on the substrate.

This is how a fully rooted plant should look like.

Nice plug formation and toned plants ready for transplant.

We just saw those plants are ready.

They are beautiful.

This will be the end of the hardening stage.

Now let's go to the nucleus and see how they look like when they are planted.

From the hardening greenhouse to the nucleus block, the purpose of the nucleus block is to provide a clean and safe environment that will allow us to create stock plants where we can use the cuttings to build up more stock plants.

They are so important that these 100 plants eventually will build into 1,100 plants into production that will provide 33,000 cuttings into the market.

I want to show you this Sedum, Yellow Diamonds.

We grew this back in the hardening greenhouse.

Now we are here in the nucleus block.

We are transplanting these by 15 plants per crate in this coco fiber media.

These plants will be grown for 16 weeks.

We will be able to harvest cuttings from them and transfer them into the propagation greenhouse.

Then we will root them to form new mother stock plants.

Thank you for letting me be your guide on this tour through our clean stock program today here at Darwin Colombia.