How to Grow Roses From Cuttings Fast and Easy | Rooting Rose Cuttings with a 2 Liter Soda Bottle

Now we've all heard the saying that every rose has its thorn, and when it comes to roses, it seems like the biggest thorn of all is propagating them. But I am convinced that we can solve this mystery together once and for all. So guys, just a few months ago, my wife and I went to the local nursery and we just decided we want to get some roses around here. And so we went and bought some. We've had them in the past, but the deer just love these guys so much. But we're going to put them in an enclosed space, probably in our garden area, and we're not going to worry about deer anymore. But check these beauties out. Look at this. We are in love with this yellow right now. It's just gorgeous. Look at that yellow rose. And then we've got this pink one over here. Isn't that just a beauty? Look at all those petals. When we went to the nursery, this one smells wonderful. It's starting to get to the end right there, but more coming through. And the red's starting to come out. When we went to the nursery, we wanted to get varieties that were more old-fashioned and obviously not anything new that was copyrighted that we couldn't take cuttings from. But I just love old-fashioned plant varieties because they're tried and true. They tend to withstand the test of time and they tend to perform really well. So we've got a base here. We've got a red, a yellow, a lavender, a pink, and we've even got a white that hasn't bloomed yet. But we're going to get these guys planted out in our landscape. Now it's a little early right now. Roses are taken as semi-hardwood cuttings. And we want to wait for this new succulent growth. You see that bending right there? We want to wait for that to harden off down more like what we got here. In fact, we might be able to take cuttings from this lower part of the stem right here because it is a little more woody and hardened off. And maybe we'll just give that a go. So as I said, you want to take rose cuttings as semi-hardwood cuttings. And rhododendrons are semi-hardwood taken sometime in late August, but roses you can take a lot sooner than that, obviously. We're in June right now. And it's not necessarily the time, the month that you're taking them, but the condition of the wood that matters. So I've had these roses out in my hoop house here all winter long and, well, not all winter long. We just bought them a few months ago, but through the last part of winter, through the spring, and the growth has been coming on faster because we're in this slightly warmer environment out here. So this is a little bit earlier than you would normally take the rose cuttings if they're out on your property. Now it's the beginning of June. I think it's June 6th today. So, but I've got plenty of growth on those guys. Now, a good rule of thumb for you guys is you don't want to take the rose cuttings when the new buds, the flower buds are still just starting to open. You want to take those cuttings when the flowers are fully open and the petals start falling off and that new growth is starting to harden off. You don't want the soft, supple growth that can kind of bend over real easy. You want the growth further down the stem that is going to be a little bit more firm and going to be able to hold up to being cut off of the parent plant. All right. So before we go any further, let's talk about what we're going to propagate this guy in, or these guys, or however many cuttings we end up taking. So I've got a standard one gallon pot here and I've got it filled with fine for bark. You guys have seen that before. And that's what we're going to stick the cuttings into. But this is how I always propagated roses in the past before the deer got ahold of them. And once again, if you guys know me, you know that I like containers. So these two liter soda bottles work absolutely fantastic for just about anything you want to try and propagate, especially softwood cuttings and some semi-hardwood cuttings through the fall, because it's a beautiful built-in system. Guys, you've got a vent cap on top. I don't know if you guys have ever tried this before, but I absolutely love these soda bottles. So I'm going to cut the wrapper off of this. I've got my other tool here. Let's see. A pair of scissors. We're just going to cut the wrapper right off of this. I've been saving this for a while now. You want as much light getting down to that cutting as possible. All right. So we've got the label off the bottle. Now we've got a nice clear plastic container with a little vent on top for the roses. The next thing I'm going to do is just pop a hole right through the bottom here. And then I'm going to kind of work the scissors up and cut around the very bottom of this all the way around so that I can slide this down over top of a cutting. All right. So there it is guys all done. I've cut the bottom off. We've got our little vent cap there. Slick little setup, huh? And the thing that we're going to do with this though, I want to show you, obviously, you know, this is going to fit right over top of the rose cutting. It's going to be coming up through here and you got plenty of humidity around this area. So the one thing I want to say though is, and you'll want to watch it and make sure it doesn't dry out. But if you take that cap off and don't add it into the equation, it makes a perfect setup. I've rooted plenty of things with in this way with the cap off without ever having it on. Sometimes people like to, like when they have a propagation dome, they seal the lid up the little caps all the way in the beginning, the little vent holes, and then they slowly open them. But with this method, you really don't need to do that. It's okay to have a little vent hole in here. One, because you don't have too much air space down in here to be able to draw air and flow it out too fast. So humidity can build up. And this hole too is small. So you're not losing a ton of humidity and moisture. And if your soil is moist enough, then it's able to build up plenty of humidity inside of this container without losing too much through the top. The added benefit of this just leaving the lid off here is as it does slowly vent, it's going to vent heat. It's going to vent the warm. And the thing with these cuttings is you want the tops cool and the bottoms warm. So if you try to put the cap on, it would hold more warmth in there. You want to let that moisture or not the moisture, but the heat vent out of that area and the moisture to build up inside. And you're going to do that by leaving the vent off and keeping the soil moist. You're going to have plenty of moisture in there and the heat's going to be able to vent. It's just a beautiful setup guys. Now I'm going to start with this lavender rose here. And I think I'm just going to take cuttings off of it right now because mainly the wood on the others just isn't hardened off enough yet. Like I said, I think I'm pushing it a little bit early with this, but I think it's going to turn out okay. The blooms here are starting to kind of get towards the end a little bit. Some of them are coming up fresh, but I've got some firmer material down on the stem a little bit more, and that's what we're going to take. The other reason I'm going after this guy is because it is absolutely fragrant. I mean, it just smells awesome and it's turning out to be one of my favorites. So let's zoom in on this guy and show you guys what we've got going on here. So I've got this older rose that bloomed here and the petals are getting near the end and it's a nice tall strong stem. I don't want to go after this because it's just, it's kind of thin and it bends a little more. It's still pretty soft wood. It might be okay, but this is a strong stock that is going to do really well I think. So I'm going to take this center one right here and we're going to get it. I'm going to snip that off and then we might be able to get multiple cuttings out of it. We'll take a look and see. So I'll snip this off and we'll come back and show you. All right, so there's our rose cutting and it's a nice long one right there. It's probably about two foot, a little over two foot long. And like I said, we need about, I don't know, eight inches on average for a cutting of these guys. And then you want some leaves at the top. So I may be able to get a couple of cuttings out of these. You want to make sure you cut below a node, which this is a node right here, a little leaf node. You want to cut below it. There's a higher concentration of undifferentiated cells in that node that will then be able to become roots. And then you also want some top branches to be able to have buds that can grow new branches and a few leaves to help make some food for the cutting. Then you still need enough space to cut another node below another node here and still have some leaves up here. So we'll work it out. We'll get some cuttings done here. And then everybody always asks me, what do you do with the flowers on top? Well, you take them inside for your wife. All right, so I got my two cuttings here and man, as you can see, they got thorns all over them. So I'm going to have to be a little bit delicate here with this. But the thing that I do, I generally don't strip bark off of roses because you're going to strip all these little thorns off of them. And then those create wounds for the roots to grow through. So that's how I've dealt with it in the past. Let's go ahead and prepare this big one here and show you how that's going to work. The other thing you want to keep in mind is we want to make sure it fits inside of this. So we want to make sure that once we prepare it and we stick it in the soil, it's all going to fit. I think we're going to be okay. So as usual, we start and we just take off the leaves. I'm just ripping those guys off. And remember, you're also creating wounds there that are going to help the rooting process. All right, I'm going to leave my set of leaves on top here. In fact, actually, maybe what I'll do, I'll take one more layer. I've still got some leaves on top and then I want to cut those down because I don't need that many leaves. I'm going to cut down to probably just a few on each side here. Let's see, we'll go down to there. And we just got a few little leaves up on top there. And then we'll go through and we're just going to take all these little thorns off of here. They're kind of a pain to deal with, but hey, like I said, every rose has its thorn. And if you like roses, that's a part of dealing with it. So I just want to show you real quick and I'll take the rest off. There's the wounds that those little thorns are creating once we strip them off. So you can see there's going to be lots of wounds all the way up and down this little stem. So I'll take the rest of these guys off and show you what we got. All right guys. So there's my two little cuttings and I already went ahead and dipped them in the rooting hormone and you can see right here, all of those little stems or all those little thorns that were on there all kind of accepted some rooting hormone and it's going to work out real well. We're probably going to get lots of roots in those areas, but we just got a couple little leaves on top of each of them. One's a little longer than the other. In fact, one was just further up the stem. So we'll see what we get. I don't know. I'm excited. Usually this method works really well for roses. I'm going to stick them in this pot now. Let's get the little lid on there and see what happens. A couple of little tips for you too guys with these is these rose cuttings generally, I like to do them with a powder rooting hormone. The reason is roses are, for some reason, seem to be a little more susceptible to fungal diseases and the powder rooting hormone helps prevent that. Helps keep things dry from the beginning and just prevent that. I don't know if that's true or not. It's just my theory. It's my feeling. It just works for me. So that's what we're going to do. And then the other thing is with this powder hormone, I like to put the water in the pot. See how it's dripping out? I just completely saturated that pot with water right now and I'm letting it just absorb tons of water. Now the excess will just drain right out because that's my fine fir bark that I use and it drains really well. But the medium is already wet and then I can stick my cutting in and not water all that rooting hormone off right afterwards. So I'll stick these two cuttings in. We're going to put them in the same little pot together with the same little lid and we're going to see what happens guys. All right. So I got my little pot here. It's all been watered well. I got my cuttings taken, rooting hormone on and we are going to go somewhere kind of near the center and just put that right down in. A lot of times people like to... actually you know what? I'm going to put it kind of at an angle. Yeah some of the rooting hormones getting pushed off of it but the most of it's going to stay on that cutting. There we go. You just want to tamp down around it a little bit. Make sure it's firmly in place and we'll get this cutting and we'll shove it right down in there. I'm going to try and make sure the leaves aren't completely together. Now you see I kind of put them at an angle. This one's angled out and that one's angled out that way. So as the roots grow if both of them take they don't you know I got a little space to work with. They're going to tangle but and probably what I'll do is leave them in this pot until the winter when they go dormant and then it's really easy to pull things apart and pull roots out of here. So anyway we'll see what happens. Well you know I'm probably not going to wait for that because you guys are going to see the roots on these guys. We might have to tear these up. We'll see. Anyway I got all that on there. Now I'm going to put my little lid right over top here and just set it right down in that soil. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be buried in it or anything because I don't mind a little airflow and we'll see how long it takes for some humidity to build up inside there. Now normally I wouldn't do this but because I've got this little vent cap that's taken off of it I am just going to leave these little guys right inside the hoop house. The reason I normally wouldn't do that is because too much light comes through this plastic and overheats things totes that are sealed. But this isn't sealed. It's got the little vent cap. We can let heat flow right out the top of it and it's got plenty of moisture down in there to evaporate and create humidity. I'll watch it. Nothing in nature is perfect here so I'm going to watch it. If I don't see humidity building up enough I may take a little spray bottle and just spritz down inside of there to get some humidity in there. Then I'll watch it again and I'll see if that all evaporates. If it evaporates too fast then I may just stick the cap and just set it on top so that I can see how... I'll kind of play with it and see what it takes to get the humidity level built up in there. But even if you don't see anything building up inside this container it's still a more humid environment down inside of there. I've snipped plenty of leaves off of those cuttings. They were robust cuttings and I think they're going to be strong enough and they've got enough energy and food stored up in them. I think these guys are going to do just great and in fact as we're talking I don't know if the camera's picking this up but I can already start seeing some humidity building up underneath these leaves here. So I'll come back we'll see what it looks like here before too long. All right guys so it's been only about seven, eight minutes. I came back out here and we've already got humidity built up. Hopefully that camera's picking it up but a lot of humidity under those leaves there and there's humidity all the way up near the top here as well and that's with that cap off and that's all we need. Just enough humidity to keep those leaves from losing too much moisture. It's just going to create a beautiful little environment with a little bit of airflow and get that heat off of there and I'm telling you guys this is just the perfect setup. This is how I did it in the past and this is how I'm going to do it again and by god I am going to grow roses again. So I don't know how long this is going to take now. Usually roses are like four to eight weeks. It just depends on the condition of the wood. I would lean more towards the eight week part of that but I'm taking them a little bit earlier and so we'll see what happens. Maybe they'll root even sooner but we'll come back here when the time is right and something has happened. All right guys real quick it's about four days after I took these cuttings of the roses and I want to show you look at how much humidity is built up in these in this little two liter bottle here. I haven't touched it. I haven't done anything with it. I haven't watered it. It's just been building up humidity and I'll tell you that all this humidity was in here the very next morning. I just didn't have my camera on me and I didn't get a shot of it but this much humidity has been built up in this little system ever since that actually it was that evening but there's no problems with that at all and here we are like I said about four days later and all those leaves are still healthy, viable, doing well and that's with the top off here. It's just letting heat out but the humidity is built up just fine in that little two liter bottle. Guys guys guys you got to check this out. I came out here checking on things and I saw something really cool. So there are rose cuttings and they've been sitting back in there since the 6th of June. I've done nothing with them. They've just been sitting there. I keep it watered occasionally not a whole lot but occasionally keep the soil moist and today is July 10th here. Let's just let's take this puppy up here and we are going to put it up on our bench and show you something. I'm not ready to take this out yet but if we come down here let's turn this pot. You're gonna like what you see. Look at that. Look at that. Isn't that what we do this for guys? Isn't that what it's all about? Look at that beautiful little rose root coming through there. Beautiful little guy. Look at that. Anything else going on? Oh look at that. Beautiful beautiful little rose root. You see that right in there. There it is. So far we're doing good guys. We've got roots coming through. They're coming through the bottom. So we know we've got four inches maybe of roots coming off of these guys. I don't know which one of them's rooted. They're all viable. It's only been a little over a month. I'm gonna leave these guys in here a little longer. Now I know what you're worried about. You're thinking he's gonna rip these things out of here, spray water on them, tear them all to heck and they're gonna die. I'm not gonna do that yet but we are probably gonna do that at some point. But right now I just want to enjoy it while it's still doing okay. We've got the top off. This has been the lifesaver. I want you guys to know something. I have started other cuttings since I started this guy in this hoop house here and those cuttings were put in a sealed container that didn't have a little top on it and they wilted. They wilted within probably I think it was a couple hours because even though this is 50% shade. You hear that rooster? Camellia? Even though this is 50% shade there's still a lot of heat buildup in the sun. I can see the sun through this although it's just an orange dot. It still is too much and it beats down through this plastic and it heats up inside of here and that's why I tell you guys put this kind of stuff on the north side of a building where it gets no direct sun but lots of overhead blue sky. You want light but you don't want direct sun because it will cook them. But because we had this top off of this thing all the heat could escape. We've got plenty of humidity built up in there. Look at that. Plenty of humidity built up inside of this thing but all of the heat has been able to just flow out of here without any problems at all and those cuttings look Let's take this off and just show you. Look at these guys. Beautiful. Beautiful. They're maintaining their green. There are a few little spider webs on here. They're maintaining their green. They're I mean they're not yellowing at all. They're not showing any signs of any problems going on with these guys. They're just absolutely gorgeous. They're going to do really well. They're going to root really well. They're already proving to us. I mean look at this. They're already proving to us that they're getting some roots through here and they're just starting to grow on really good. So now the next question is when do we take this thing off? Well because we put three of them in one gallon container to get or three did we we did two of them. We did two of them in a one gallon container. I don't know which one it is that rooted. So I'm a little hesitant to take it off quick. I like to do roses for maybe six weeks before I really start feeling comfortable with the rooting and that was about the time I was thinking about pulling these guys out of here spraying them off and showing you the roots and I may still do that. So just chill out. We'll get there but I think I want to leave this on a little bit longer and then at that point what I'll probably do just so you're aware just so you know what's going on is I'll put maybe we'll even do that now we'll see and you'll have to watch it but maybe I could put something just underneath this little guy to hold it up off the bark so that a little bit of airflow can get down under here and flow out the top and we'll just do a little at first and then we'll just prop it up a little higher all the time and eventually this thing will be growing on its own roots without it won't need the humidity anymore it'll be completely acclimated but that's how we're going to acclimate this guy it's already pretty well acclimated because it's got airflow coming out through here anyway and then it's just a matter of fertilizing and letting the new growth come on but I'm going to keep this video rolling I'm going to show that to you guys in this one video as we go so you're not going to get this quite yet but actually you are going to because by the time you see this then I'll read anyway so I'm not going to get this quite yet I gotta see once again I'm the one that has to wait for this but that's how the roses are doing we'll come back when a little bit more is happening. All right guys so here's our rose cuttings now let's recap for a second so we started these cuttings on June 6th today is July 20th the last clip that you saw these guys was July 10th about a month after we started them now today like I said July 20th and maybe a week ago I propped this up like I said I was gonna found these little metal pieces here that I clipped off of a hog panel and I just propped it up so some airflow could flow under here and up through here and out our little chimney out the top and that would let all the heat escape but I propped it up so that we could start acclimating these guys to the ambient air and we didn't have so much humidity in there you can still see that backside I hope you can see that there's still a little bit of humidity there's not a lot but it's just slightly more humid on the inside there than it is on the outside but these guys are acclimated now so I'm gonna pull the top off we've got our beautiful rose cuttings and we are gonna do what you guys don't want me to do but we're gonna do it anyway because this is for educational purposes we're gonna pull the rose cuttings out of the pot guys and I'm just gonna tip these out and if each of you can grab an end of the stem now we don't want to pull grab grab the end of the stem there Emily you grab the end of the other stem you're okay just don't grab the thorn you're okay and slowly kind of don't pull I'm just gonna kind of there we go we're getting it we're getting it hold on to them hold on your hats look at that we got roots guys we got roots all right girls so let's show them how we're going to get all these roots out you guys see them look at that the roots are growing all down the bottom now don't get panicky guys don't we're going to be nice and gentle with these we're just going to kind of gently tease these apart look at that isn't that just fascinating isn't that just the most fascinating thing you ever saw roses they're such a problem for people and here we are rooting them like crazy and you guys can do the exact same thing if you just follow these little tips and tricks guys all right I'm gonna set this one down and we are gonna look at this look at that guys look at that you want to gently rinse that bark away from those roots I'm showing them roots look at that guys I know that the kids think I'm crazy too look at that look at all those roots guys isn't that fantastic isn't that absolutely nuts these things just root like crazy a little more root initial starting to pop through there and you're wanting to start rooting more look at that beautiful beautiful little rose cutting guys beautiful let's do the other one look at that guys look at that isn't that just fantastic look at all those roots trying to get that in there for you because I know that that is the money shot guys that's what you want to see that is a stocky sturdy cutting that is going to do just fine I'm going to pop this guy up as well as the other one and we're going to see what it can do it's going to grow just fine guys I'm really excited about this all right guys so we got each of our roses here and we're going to pop these up real quick now the roots are still moist everything's looking good we've got some moist uh fur bark here I'm just gonna get these going once again I only got the one hand girls don't want to touch the bark and I don't blame them so I'm gonna take a hit for the team here a couple more weeks from now these roots are just going to recover and fully take off and these things are going to be filling up these pots again we're going to have some beautiful new rose bushes look at that see I can do things with one hand sort of and then we're going to run it over the pots just run it across the pots you don't want to knock all the bark out of there yep there you go good job go over a few times other one okay we're going to turn this off go ahead and turn the water off and then we got to do one more thing here we need a little bit of fertilizer going into these guys you want to come up close alley see what I'm doing so we've got that slow release fertilizer here and I always put a little bit of that in it's a four months slow release and I'm not going to use all of that in that little cup because that's a lot for a newly rooted cutting and we're just going to sprinkle some of that around the cutting there and that's all they need so now Emily we're going to turn the hose back on over here there you go and we're just going to kind of go over them real quick and water in water in that fertilizer there we go and it won't fully release yet it'll take a little time for it to do that and then we're going to go set these guys back over by the other plants and that's it guys that's all there is to our little rooted cuttings all right guys so that is all there is to it I hope you guys learned something from this but there's our rose cuttings and they're all watered in well I know a lot of you guys are worried about oh man he pulled them out he's going to kill those cuttings they're not going to die those guys are hardy and they're strong and there's more root initials growing up and down those little stalks and them suckers are just going to burst out with tons more roots in the pots aren't they girls you believe me yeah you sure you believe me yeah what about you yeah you better believe me all right guys so thank you for watching this video I hope you take this information you guys go out and you propagate your own roses with a two liter soda bottle it's gonna work I'm telling you here it is for all you doubters out there it works roses are easy to propagate you're just using the right technique so I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did hit the like button subscribe if you want to follow along we'll do some updates on these roses have an awesome week and I'll see you in the next video adios take over girl