Hey again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm
and today I want to talk to you about whether it's safe to use rooting hormone in your garden for yourself for your plants for
The environment what's the safety factor of rooting hormone in the most common?
Form of rooting hormone that we use is a chemical called
Indole-3-butyric acid. It's in usually in a product like this
Which is a rooting powder that you would dip the bottom of your cuttings and to get them to root faster
So I've broken this video into a few different sections assessing its safety in different ways
I'll put that index up on the screen right now
The first safety issue I'm going to deal with is whether this
IBA that's in these products is acutely toxic
or I guess the question is are you going to poison yourself by handling it ? or
Ingesting it or getting some on your hands and the answer to that fairly quickly is no and the reason for that is fairly interesting
IBA is naturally occurring in a lot of plants. It's in Willow. It's in corn that you eat all the time
It's just related to the auxins that tell your plants how to grow and what to do
which is why it has an effect on the rooting of the plants now the
auxin, the iba that's used in these products is synthetically produced but there's no evidence that the synthetically produced IBA is
Any different in terms of its effects on your body, then the naturally produced IBA
So this is not something your body is completely foreign to and currently in small amounts
It is able to quickly convert that to other non harmful chemicals in your body and it's no problem. It's a
Acute toxicity is similar to caffeine
So if you you take anything, even if it's natural in a high enough dose and you can cause problems for your body
But unlike caffeine you're not purposely introducing this into your body and just to give you some additional
Context on this the amount of rooting powder that you would have to
Ingest for you to have a toxic reaction is in the measure of pounds. So in unless you're taking up
Snorting habit of rooting powder you're unlikely to get any
Toxic reaction to rooting powder or gel, you know
If it's more concentrated you want to take more precautions with it
One more thing I'll mention is that the active ingredient being IBA. The inactive ingredient at least in the rooting powder is
talc
And that's actually where most of the handling concerns come in because talc is like a fine powder
You could get that in your eyes and that caused irritation
You could get you could breathe some of that in and again, cause some lung irritation
the directions on the MSDS say that if you
On your hands wash it off with soap and water if you get it in your eye
Rinse it out. And if you get it in your lungs go get some fresh air the second safety concern
I'm going to deal with is whether it's safe to eat
food from plants that are grown with rooting hormone because that's being brought up to me before and I want to address it here is
That the EPA did an assessment on IBA and it found that it posed no health
Risks to humans or the environment and I'll put that quote up from the EPA right now
And of course this depends on how much you trust
Scientists or at least these scientists, but that gives you some indication of the work that's being done on it
Like I said before IBA is naturally present in a lot of foods and naturally present in the environment
So that should give you some clue that there are there's some capacity in your body to deal with this
but I still want it to deal with the question of put the
application of rooting hormone to the roots
translocate
in the plant and move from the roots up to
The fruit or whatever part of the plant that you're going to be eating now
This is kind of a red herring argument in a way because we actually don't produce a lot of food crops from cuttings
but let's say you don't have to do it something like
Gooseberries or plum trees or something like that you use rooting hormone
I did find a study that talked about rootstock on plums and
they stuck it with IBA and then tested the tissue at the bottom of this the cuttings to figure out how much
IBA actually got absorbed into those tissues and then how long it persisted and what they found is that it only was
absorbed into the plant in parts that could be measured in millionths of grams and that
Most often had degraded over the course of two weeks and at most up to about six weeks
There's very little chance at those quantities and at that level of persistence
That the IBA would accumulate to any degree
upwards of the plant
The third safety issue I'm going to talk about is whether it's safe and effective to use this on your plants
And I guess the safety question would be is it going to harm my plants? Is it phytotoxic?
The answer there depends on the rate
So for plants that easy to route things that are cut and softwood rapidly growing plants
You may not have to use rooting hormone at all. It may not benefit you a lot
So in that case just take your cuttings stick them clean. Don't worry about it
If you do find that they're a little bit inconsistent in routing or you have a variety that you're having some troubles with you can
Apply it at its lowest rate for those fast routing plants. So for a softwood cutting you might apply it at the rate of
0.1 percent, which is one tenth of one percent and in that case it may speed along or make your results a little more consistent
Moving on to semi hardwood cuttings. That's what I take. Most of my cuttings as semi hardwood cuttings of
moderately easy to root plants is usually around the rate of
0.3% And this is the first place I gotta warn you is don't over apply don't use a
powder that's rated at 0.8 percent or
1.6 percent or some higher rate thinking that's gonna speed things along in that case. It usually will
Reduce your rate of success in cuttings. It's still not
Toxic for you to handle but it's going to reduce the success rate for your plants. So don't over apply. I'm gonna show you now
The way that I stick it on semi hardwood cuttings and what that looks like
Over here on the left that's from a horticultural store where I got IBA at 0.4%
For my semi hardwood cuttings and I use that a lot, but they don't use it directly out of this canister here
I pour it off into smaller containers that way I don't contaminate
What's in the main container?
Because there's a lot more in there probably a couple years supply and just incidentally if you keep it in a cool dry place
I think a couple years is fine. Go anything past that you probably want to get a fresh supply
So here's a cutting I took from outside. It's not exactly the right time of year for it
But for this demonstration, it won't matter because dipping it into powder. First of all has asked the question recently
Should I dip it in water first and wet it and put another powder and the answer is no
But if you do that what you'll end up with
Just going to use this as a demonstration
is a bit of a heavy paste on the end of your cutting you see how much is sitting on there and
That's far too much rooting powder to sit on there routinely so you don't dip it first in water. You do a dry dip
like this and
then
Tap it off so you don't have a whole ton of powder sitting on there. That's just a light
Light coating of powder on the bottom of that stem and that's it
So now I say I have the powder here. I've put it into a smaller container there you dip you tap?
but if you're not using that you can use gels or you can use like this one here is a
Liquid and you just follow the instructions and dilute that liquid into water like this and then in that case
Pretending this is a clean cutting. You just do a dip like this for one two three
Maybe even up to five seconds and then pull it out and your job is done and that's already got what it's needs
For hardwood cuttings and harder to root plants
You may have to use a higher rate and just follow the recommendations and guidelines
provided by scientists and the manufacturers to figure out exactly what reach you need because really
Over-applying is not good. It's usually better to start at a lower rate something like
0.3 percent or 0.8 percent and then only move up from there if you're not getting the success that you need
finally, I want to have a quick discussion about the use of IBA and its sustainability aspect whether it's environmentally responsible or
responsible for my business to use IBA for making my cuttings and
I know when talking to gardeners that a lot of them expressed to me a real
Hesitancy to using chemicals a much higher preference for using natural alternatives and I completely sympathize with that
It's the reason why on my own farm
I've sworn off the use of heavy pesticides in my plant production because I just don't like the risks to myself
I don't like the risks to my Ireland and the and my family frankly for being around it
So I don't want to use hell on my farm
But it came to iba the assessment came down to when I looked at the risks when I assess those
Realistically. I don't think there's much of a chance that I got to poison myself with this. I don't think the long-term exposure
at least as far as the evidence shows has much of a risk and
That if you use it as directed and don't dump it into a stream, you won't have any significant impacts on the environment. So
Overall, I'm quite happy or satisfied to make that a part of my business that said if you're into the natural alternatives
I won't argue that one little bit I will say I did a quick trial on honey
I can link that video up above here and I found the results to be unimpressive
I think you're better prospect would be willow water. And when I looked at the scientific research on using
Extracts of willow or willow water on reading things. I found that there were some really promising results, but some very
Inconsistent results as well. And so I think some work would have to be done on
Standardizing how you extract it what dose you use that you can get really good consistent results for yourself
For me, I'm not looking for another hobby trying to figure that out
So I'm probably gonna stick with the rooting powder and I will say to make a final argument here
Yes, you could do without rooting the powder
Yes, you could go to natural alternatives which may or may not be quite as effective
But when it comes to IBA get a good consistent result, which means that I'm actually using fewer resources
growing my plants
So if I'm using a heated bench and I put plants on there and they root faster because I used rooting hormone
I'm using less energy
I'm also using less bench space which cost me money less water for my misting system
I'm using less of my own personal time all of which are factors in the sustainability of my small farm business
So the sustainable option in my case may be using IBA rather than avoiding it. All right
Thanks so much for watching today on the safety issues around IBA and rooting hormones
If you have any questions comments concerns, please leave those below the video. I'd be happy to hear them and discuss with you