Mint, How To Propagate From Cuttings

So in this video I'm going to talk about two different types of cuttings that you can do to propagate mint. Now for the first one all you will need is a pair of scissors, a glass and a glass of water and then your mint plant. It's very simple. Mint is one of the easiest plants that you can use to make cuttings and propagate because it's always wanting to root and take root and make new plants naturally so it's very easy to do cuttings from it. So you want to get your mint plant. Now you want to choose some of the healthiest foliage with the darkest green leaves and good long stems because this will be the easiest to root. So you want to find one like this one here and you want to cut it quite far down. So here's the cuttings. I've got one here as well. So all you have to do now is remove the lower leaves. So I'll just put my camera down so I can do it with two hands. Now it's very easy you just have to hold it at the top with the other two fingers just gently pull and the bottom leaves come off as easy as that. So I'll do the same for this one. Just remove all the bottom leaves and that's the two cuttings prepared there. So what you want to do now is just cut it to the nearest internode. So you can see here you've got little knots there. You just want to cut it just below that knot there. Pop that in the water. So the same with this one. Let me get the focus better for you. There's a little knot just here so I'm just going to cut it just below that and put that in the water. So the reason I'll just take a few more leaves off there. You just want about five or six leaves on the plant and pop that in the water. You want the stems well covered in water. So the reason why you cut it off at the node there is because that's where the most growth hormones are and the most embryonic cells are there for the new roots. So you cut it off there it will encourage it to root better. Keep it in a bright place but not in direct sunlight. Somewhere that's warm but not hot and dry and about with the mints they're not too fussy. They can go pretty much anywhere and after a few weeks just to get some healthy roots. Once you've got the healthy roots you can then pop them into soil and you'll have a happy healthy mint plant like this. Of course with all the leaves you're taking off you can use them for making whatever you want with your mint. Now the other method is it's not as easy and it's a bit trickier. It's not as commonly used but you can still do it if you want to make a huge amount of mint for whatever reason you want to make loads of mint. You know you might cut all your leaves off and you want to use the excess or you can always do this in winter as well because you know we can't normally do stem cuttings in winter because mint often dies down to the ground. So another one is root cuttings. So I'll just place the camera here so you can see better. So what you want to do is either dig your mint out the ground in winter or if it's in a pot pull it out the pot and during the autumn it sends out a lot of runners. That's what you can see here spiraling around the pot. You can see when they grow up to the surface they start growing leaves and into new plants. So all you need to do is find some healthy runners, find the end of it where at the surface there where you've got a growing tip and you just want to carefully pick it out without snapping it and get a good long section of runner just like that. So I'll now cut that just like there put that back in the pot. So what we've got now is a section of runner with some already some fresh roots you can see so it's already rooted this so I can just separate them because there's actually quite a few here there's a few runners something like that you can see it's already got some you can get in focus you've got some small roots on the bottom it's even got a growing tip you can see even better with this one though this one's a much larger one you can see the roots there already as you can see the growing tip is already going green with small leaves so all you need to do for this the root cuttings is you want to bury the entire thing with just the very tips poking out the top so you get yourself some soil you then want to bury this completely in that soil so just pop it in bury it and you just have the very tips poking out the top just like that and now you put that somewhere could it be winter it'll probably be quite cold put it somewhere cool but not too hot you know like a window sill in a room that's not too warm and after well this is really quick probably if it's somewhere quite warm but not too dry after a week or so to put it on strong growth because it's got it's already got the roots established and it's already got shoots going so that's actually a much quicker way of making cuttings than the leaf cuttings but it's just a bit trickier because you've got to dig up the soil it's a lot messier as you can see as well but you'll get a quicker more robust plant in less time it's also a cutting that you can do in winter and autumn whereas the foliage you can only do leaf cuttings throughout the time of year when it's got leaves on the plant which is spring to autumn so this is good for winter you can't really do this in summer because the plant only really runners in in autumn and winter but that's just another way of doing mint cuttings as I said mint is one of the easiest plants to do cuttings and once you've got it in the ground it keeps spreading as well so most people once you've got one mint plant you don't need another but if you want to make more give some away to friends and this is the easiest way to do it