Thought I'd share this... cuttings in perlite (with pics)

had they started to callous Dee?

No Simon, they don't look like they have callused. I have pulled out all the ones that have gone brown and dead and they don't have antycallus on them.
I don't want to pull out the two remaining green ones just to have a look. This variety is Tequila Sunrise.
I do have a row of another variety that I pinched from a park. I don't know its name, but it has not produced leaves although it is still turgid and its shoots are swelling. It does not seem to be affected by the fungus. Mysterious.

I had about 20-30 'Lamarque' cuttings in a plastic bag wrapped in newspaper Dee that have also fungused on me... they just went furry. have put them outside in an open pot now to see I can save any of them.

Did the cuttings go brown/black from the ends? A lot of my cuttings do this too and I've been doing a bit of reading about it. Apparently it is caused by a soil borne fungi (which is strange because with perlite there is no soil... maybe it's on the sheers we are using or they pick it up when we lie them down or maybe the stems were splashed with dirt before we cut them off etc ... I don't know), called fusarium (lots of different species of it though). It causes cuttings to die from the cut end upwards looking like this (this photo is from a plant called Kava which had the pathology of the fungus confirmed):

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I can't find much information about treatments except that they are mostly copper based fungicides... I don't know much apart from that.

Yes, a lot of mine went black at the bottom too.
I wonder if we sterilised the cuttings before putting them in the perlite? Maybe a soak in a weak solution of bleach (sodium hyperchlorite) ? Or a soak in copper solution?

*shrugs* I think sometimes the fungus might actually be up and through the tissue before we even try and grow them. Endophytic fungi is common... so maybe some cuttings are just destined to fail.

Exactly, the survival of the fittest, or nature just made it that only some are destined to make it if they get brokened off and some how pushed into the ground.

Simon, stay with the Perlite and orchid pot particularly if you are going to try Hydroponics. You are partly on the way to 95% success rate.

I have a few cuttings in Perlite, under a 2 litre juice bottle. I cut the base of the bottle off and pushed the bottle into the Perlite or dropped the bottle over the whole pot. All the cuttings have new leaves, and I am unscrewing the bottle tops for a few minutes each day. Fingers crossed as there's no sign of roots yet!

I had a stack of cuttings in a plastic container, in perlite...inspired by a post of Simon's.

Then one day I took the lid of the container to let some air circulate because some were moulding.

I forgot to put lid back on and the cold night killed all the new leaves.

Some are reshooting now, so all may not be lost.

Great idea Simon, it did work very well until i left the lid off!

I have been thinking about this and am beginning to think that putting the cuttings in perlite has a similar effect to pre-callousing the cuttings in moist newpaper (as mentioned in a different post) and maybe using the perlite would be better to just get the callous started and then transfer them to a potting mix to finish them off. The perlite holds moisture without water logging the cuttings, it has a lot of air spaces within it creating parge pockets of very moist air in which callouses can form. I started thinking this when I was pre-callousing the 'Fortuniana' cuttings where the key seemed to be ot keep the cuttings humid but not wet in an oxygen-rich environment and at the same time I had lost a number of cuttings in the perlite, I think (just my personal opinion and not backed up by anything), because I left them in there too long and the cutting could not start to feed to support the development of roots due to the lack of nutrients available. The cuttings I took out of the perlite when the callouses formed went on to do well, but the ones I left in to see if I could get roots to form did poorly on roses that weren't as easy to strike as 'Amadis'. David... that little orange mini was a casualty of this process. I thought I had one going but it too eventually went brown and I lost all of them

Simon, I will send some once it starts to grow again.

Some of the Queenslanders use Coles basic (NOT clumping) kittylitter as a much cheaper alternative to perlite. I haven't tried cuttings in pure kittylitter as they have, but I use it as an aerator (about 1 in 4 volume) in potting mix to strike cuttings.

I reckon kitty litter would work well too... these days I am having just as much luck with plain old potting mix as I am with specific mixes or perlite.