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Hello.
I'm Jody Gale, extension agent with Utah State University
Extension Service.
Very pleased to have you with us for another segment
in this continuing series on working around in the yard
and dealing with trees.
We have talked in earlier segments about hybrid poplars.
Hybrid poplars are very fast growing, very short lived trees
and when a home has recently been constructed,
sometimes they're a good plant material
to look at when they're planted far away from the home
where they can grow quickly, provide some shade while you're
growing higher quality trees that are much,
much slower growing.
Eventually, those hybrid poplars can be taken out
and the more slower growing higher quality trees
are allowed to grow in their place.
This is a way to kind of have your cake and eat it too.
Shade as quickly as possible a new construction, and then
the high quality plant materials that we look for.
Way hybrid poplars are propagated are basically
done by a cutting.
Cuttings can come from stumps or suckers
have been allowed to grow, or they
can be taken from outer limbs of hybrid poplars.
This represents a sucker that's been growing
on a stump of a hybrid poplar.
The way the cuttings are developed
and the way that new trees are planted from cuttings,
you do not want to use the material that's
close to the stump or close to the end of the cutting
on the bottom end.
Where you do want to select a cutting from the small tip
part of the branch.
You look for buds that are very vigorous and very large,
partway down that are approximately half
an inch in diameter.
So you'll trim away the top, trim away the bottom,
and select a cutting that's maybe 12 inches long.
In this case it has one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven buds on it.
The way that these are propagated is really simple.
They can be kept in a bucket of water and soaked for a few days
to absorb a lot of water as these have.
If the tissue or the cutting is very fresh,
you can very literally put them straight in the ground.
Ground has been prepared by tilling and addition
of organic matter.
Pushing it in several inches, so there's
approximately three buds below the ground.
From one of those buds, we'll develop the root system.
And from these exposed buds on the top,
we'll develop the new top.
As you can see from these cuttings that
were planted a year ago that look like that,
we have a root system that's now down here.
The buds have taken and have developed a new top on it.
This one has already been pruned.
The side branches have been trimmed away
allowing one central leader to continue
the growth of the plant.
This year there will be branches that will come out
from these upper buds, and you're
on your way to developing a new hybrid poplar
tree for another planting somewhere within your yard.
This is an example of an unpruned
cutting from the previous year.
You can see you have multiple stems.
You need to trim this back to just one stem
and trim away any of the small growth in this manner.
Using a pair of pruning shears, you make a good clean cuts.
These will heal over.
Removing surplus branches, developing a central leader,
and that becomes the beginnings of a new hybrid poplar tree.
These trees will grow sometimes six to eight feet a year.
So they're very, very vigorous.
They should be planted in areas where you have a lot of space
far away from home or building where eventually if they
need to be taken out, there's plenty
of room to be able to do so.
They are a little bit of a trashy tree,
which is very true.
They have very large leaves.
They tend to not break branches up particularly bad,
but they are the very best plant material
for instant shade from a tree.
Within the course of four or five years,
you can have a tree big enough to cast a shadow while you're
waiting for the higher quality, much slower growing trees.
This is again how to propagate hybrid poplars for use
in planting in the landscape.
Thank you for joining us for this segment of growing
trees in the home and yard.
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