During the month of August is a great time to take cuttings of your favorite plants and once they’ve taken, plant elsewhere on your lot in October or trade with friends.
Getting cuttings to grow is fun if you’re patient
Contrary to what you may believe, getting cuttings to grow is not all that difficult. There are just two things to keep in mind, first – pick a plant with many trunks such as roses or dogwoods, and second – be patient while waiting for them to take.
To be successful at propagating by cuttings, you have to start with a piece of plant at least 6” long taken from a branch that has just bloomed. It is preferable to include about an inch of the old wood with the rest being the new green wood, and make a clean, sharp cut. Next you remove all the leaves except the top set (usually 2 leaves), this is very important as the plant needs only two leaves to survive. Before sticking it into the rooting medium I usually dip the cut section in a dusting of Rotenone or some other growth hormone/damping-off preventative.
Then get a gallon size zip-lock type bag and put about 2 cups of finely sifted sandbox sand in the bottom of the bag. Thoroughly wet the sand but drain off any standing water, you only want it to be damp, not soaking wet. Stick your cuttings into the sand (usually 6-8 will fit in a bag) puff it up with a little air, and lock the zipper closed.
Keep the bag out of sunlight and place it somewhere you won’t disturb it ( I put them out under a pine tree in full shade sitting on top of a cement block). By mid-September, about 3-4 weeks, they will have a lot of new roots that you can see through the bottom of the bag.
At that point, you can plant them in individual pots in potting soil, keeping them in light shade, never putting them in direct sunlight, and by October they’ll be ready for gifts or to plant elsewhere on your lot.
Layering and air layering are fun to try
You can also propagate some plants easily with a technique called layering. Certain plants such as Euonymus, Pachysandra, Ivy, Forsythia and Verbenas are very easy to layer. What you do is take one of the stems of the plant, lay it down flat on the soil and anchor it to the soil. Some folks use wire bent into 8”long u-shapes and hammer them into the ground over each piece they want to layer.
You can scratch the bark with your fingernail to promote rooting, but it’s not necessary. Then you cover the section with some fresh dirt and a little water and forget about it. In several weeks there will be new roots on that section which can then be cut away from the mother plant and planted on its own.
If this sounds like too much work for you, with most of these plants you could bend a branch down in contact with the soil and put a brick or a rock on it to hold it down and it would probably take root in several weeks.
Then you just cut the branch before the end of the brick and you’ve got a new plant.
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