A gardener has asked me to write a column on obtaining plants for free, especially from cuttings so your wish is my command.
There are several ways you can obtain free plants and the best of these is from collecting seeds from any plant that flowers and seeds including all fruiting plants.
The other ways are by cuttings, layering, division, grafting and air layering.
Air Layering is when you wrap moist sphagnum moss around a stem or branch to make roots form while it?s still attached to the parent plant; that’s air layering.
It can be assisted by making a small knick in the stem over which you wrap wet sphagnum moss and then hold in place with tape such as insulation tape.
After a couple of months or less you carefully remove the tape and check for roots in the sphagnum moss and if found you then cut the stem/branch off the plant below the newly formed roots and plant the now rooted stem into the ground or container.
This would be the easiest way to take cuttings off hard wood plants and trees.
Readers may remember that I have talked occasionally about controlling insects pests in mature trees such as Rhododendrons using the Tree Bands that we sell.
On a rhododendron or other tree that has thin bark take a length of the Tree Band long enough to wrap around the trunk of the target tree.
You then soak the felt of the Tree Band in straight Wallys Super Neem Tree Oil then wrap around the trunk and hold it firmly in place with a couple of drawing pins.
Note not all Brands of Neem Oils will work doing this you need the proper cold pressed Neem Oil.
The Super Neem Oil soaks into the bark and is taken up into the canopy of the tree with the flow of sap from the roots. Anything feeding in or on the tree will get a dose of the Neem and stop eating to starve to death.
We advise to only leave the treatment on the tree for one month as air layering can happen which is not good for the tree.
The Tree Band can be taken off, new Neem Oil applied and located at another place on the trunk for another month. Very useful on say a rhodo that 40 feet tall and has thrips.
It works faster than using Wallys Neem Tree Granules in the root zone of the tree and in some tree types the Neem Granules are not very successful so the Tree Bands are best.
The bands are reusable year after year as needed for control.
Back to free plants….. Another method of ‘Layering’ is to take a low branch that can be bent down to the ground where bury or cover with soil part of the branch and pin it down to hold it in the soil
with the leaves on the end of the branch poking out of the soil.
It pays to put a little knick in that part of the branch that is buried to speed up the rooting.
Once again after a couple of months you examine the branch and if roots have formed the you can cut the branch off the parent and have a new free plant.
Layering and cutting grown means that your new free plant/tree will be the clone of the parent.
With Buxus plants you can layer by piling up soil or compost around the base of the plant up to covering a number of the lower branches and leave like that for a month or two and those lower branches will root up and you have a number of new free Buxus plants to use.
By the way if you have Buxus plants and they catch the dreaded Buxus disease simply spray them with Wallys Perfection and they will quickly recover.
Good control is to spray even healthy looking Buxus about every couple of months with the Perkfection.
Cuttings are done on perennials and a lot of plants very simply using one of several methods.
In some cases all you need for a cutting is a actual leaf that has been pared off the parent plant with a little bit of the stem that attached it to the parent.
An interesting thing here is that if you take a leaf of a Hoya without a bit of stem attached, the Hoya leaf will root up but never become a vine, it will just live for years as a single rooted leaf.
Cutting or leaf propagation commercially in a nursery is done on a bed of sharp sand with a underneath heat pad and overhead grow-lux lighting along a automatic misting system that lightly mist the bed every 30 minutes or so.
To be most successful doing cuttings is to have a heat pad with a polystyrene pad underneath to ensure all heat goes up.
Sharp sand or also called plasters sand is best medium to strike cuttings in and it is easy to see when it become dry.
A seedling tray or punnet, which I like to put a bit of compost into the bottom so that roots do have a little goodness to go down to then a good layer of sand over that.
Have a trigger sprayer with a little bit of Magic Botanic Liquid and a little molasses dissolved in the hopefully non-chlorinated water.
Mist the cuttings and the sand two or three times a day and best have the tray where there is good light overhead.
Preparation of cutting is important.
To be more successful spray the foliage of the plant where you want to take cuttings of, under and over the leaves and stem with Vaporgard a couple of days before taking the cuttings.
This will reduce the cuttings moisture needs while rooting up.
It also means you don’t need to de-floilinate the cutting that means more energy to grow roots from a good amount of leaf surface..
Otherwise once to have your cutting which should be about 6 to 8 cm long you remove about 90% of the leaves leaving only a couple or so small new tip leaves on the cutting.
If there are only larger leaves at the head of the cutting you cut those leaves in half or down to a quarter their original size.
The cutting needs some leaf area to gain energy from light but not so much as to put a moisture strain on the base of the cutting where roots are to form.
Rooting hormone? Maybe worth while on hard wood cuttings but not a great benefit on soft wood cuttings which strike fairly easy anyway.
If you want to use something without buying a rooting product then dip the end into honey or just spit on it.
Many cuttings will root up and grow in just water.
The best container to use is one that does not let light into the water as roots grow better in the dark and it stops the water from gaining algae.
Saying that I use a rack of glass test tubes which I strike various cuttings in after removing most of the foliage.
The rack sits on the kitchen window sill and gets bright light in the morning but not direct sun light and then good light for rest of the day.
As we have filter tap water there I change the water ever couple of days which keeps the algae from happening and also gets some oxygen into the water.
Even though roots form better out of light in the dark they do ok in the test tubes and its easy to see that they are well rooted.
With vegetables the best free plants come from a vegetable that you allow to mature and seed.
The fresh seed germinate very quickly and easily by just scattering over the area which they will grow to maturity in.
You thin out the plants as they grow to give ample room to the plants you want to mature and eat. Repeat this every crop and be amazed how better the vegetables are after a few generations.
Image credit: Ben Iwara
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