Grow Your Favorite Plants from Cuttings!
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Instead of buying your favorite plants, MAKE YOUR OWN! With some basic equipment, a little space, and a bit of know-how, you can grow baby plants!
Most of the planting stock you buy at your favorite nursery is grown by cuttings - not by seed. There are huge advantages to doing it this way. Remember biology class and how reproduction works? There are two ways to get offspring - sexual and asexual (without sex).
Sexual propagation produces seeds that possess the characteristics of both parents. This is a common and economical way to produce huge amounts of offspring, but there are some major drawbacks. It takes a long time to get sizable plants and trees from seed. And, there may be undesirable traits from one of the parents, such as size, coloration, thorniness, lack of hardiness, and so forth.
Asexual propagation allows us to get around those downsides by cloning the contributing plant - as it is. A clone retains all the DNA of the plant - you are simply making copies. While commercial growers literally grow 1,000’s of plants at a time, you can grow as few or as many you’d like, depending on your needs, space, and budget.
Late summer to early autumn is a good time to do this, using semi-hard tip cuttings from your favorite plants. We cloned Gro-Low sumac, honeysuckle, jasmine, plumbago, Rose of Sharon, and several others. Semi-hard cuttings are good because they are more durable than softwood cuttings in early spring. The plant has hardened up a bit over the summer and the cutting will have more resources “on tap” when you work to root them. When they root, the cutting is said to have “struck.”
In this episode, DirtFarmerJay shows you how to start cuttings using readily available supplies from your favorite home center and nursery. He strongly recommends that you use a journal as you start plants - both to keep track of the varieties, but also details about how long it took for rooting to occur, the level of success, and so forth. This will allow you, over a few seasons, to become proficient with the “recipe” needed for each type of plant you wish to propagate.
Additionally, you can find several resources for rooting cuttings, one of our favorites is:
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/5/3464/files/2013/09/cuttings-for-ground-covers-1befo95.pdf
Now, you can buy some of your favorite plants, and if they are not patented, you can propagate other plants very inexpensively. And, you can JUST DO IT YOURSELF.
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