Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today i want to take you through
how to propagate rosemary from cuttings and i'm just starting from a little four
inch herb pot like this one here but i bet you even with something as small as this that i'll
be able to get 15 or 20 cuttings off of that so i'll have plenty of plants going into next spring
i will be discussing some things that are rosemary specific but really this video is very similar to
the method i used on lavender not too long ago i'll link that video above in case you want some
other examples or want to see how i finished those up all right let's look at the plants okay really
basic method here i'll be using this plant plus a bunch over here as well to fill out this tray and
this tray has 105 cells in it so i filled that with potting soil i'll say a bit more about the
potting soil in just a minute here and also i'll be using rooting powder to help speed along the
rooting now i've seen a version of this done recently where they took a cutting like this a
whole big stem like that just stripped the leaves off the bottom did some scoring across the bottom
of the cutting and stuck the whole thing into a pot and you know i suspect you could succeed that
way too but to me it just seems like wasted opportunity when i see a big long stem like
this here i think i can get a cutting from the top here right around there i can probably get
another cutting right around there at least a third cutting and maybe even a fourth cutting
off of this all using the same technique so let me show you how i start with that here
when i discuss cuttings i usually discuss a couple of terms the first one is to discuss
the firmness of the wood so if you look here this whole this whole stem is emerged from this year's
growth so this is all fresh growth but the stuff at the very tip here is very very soft well the
stuff at the bottom here if you see me trying to bend it here it's quite firm in fact you can see
that the color at the bottom is much darker than the color of the stem near the middle here so
this is the firmer end towards the bottom of the plant this is the softer end what i'm looking for
is somewhat soft to semi-hardwood growth i think the stuff at the top here may end up
being a little too soft for my purposes it's just freshly emerged growth so i'm going to cut that
off before i start taking any cuttings okay the next term i talk about usually is about nodes and
happily on rosemary the nodes are plentiful every place where you see any of these leaves emerge
that's a node and so i'm going to cut this one down at i'll give it three nodes
and that's a cutting
and it isn't any harder than that it's just take it like that give it a quick dip in your
rooting hormone and then stick it into the tray and then go ahead and take your next cutting
from the same stem here just going to count down one two and maybe down to a third note again
and that's my next cutting having taken a few cuttings off of here from the top in that
semi-hardwood region you can see how easily it cuts as i cut down the stem you may notice that
it starts to get a little harder to cut that's because you're progressing into that firmer wood
here it's just fine but you see how the wood there is darker and as i cut here now it's harder to cut
as you get into that woody section it actually is time to stop because the woodier it is
the harder it will be to get that to root it's going to take more time and so these parts with
the dark brown stems on them are not cuttings for you look for the stuff that has the lighter green
and is still relatively easy to cut this is a point that i can make about rosemary and it's
going to be useful for you in a different context rosemary is not truly an herbaceous perennial
as they're sold in the stores it's actually a sub shrub so as you leave it out in the landscape
you'll find that just like its cousin lavender low down it starts to get really really woody at the
base and the woodier gets at the base and if you let it get a little bit overgrown that part of the
plant becomes inactive this is exactly where the rosemary dies off in the winter is when it's left
with that really really woody base and the winter comes it kills off the top growth so the soft
fresh active growth at the top of the plant and all that's left is that really really woody base
so in my climate rosemary is sort of semi-hearty it's hardy like three years out of four well in
that fourth here a cold wind comes through and kills off all that top growth and all that's left
is that sort of inactive wood at the very base of the plant and then the plant dies so two things
about that one do your pruning each year after flowering or after growth sometime mid-summer give
it a prune down so that you have say four inches of active growth i'll show you on this this here
is if you cut it down like this to the point where you still have active growth on the stem then
you're going to save that plant you're going to keep all the active buds down low and it's going
to be able to shoot again in the spring whereas if you let it go super super tall and you let
this woody section at the bottom get inactive then if there's a greater risk it's going to die second
thing you can do of course is take cuttings like this you'll have fresh plants to go in the spring
so i told you that i've talked a little bit about the potting mix that i used to fill up this tray
here it is i'll show it to you now you don't have to look for anything
very similar to this but i'll describe it for you anyway it has some bigger chunks in here that are
composted bark mulch and then the smaller bits are just made of shredded wood fiber this is what i
pot my roses into on my farm here and i've just made it use double duty for my propagation mix
now it holds a fair amount of moisture it also holds a fair amount of air that's what a potting
mix is supposed to do replacements for this or substitutes locally you'll find very very commonly
a peat and perlite mix in the stores uh in those compact compressed bales so that's perfectly
fine to do propagation and other times you'll find that people propagate either directly into
perlite or pumice or sand or other times they'll use coconut fiber all of those are perfectly valid
the only one thing that i won't recommend is using your regular garden soil in this now my
soil supplier described this to me as a biological desert and what he means is it's not sterile but
it actually has very little in the way of life in it and not a lot of bacteria not a lot of fungus
uh not currently um whereas a garden soil has you know thousands of times more organisms in it
many of those are specific plant pathogens that is they're in there kind of either to rot
dead plant parts or to attack plants as they grow and that's going to be very threatening of course
for your brand new cuttings which don't really have anything in the way of defenses
they have that cut stem at the very bottom so the pathogens are looking for a way in
and by using a cleaner mix like this you actually avoid some of those early rot problems
well i filled up my cutting tray here 105 cuttings and i'll give you a close-up view you can see
they're not exactly uniform but close enough in terms of firmness and hardness and length that
i shouldn't have any problem getting those all to root the same conditions as for those conditions
well i've taken this inside because we're going into fall now outdoor temperatures are getting
colder and so this i can keep at a nice stable temperature and the light i've topped up it's
underneath the south window anyway but i've topped it up with artificial light just to keep those
hours up because the days are starting to get shorter as for humidity i'm placing it underneath
a humidity dome and i showed you this previously with my lavender video it's just a tupperware
bin this is the lid here this is the base and i've drilled some holes in the top just to stop the air
from getting too stale you can see as i put this on that i've sprayed the inside of the bin already
just to get that humidity up initially and we'll be able to check back on this oh within
the next couple to three weeks just to see if i can see that some rooting has initiated
time to show you the results here and i'm going to zoom in and show you the beautiful roots
on these rosemary now i will say that between these and the lavender the lavender did root
a little bit quicker but that is a bit to be expected because of the stage i took the cuttings
in the lavenders i took in fresh young cuttings early in spring these were taken in fall when
the days were already shortening and the plants were starting to think about going into dormancy
i think that would have affected them however the rooting hormone that i put onto the base of
the plants did convince them so this is what i ended up with a success rate so far of about 70
of the tray so 70 rosemary plants that i can throw into pots early in spring for sale at my
local farmers market probably and that is the beautiful result so thanks for watching the
video today on propagating rosemary i hope that answered some of your questions and if you have
any others please drop them into the comments of the video and i'll see what i can do to help