So in the last lecture we talked about creating bonsai from seed
and now we're going to talk about cuttings, which is a very easy way to create a bonsai
maybe even a little easier.
Some species are very difficult, if not impossible.
It can be very difficult to create a cutting from a pine.
But others are very very simple. A lot of the broadleaf evergreens can be grown very easily from a cutting
Satsuki Azalea is very very easy, boxwood is easy, your hollies are easier.
We'll talk briefly now about how to take your cutting, how to prepare it
how to use hormone, when to use hormones, some plants don't need it.
And then we're going to stick - this is a technical term, stick it into the soil. And then a bit of aftercare.
So time of year is another thing to keep in mind as a consideration
Your hardwood cutting is usually taken in fall or winter
creates a little callus, and then the roots begin to grow in the spring.
For the juniper, usually you want to take the juniper cutting
when it's in the growing season, so not when it's dormant.
And then there's also the softwood cutting
which for the deciduous tree would be sometime when it is still extending
and if you choose that option, then you're going to need a pretty significant misting apparatus.
And we'll share with you one of those in a little bit.
But first we're going to talk about how to prepare your cutting.
First what you don't want to do: ou don't want to try and take a cutting from this.
It might take, juniper is an easy plant to root.
On the other hand, you're going to have much better success if you take a cutting from a long extension.
Also, don't use a short little extension. Use a long one.
Give yourself a good eight inches or so.
We don't want it to be shallow.
That's about right. Notice I spent no time figuring out, you know, whether this is at an angle or whatever.
This is not where the roots come from. They don't come from the end, they come from all in here.
We're going to dip that in hormone before we stick it.
But first let's try the same thing up here.
Here's our trident maple shoot.
It's a nice long extension. Cut off the bottom branches on that
We want to leave some yeah, it has to has to extend - the extensions will grow our roots.
For these, it helps to be just ahead of a node, where we cut off some branches.
You generally get a fair number of roots coming from the node.
So while this is strong here
you don't want to take a little piece of it.
Or over here, although that might root for you
it's so skinny and it has very little energy in there, stored sugars and whatnot.
Something that's quite a bit thicker is going to do much better. Here's a really nice one.
Down here, that's a good size and has a lot of stored nutrition in it.
The juniper can create food, so it could be a little shorter
but I'd still go with a fairly significant thing. Don't try and make a cutting from a little tip.
So usually you're going to make, you know, 20 or 50 cuttings or something like that.
but for the purposes of our demo here, we'll just do a couple each, and we'll stick them.
All right, there we go.
All set to roll. We're going to put them in hormone now.
So I mentioned hormone. What does a hormone do?
The hormone helps us grow callus, and from the callus we can grow some roots
And as I mentioned, the roots don't really grow from where the cut side is
they grow from all throughout this region here, so we want to make a pretty good dip.
I just poured a little hormone in there, and this is - I'm going to make a usual, it's very simple, it's a 1:10
diluting with water. We swish that around a little bit.
You can use a powder, you can use a gel. There's nothing that says you have to do one thing.
Generally speaking, you leave your cuttings in for about 10 seconds, something like that. Five seconds.
For really particular plants, they can be very touchy about not only your dilution
but also the amount of time that you spend in there.
And then we're just going to let them dry for a little bit.
And then we'll put them into the soil in a little while.
Soil for making cuttings is as diverse as the number of people you talk to.
You can use many many different things.
I'm using the same soil that we're going to use throughout this conversation about propagation
which provides water and nutrition for the young growing plant.
We want our plants to grow strongly in the propagation phase, phase one.
For cuttings you want a deep pot. The seeds can be placed into a fairly shallow container
but for a cutting you want a deep one, because we insert them to a pretty good depth, usually three inches or so.
You can insert at an angle if you want.
I do recommend pushing in a chopstick first.
This isn't rocket science.
It's fun, it's easy.
So the angle is a way to start a plant that has some energy already.
It's a technique that can help you create an interesting base
you know, sort of like the first sentence in your paragraph kind of grabs you - it's your lead.
Unless you're creating a formal upright, this is a good beginning
and then you cut it here, and then you grow this out, you know, in a year or two
and then you already have some energy for your plant.
You don't have to do this. You can cut them - make them all straight up and down
because in a year, you're going to take all these out anyway.
If you leave them for longer than that everything grows together down there, and you have a big snarl
and that's a bit of a struggle to get apart.
So there's your cuttings. You want to water that in so you have good contact between the soil and the scion
and then you would like to keep it out of the wind.
Still in good light, because the light is going to grow your roots, these will open into leaves
and next we'll talk about a misting system, and possibly some bottom heat as well.
We want to create this. This is about a two year old juniper from a cutting.
And to be able to get there, we need to consider two things:
One, do we need bottom heat? The second is moisture.
We have a problem with moisture with our cuttings because we've cut all the roots off by making them
and so we have to supply the moisture by - usually it's mist.
Some of it is capillarity. We have soil here which is going to soak in a little bit
but if we leave that out on a sunny windy day, forget it. It's going to fry pretty quick.
So, here's a little trick for you to consider.
Although you can do it with your hand, there are many ways of misting.
This is an automatic system that is a lot of fun.
This hooks up to a sneaky misting system that sits over the top of the plants
and will run constantly unless you have it on something that will shut it off.
This is, I think, one of the most brilliant little inventions in the world of horticulture.
This is called an electronic leaf, and it has a very fine mesh on top of this leaf here.
It's set on a very delicate balance.
There's a little screw on the back so that you can create even a more delicate one if you want.
When mist falls from our mister up here, and hits this, it fills up the cells on there making this heavier.
This falls down, turns off the solenoid, which turns off the misting system
and then according to the humidity, the heat of the day
this evaporates, this rises, turning the misting system on.
so you can go off on your vacation, and you will have perfectly misted plants.
So although this is a complicated gadget, I think it's fun to share
and it allows us to understand ideal situation, to mist more when it's hot and sunny out
and to mist less when it's cool and rainy,
But you can just use a hand mister. That's the easiest way if you're only going to do a few pots now and then.
The next question that we have, is do we need bottom heat?
And for a hardwood cutting like this, that can help
because we have to create some callus down there over a period of months in the cool period of the year
and it can help conifers in particular, broadleaf evergreens as well
to create that callus and to root faster
because they tend to be a little slower in the deciduous trees to want to do that.
So the two cuttings that we made, the juniper and the hardwood cutting of the trident maple
would appreciate a little bit of bottom heat to create their callus and roots
the temperature of which is assisted by this heating mat.
And the heating mat plugs into the interior wall, and you can put it on a thermostat
and adjust it to right around 70° Fahrenheit or 21° Celsius
which will make your pot dry out, so you do want to keep up on your moisture level there.
But that will create a faster roots.
If you're creating a softwood cutting, you don't generally have to worry about the heating mat
because it's at the warmer time of the year, the temperature in the soil is usually spot on for creating roots.
So if you're in the cooler months of the year, you might want to put it on a heating mat.
If you're not in the cooler months of the year, you probably don't need that
but pay more attention to your misting, because that'll keep your cuttings hydrated
and give them a much greater chance of rooting for you.
After a month or two, especially if you are in the warm months of the year
you can find that your cuttings can resist pulling. If you tug on them lightly
and they don't want to come where you're pulling, it generally means they're rooted.
And after a few more months or a year, you can begin to separate them.
I wouldn't separate them any less than about a year though, because the roots are fairly fragile.
But once they've started rooting, you can begin to wean them off of the mist
That's important, otherwise they can get dependent on the mist and not root as well.
So this is where the roots begin to dry out the pot, and we begin that nice gas exchange.
That will grow a stronger plant.
So you probably won't see a lot of growth on your cutting in the first year
because it's colonizing this pot with roots.
And so you can get at the end of the year, and end up with something that's not much bigger.
This is a rooted cutting though, started about like that
and we can transfer it into its own pot, after one year.
And then at about the two year phase, we look like that.
And then they begin to grow exponentially, because it has this big root system
and you start seeing the shoots coming out. In fact, you can make cuttings off of that one.
So we covered how to make a cutting
and I want to offer an alternative idea that is specific for bonsai, to set us up for the next step.
You can imagine this as one of the cuttings that we made.
It's fairly straight and now has good roots, but we've missed an opportunity.
This is now fairly thick, and we can get some gentle bends in there, which would be fine for a large tree
if that's your future for the plant that you've just made.
However, many of us want to make smaller plants.
and we want quick little turns in the trunk, and we've lost that opportunity here.
The cuttings that we've made, that we stuck, they're going to create these little roots
and within a year, they still won't have grown very much
but we're going to want to wire it before they get fixed.
So you stick a wire in there, and you do your spiral wrap, and then you'd start bending it
but the problem is that the roots are so weak, that you'd end up damaging the roots.
So this is an idea that gets beyond that problem.
So for this alternative method, we have a plant with long extensions, and we don't cut them off...