Outdoor Pest Solutions

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Landscape Plant Propagation

How do you get new plants at a low cost, and have fun doing it? Well, it is known as propagation.There are two forms:

Sexual
Asexual
The first method is the one we all know, you take a bag of seed, learn all you can about seedbed preparation, plant, water nourish and then watch them flourish. Simple, straightforward and rewarding on levels that non gardeners cannot understand. This process can be used to produce large quantities of non woody plants like grasses, vegetables, and flowers, and can be done in a variety of ways, from intensive greenhouse culture, to tilling the soil, and dropping in the seed.

But, what if we wanted to produce a quantity of slower growing woody, or herbaceous plants, say, some extra crepe myrtles for a fence row? What would be the best method? It would take a long time to produce them from seed, and the results would rarely be consistent. How can we speed the process up and get the consistency (uniformity) we are looking for? That is where the second method comes in.

Asexual reproduction can be used with the vegetable and flower types of plants as well. The method usually involves removing a portion of a stem from a plant, and inserting the larger end, that is the end closest to the base of the plant into a planting medium. There are other, more tedious methods in use, such as "tissue cultures" which involve taking a few plant cells, and growing them in a petry dish like situation, but that is a science all to itself. Although these two methods may seem worlds away, they are actually the same method, just done at different levels. For our purposes "cuttings will do nicely.

You will need a "Mother Plant", that is a plant that you want to "clone" and don't mind chopping into pieces. You will also need a "rooting medium" and there are a lot of different thoughts on this. I like using a mix of peat and sand, which is about three quarters peat, and one quarter sand, but you can use the media you prefer. It needs to retain enough moisture to allow the cutting to never dry out, but not so much that it rots, moisture is critical. Depending on the difficulty that the plant has in producing "adventitious roots", You may need a little IBA, indol butaryic acid, or rooting compound. The instructions for its use are usually found on the label. Some plants produce roots quickly from untreated cuttings such as willows, others are almost impossible to produce from cuttings, such as deciduous oaks. Crepe Myrtles are relatively easy.

Make sure that you have a way to keep them watered frequently, the soil cannot completely dry, or you will lose all your hard work.Speaking of work, I have to do some now, so I will have to do this in at least two parts. Come back next time, for the second part of our continuing mini series, Desperate homegardeners" or Sex in the garden.

I need to make a disclaimer here before I go any further on the subject of asexual reproduction: Like any clone, the clones that you create, will have the genes of the parent, and will consequently have all the good and bad characteristics of the parent plant. If you have a disease problem with one, it will also attack the others! The more "specific" any line becomes, the more susceptible it becomes. The Irish potato famine and the North American Chestnut blight are good examples. It is ok to reproduce your plants this way, but always understand the need to keep some diversity in your garden, and don't put all your genes in one basket. "Variatiodelectat"- "Variety is the spice of life".

Now, A "hardwood" cutting works well with crepe myrtles, (softwood cuttings of many species can be rooted in a glass of water) hardwood is wood that has become, well, hard, or "herbaceous".

There are many theories on when the best time to take a cutting is, but with the crepes, and good watering conditions, I have done this year round.

Make sure that your soil is prepared beforehand, and you can use a "dibble stick", to poke a hole for planting.

Good, sharp pruners are a must, and freshly cut branches are a must. Take a cutting, about 4 to 6 inches long, with a bud node about a quarter of an inch from the bottom, and a couple of buds on the higher part of the cutting. Do this at an angle. Check your cutting, ragged edges almost insure a less than satisfactory outcome. I keep a sharp knife handy, to trim any ragged edges away. If you are using rooting hormone, dip the big end into it. Then place it into your planting hole in your soil. Gently pack and repeat, until you get the numbers of cuttings you need. Always do a few extras, because you will lose some of them. Water well, and make sure they never dry out completely.

As time goes by, you will see shoots developing, and hopefully the roots are doing the same. Callous will develop on the bottom first, followed by adventitious roots. Leave them in the planting medium for the first year, and then transplant them into pots or the ground.

As you watch them grow, pat yourself on the back. You have done something that is a tradition as old as mankind, and as new as genetic engineering. Enjoy!

Teach Your Children To "Clone"

This is written with parental supervision in mind.

Plant Reproduction Project:

You will need:

1. A plant. Preferably a fast growing tree or shrub such as a willow or better yet a weeping willow.
2. Very sharp pruners.
3. Some fine potting soil.
4. Some planting pots.


What will be doing, is making new plants from existing ones. This is sometimes called "cloning", which is exactly what it is. Some of the more technical terms are, asexual reproduction, and propagation. This has been done almost from the beginning of time, but is as fresh and new, as genetic engineering, and tissue culture reproduction. Cloning a plant by making a cutting, is really not much different from the tissue culture process, it is just using more cells. Tissue cultures take a few cells, and reproduce an entire plant from them in laboratory conditions. What we will be doing is taking a pretty large number of cells, and reproducing a tree in your garage, or classroom.

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