Hi everyone! I'm Kim with Shiplap and Shells, and I'm a cut flower gardener here in the pacific
northwest about 60 miles southwest of Seattle, Washington in gardening zone 8b. And, today I am
going to show you how I take my geranium plants and cut new startings from them. But first,
make sure you hit the notification bell and the subscribe button so that anytime that Kellogg has
an amazing video to share to help you with your garden you'll be notified. So, the main reason
why I start new plants off of the mother plants are for a couple reasons. But, you get them when
they come from the nursery and they're more bushy, and they're beautiful, they have lots of blooms,
but then they get to the point where you see that they become more leggy, they become longer,
they grow longer, they're not as bushy and then in a couple years the mother plant won't produce as
many blooms. So, you can look at this plant for instance it's very bushy but then if I showed
you another one it goes straight up. There's just not a lot of bushiness, it's time to take
these little sections here and start new cuttings. Geraniums are usually grown as annuals
except in zones 10 and 11 where the climate is more mild and they can bloom and be outdoors year
round. So, what I do every year is I transplant my geraniums into pots and overwinter them in the
greenhouse. So, it's quite a chore at first, but it saves you so much money and I don't
have to go and buy geraniums as annuals every single year it saves me hundreds of dollars.
So, what I do, like I said, is I pop them up, put them in here all year, and then
this time of year is when I will go ahead and I will start new plants from something like this.
As far as geraniums go there isn't any dormancy period. So, you can basically cut these
geranium starts anytime that you want throughout the year, but with that said
it is better to wait until the blooming cycle is a little bit slower, that's when I find that
I get the best results. So these are some of the supplies you're going to need for your cuttings,
you're going to need a clean and sharp pair of pruners, you can use a knife or a razor as well.
You're going to want a healthy plant free of diseases. I tend to go more for the ones that
have a little bit more length here, I call it leggy. I would not, for instance, take any
cuttings off of here as much just because there isn't a lot to work with. For your container,
I use a three inch container that seems to do really well, and when you're filling it up,
I fill it up with potting mix, but also we'll do a peat moss or a perlite. Geraniums are prone to rot
so you really have to make sure that your soil is draining well. And then,
Jax is taking a nap. I will put all of my cuttings on a heat mat
to get the rooting process going, they do, they just tend to root quicker with a heat mat.
Absolutely, I do not use a plastic dome lid over the containers.
I have experienced that they don't like humidity, and this will make them rot quicker so I leave the
plastic lid off completely. So, here are all of my beautiful geraniums, some of them will
look wonderful like this, nice and bushy, and some, I saved this one to show you, this one
is looking really scary if you were going to plant it. But, how great. I mean look at how amazing
these starts are gonna be, so this is the perfect plant. I mean, you could get so many, I see three,
four, five, six, you get to get eight plants out of that. Now I'm gonna take this out because this
is rotted, so I'm going to take that out right away, this whole section. But this is like, to me,
it might not look like a beautiful plant to you, but to me it's it's absolutely gorgeous. So,
here's a perfect example of a leggy plant. One that I knew
needed some help but I transplanted it in the fall anyway knowing that they would make
great cuttings. That's the wind knocking everything over outside.
So, you can see how leggy it is, and what I'm going to do is I am going to cut at an angle
just below a node. So here's a better example, so I'm going to go just below a node here,
and I'm going to clean up
everything. You do not want to have any leaves that are going to be in the dirt
because geraniums are really, really sensitive to rot and the other thing that you're going to do
to clean this up is you only really want two, maybe three, but you want mostly two leaves,
so you're going to want to really make sure that you clip it down as much as possible because you
don't want the the energy going towards growing the leaves, you want the energy going towards
making roots for your new starts. So, again we've heard that some experts
say a shortcut is better and some experts say that you want a four to five inch cut,
cutting with more nodes, the more notes the better. So I just look at the plant to decide
if I'm going to make it a longer cut or shorter cut, and that's how I make my decision. And so,
you'll see here, this basically just started, a new, it's a new start. So, what I'll do is,
when I'm all done with this, I'll make that into a cutting too, so you could basically get you know,
one, two, three, four, five, six cuttings out of this one plant. Okay so, it's really hard to know
which areas I'm going to do. So, for instance, again like I said, this doesn't look as healthy
to me, but there's a lot of growth on it. So, I'm going to cut again just below the node,
make sure I clean everything up, but already I can feel this one is already rotting. It's really soft
so we're not going to use that one, and then I'll just go to the next one above the node.
This one feels a lot better, it's more green, I'm going to take all the leaves off.
So, I tend to go shorter than the longer, as you can see, just because, I'm not only getting
new start, clipping the new starts off, but I'm also cleaning up this plant too. Because
it's so leggy right now I'm not going to lose anything
by taking these all off. So, even if I can't use the cuttings, which I'm going to try to
cut them the way that I would if I'm going to keep cuttings, but I'm also cleaning up
the plants. Now, do I know if this is going to get bushier and it's going to be pretty? I don't know,
but that's what's so great about having all of these is you can just experiment.
But now, I've gotten it so it'll probably be more bushy and hopefully that'll help for
this next season for this one. Okay, this feels like Christmas to me, this geranium has it all;
it has growth down here, not like the one I showed you that didn't have any growth at all,
it has enough growth that I could keep this as a plant but I can do a start here, here,
here, and here so I can have four new starts, plus I can try
to keep that plant and see if it'll grow and be bushier. So this to me, is the geranium lottery.
You're going to take your new start and you're going to put it, press it into the moist soil.
Again, experts are saying the different things, some are saying you don't need rooting hormone at
all, some are saying that you could do a vitamin c and water solution, dip it in and then plant it,
some are saying honey. I've done the honey, I have not done the vitamin c, but I've done the honey,
I've done the rooting hormone and I have actually just pressed it right in,
and then I'll water it.
I'll add a little bit more soil.
And that is all I do as far as planting it. Now we're going to take it to the heated
mats. Like I told you with the short cuttings, or the long cuttings, if you have enough plants just
make sure you experiment with them and just see what's going to work for you. So, here are some
of the starts that I just did. Again, I took a little bit of, you know, I did some short cuttings
and long cuttings. I'll put them on the heat mat right there and then they'll start growing.
So, it's really important to harden your new starts before transplanting them outdoors,
and so what I mean by that is they need to be introduced to the tougher climates outside,
the harsher environment. So, I will take my new starts out for maybe an hour to start with, and
then every day I'll just increase the amount of time that i leave them out, and they're not going
to go through that shock, they're going to be more used to the rain and the wind and just more
direct sun, that kind of thing. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button in the notification bell
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garden. I'd love to hear what you're doing in your garden this month, or if you have any questions
about anything that I've gone over, please leave a comment below and we will get back to you!