Hi again, it's Jason at Fraser Valley Rose farm
I'm going to talk about propagating plants by cuttings and I have done a lot of videos
Related to specifically doing cuttings on things like roses and dogwoods and willows and so on
But I wanted to drive home the point today that once you understand the basics of the technique (in this case the semi hardwood
Propagation technique) then you can apply it
across a wide range of plant material with a lot of success and it becomes very very easy but to do that
It's best to get some practice on some plants that are relatively easy to root
And so today I'm going to take you through
four plants from my garden
That are really really easy to root by the semi hardwood technique and I'll show you
Step by step how I do it and you'll realize that the steps aren't all that different depending on which plant we're doing
So the first one I'm going to show you here is the ever familiar
Hydrangea, and very easy to take cuttings from hydrangeas
You hear stories of people saying they just stuck the stem into a glass of water and it calloused and that's true
I
Find the semi hardwood technique done in soil to be
Just as easy and takes less attention because you don't have to change the water quite so much
So how does this differ from the rose cutting and I've done a lot of rose cuttings. Is that the
Internode's
So you see this leaf on the bottom and you see this leaf right here
That distance between them is called the internode that little section there is quite long in
comparison to doing a rose
So typically when I do cuttings on roses I leave
four
four nodes quite possibly every time I do a cutting if I tried to leave four nodes for this would be the entire length of
This stem. So in this case, I'm gonna do it by just doing two nodes and take a cut right at the bottom
and
a
Cut above the next set of leaves and then trim down those leaves. I don't need quite so much leaf surface area
the more leaf surface area there is the quicker it loses moisture and
That to me is a decent cutting of a hydrangea and like I say, there's only you know one node at the bottom
That's the place where the leaf came out. There's only one node at the top
For a hydrangea. That's what I'll do and
Here
Just a touch of rooting hormone top it off the bottom and stick it
Into a pot you don't have to stick it deep into the pot. You're not looking to bury the stem deeply
I'm just looking to give it some support at the top of the pot and that's it
Okay. Now I didn't show you me cleaning my blade before that. I did clean it off off-camera, but every time you take cuttings
You should clean your blades in
This case I'm using a quaternary disinfectant. You could also use Lysol, that'd be fine. Just something to clean your blade
Between doing varieties and that's it. Okay, so that's a hydrangea and
Hydrangeas, as I say are very easy. Here's another one that has a reputation for being really easy to take cuttings of and
This is a currant
currants or gooseberries
They're just closely related cousins root very very quickly in this kind of cutting system
So what I'm looking for here is I'm looking for a semi hardwood
Okay, and I've shown you this difference before on roses that if you go to the top of the stem and take a bend here
this here is
Softwood it's very pliable
It's in my case. It would actually dry out
Too quickly
So I'm gonna go to semi hard with and you want to avoid the very very very firm
Material at the back end of this. That's what I would call hardwood. So somewhere in the middle here
It's semi hardwood and doing a cutting on this one is very much like doing a cutting on a rose
I'm going to take a cut below a node
Then I'm going to count up one two three four nodes to a length I like strip off the bottom leaves
And
In this case, I'm just gonna leave a little bit of leaf surface area on the top and that's it
so that should be a viable cutting of a
Currant in this case. I'm doing a an ornamental red flowering current from my garden
Okay, third one I wanted to show you here is
Actually, not a shrub, but kind of a well a perennial that produces woody stems in this case. It's
Russian sage or perovskia and I just wanted to use a perennial to show you how adaptable this technique is
so on the Russian sage again, you do the same test of firmness, and I should have done it on the hydrangea, too, but
Being that it was behind a flower
I knew it was going to be in that stage and you do that test of firmness and on the Russian sage
I think right here is a good spot. You don't want to go up into the section that has flowers emerging from it already
that's not going to
Send new shoots properly
so you have to go back down to this area here and I'm going to take a cut below a leaf node here and
above a leaf node here and
You can see very similar
stripping off foliage on
The lower nodes and on the top nodes
They're just trimming them back
Give it a dip in the rooting hormone
and
Stick it. And again, you just stick it just deep enough
To support it and not very deep it down into the pot
Okay, last one. I wanted to show you here is
Actually just saw it out in the garden and thought I know I've had good success taking cuttings of Saint
John's wort before and st
John's wort is a I guess you'd call it a a shrub or a perennial sort of in between there and this is a
florist's variety
so it shows these long stems for cut flowers that are attractive both for flowers, but also later on for the berries and
Again, I'm just going to do the test for the firmness of the wood up here might be a little bit too soft
So just by feel I can feel that this is the semi hardwood section. So
Same technique cut below a note cut above a note trim
The top leaves strip off
The bottom leaves and
Give them a dip
So now I have four different plants in four different pots and
when I go
after this stage after I've taken my cuttings I place them in an environment that is going to be conducive of them rooting and
That rooting environment is actually about the trickiest bit of all of propagation
It's like how do you stop them from drying out?
But at the same time not add so much water to them that they're going to rot in the meantime
some people accomplish that by taking like a clear plastic container and putting it over top of a tray like this and
then you'll see the moisture from the
plants and from the pots condense on the inside of that pot that leave it in a semi shady spot and
Then hope for the best and that's fine the hazard to that
Is that often when you tent or cover cuttings they will rot?
So to keep that moisture level up you'll be opening it up. You'll be spraying on the inside
You'll close it down if you crack it to let air
circulation in or out
You may find that it dries off too quickly. And then you come back home and you find that the tent is is
Completely dry on the inside and the cuttings have suffered
but if you don't crack it enough at all, what you'll find is that they'll start to rot and what a
Plant looks like when it begins to rot is it starts to blacken from the bottom up?
And I've got a propagation bench full of plants here. So I'm gonna see if I can find one here
Here we go
from some roses they took cuttings of this one here is
black from the bottom up
So that one's not making it and that's indicative you get a lot of results like that
When you use the tented technique, so what I prefer to use
I don't know if I can pull this into the frame of the camera is a mist a timed mist on my benches here
so I grow them in a fairly open environment and then I
Use the mist on an intermittent mist on a day like today
It might only come on for 10 seconds every 10 or 15 minutes something along those lines
So it isn't a frequent miss, but it's enough to wet the leaves
to probably keep the soil surface a little bit moist, but it doesn't keep the
The soil soaked and it doesn't keep them soaked in between misting
They tend to dry out a little bit between the misting and so it's kind of perfect for that stage or letting them
Not dry out too much, but also not stay soaked
Okay, what I'll do is put a pause in this and I'm gonna show you the results in a couple of weeks
Here three weeks is what I'm expecting
I should either see some early
Callusing or some early routing and so I will put a pause in the video and I'll show you that
It's been exactly three weeks since I took those cuttings 21 days. The greenhouse is a bit bright. So I've moved my
Conclusion video over here and all four of the varieties that I tried
Responded to the cuttings, although some quicker some slower
So the quicker one would be this perovskia and I'll try to get a close-up view of this
But it went directly to root just an incredible amount of roots on both cuttings
So and that's across the entire variety. So perovskia very very easy to root this way. No problem at all. Very quick
Next one here. This is Saint John's wort and
the st. John's wort
Is also rooted to the bottom of the pot at least on one of the cuttings
I think the other one is pulling back now. So it's on its way the third one here
again, the
Red flowering currant and
It is routing to the bottom of the pot on one of the cuttings and then pull out the other one here and show you
That it's routing as well
now the slowest one to root here is the hydrangea and
I've said that hydrangeas are easy to take cuttings from I've had good success rates and if I wait long enough
I'm a hundred percent sure that these ones will come through right now
What I have is I have good callus on the bottom of the cuttings
But they just have haven't been as quick to root and I recall that being the same last year
So I'm gonna try something different now and I know this is a follow-up or the end of the video
but I may have to do another follow-up after this because I've taken some additional cuttings of my hydrangeas and I
Put them into this box here
and
Some people have asked me in the past
Well, what if I don't want to make a misting system?
What if I don't want to spend $100.00 or $150.00 and go through the trouble of making a misting system
I'm just trying a few cuttings a box like this is a good option
You can probably see there's condensation on the outside of the box and I've rigged up across the top here some vent holes
Which I've just covered off with a piece of scrap plastic
And I can adjust that to allow it to vent or not vent as much as I want to
here I've taken some additional cuttings and I want to show you what I'm going to have tried differently her on the
Hydrangeas is that previously I showed you I was doing semi hardwood cuttings and that would be from the region down
Here where you can see there's some firmness to the wood
what I'm trying with these cuttings here and I'll try to get you a again a close-up shot of
those is I'm trying some tip cutting some softwood tip cuttings, which
Softwood cuttings are a little trickier in terms of having to try to keep a lot of moisture on them
But they can root a lot faster. I just want to see if that's the case here
so I'm going to give this a cut below one of the top nodes here and
Pull off and you see that I'm just I'm even leaving
the tip the growing tip of the plant on and then stick and
also in this tray, I've got some
I've got some penstemon
It's a a blue flowering variety of penstemon that I found that people were crazy for at the farmers market
So I've got those cut as well. Alright, so that's the update on this
Propagation video by cuttings
I hope the conclusion you can draw from this is that it's actually really adaptable to a wide range of plants
I've done this with fuchsias have done this with
Japanese quince the list goes on and on so it almost every
shrub or
perennial that is able to do cuttings can do cuttings by the semi hardwood method under mist or
Underneath in container like this