Grow Your Favorite Plants from Cuttings!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. We love having a yard scape and there's a lot of favorite plants we have. But when it comes time to plant more, you don't have to go down to the store and buy more. You can grow them from what you already have. Stay tuned and I'll show you how. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you have a yard scape that you're planting, there are three ways you can get more plants. One, you can go down to the nursery and buy some. But for us just do-it-yourselfer types, that's not the best option. Well, there's two different ways you can do it yourself. One is to buy seeds and plant them. The other kind is to get cuttings from plants and clone them and grow them yourself. Now, sorry kids that are listening here. This is also known as asexual propagation. If you go back to biology class, seeds are actually sexual propagation. There's a male and female contributor. The offspring of the plant is a product of contribution of the two parents. Whereas this type of growing is we're cloning. We take a cutting and it is without sex. We're just simply cloning a plant and getting an exact chromosome duplicate of the parent plant. Now, doing this is surprisingly easy and only takes some basic supplies. You should know right off that time of season really makes a difference. My favorite time to clone plants is mid to late summer and that's because the cuttings on plants are hardened offs. They're called semi-hard cuttings. Early in the season when you have lots of greenery coming out, those are called softwood cuttings and they tend to root fairly easy but they're very tender. There's a lot of mortality with them. Whereas in mid to late summer you have semi-hard cuttings where they're hardened up enough and there's enough vitality and structural strength and resources in them that they tend to do pretty well with rooting which is called striking. When a plant cuttings shoots out roots, it's said to have striked. So if you get these plants to strike there's a couple conditions. One is that mid-summer works very well. Now there's also hardwood cuttings that are done at the end of the season when the wood is all hardened off in preparation for the winter. But for our purposes we're going to do semi-hard cuttings and to do so it doesn't cost a lot and it's not real complex to do. You're looking at a basic set of supplies. You need some perlite. That's going to become your growing medium. It's sterile. It's very loose. It holds moisture and it is a perfect thing structurally to hold the cuttings as well as to provide the moisture it needs to get the the root fibers to start. You need a propagation chamber of some kind. I like these plastic tubs because they're translucent. I can lock them down to hold moisture in them and it allows light in and that can control as these have been sitting in for a while the cuttings the amount of times I take it on and off to dry them out to harden them off. I like to use some different resources. This is another thing we have them in the description below. This is a great little resource from Cornell University but almost all the agricultural colleges have all sorts of resource sheets like this that tell you how to do cutting propagation for particular types of plants and all of them are slightly different. The plant you're looking at right here is what's called a grow low sumac. It's a great understory plant. It's not real showy but it does a lot of lower growth. It can grow to about six foot in diameter, chokes out weeds, creates a lot of greenery, maintains moisture, controls erosion. It's a great plant and it responds very nice to these cuttings. It happens to be one of the plants that was listed in this particular guide. There it is the grow low aromatic sumac and there was a lot of other ones there as well but you can download these sheets for the things you're interested in. It'll tell you how to do this. So there's a sheet you need a little bit of rooting hormone right here. This is available online or any of your favorite gardening centers. I know if you go to Lowe's or Home Depot they'll have this in their gardening center. You need a spray bottle just with plain water that you can mist like that with very fine mist that'll coat the surfaces of the plant. You'll need a pruner and that's about it. This is actually one of the plants here so we're going to show you how to set up a growing chamber. Let's go ahead and get to it. All right well let's start with a basic setup of a growing chamber. Now what I did is I bought this clear plastic tub characteristic. You could use an old aquarium by the way if you've got one of those a glass side aquarium. This particular one costs about $18 but it'll get used over and over and over again and you can probably plant about 24 plants in this or cuttings in it at a time. So the economy of this of getting all these plants that normally would cost you anywhere from $10 to $30 a plant depending on its size and variety. You can see the economics of this get there pretty quickly. Then you get a bag of perlite and this is actually enough to do two propagation chambers and by the way this gets used over and over again so it's not a one-time purchase. So this perlite was about $16 for this bag of it. Now we're going to end up pouring this in here but depending on the product of the manufacturer some of this is more encapsulated some it's really dusty. One product we had it was so dusty that we were coughing and gagging and you just don't want to do that. So what I'm going to do just be safe is I'm going to go out and pour some water in this because you need to moisten it anyway then we'll put it in our propagation tub. All right now we've pre-moistened this I just simply put a bag of or put a hose down in the bag and probably put about a gallon of water in it. You can kind of see it and what we're doing right here is we're filling this up about two-fifths to a half full so I want to smooth that out and I can feel the moisture in it and I'll actually add some more moisture as we're ready to plant it. You want this wet enough that it provides moisture to the stem of the cuttings but dry enough that it stops mold from forming if possible and one way you know that is you can feel it wet when you put your fingers down in it but looking at the translucent tub you can't see any water standing in the bottom. We now have our perlite moistened in the tub just kind of straighten it out a little bit here now also you should know that some plant propagators just use regular clean sand moderate size sand you can do that as well. I like this because it's lighter although if I was doing a whole outside bed with this with a misting system and all that I would go to the sand bed but for this purpose perlite works just beautifully. All right we now have our moistened perlite we know it's not too wet because there's no standing water below but it is definitely moist and moisture can be added to it as we go. Now the next thing you need is your rooting hormone and this is in powder form there's a lot of inert ingredients a very small amount of active ingredient the butyric acid which is a hormone that stimulates root development and so what we're going to do is we're going to take our group of cuttings these are cuttings off of a sand cherry of some kind and as you can see we now have a whole set of these I've been keeping them in water actually these have been cut 24 hours ago and they're still very turgid and very nice they're a little tall if I put them in the in the bin they're going to be hitting the top so we're going to cut them shorter don't need them that long and when you do trim them what you do is you trim them right below where a leaf goes off right where a stem goes like that okay so now you're just going to grip them strip off the leaves there is a cutting that's ready to go I might even pull that one off right there you don't need very many leaves at the top so let's go ahead and work through our stack of these and create a whole bunch of cuttings here we go now that we have all of our cuttings and notice how compact this is these are 10 cuttings right here I'm going to end up with probably 8 of 10 of these will work well ultimately but if I get all 10 hey it's great very compact the first thing I'm going to do is square off all the ends get them all so they're down the same you don't have some up like that you get them all pulled down the same and then grasp them put them back in your water moisten the water and then using your rooting compound put them down in the rooting compound together and then I kind of cap it and shake it a little bit and when you do that you've got rooting compound coating the ends of the stems and if you feel that's not enough although that's for this variety I think we're going to be just fine you can double coat them you can keep coating them now you've got your cuttings the next thing you're going to do is go ahead and stick them so now we have this we're just going to simply I'm going to just do two rows of five and stick them in firm it give enough room so that the leaves do not touch each other another thing I've learned is you always want the leaves up off the surface anytime you have leaves too close or touching the surface of the growing medium you'll tend to have rot fungus mildew and so forth so right here we're just going to go ahead and stick those a little bit longer one but that's okay and we'll go ahead and do that push those all in and let's go ahead and firm them in because you want the perlite to grip them we'll put in our second row all right let's go ahead and firm those in as well and now either I could hold I could fill up the whole thing here you could put different kind of cuttings I will tell you that if you do different kind of cutting something we learned firsthand I want to pass on to you keep a journal write what it is in the tubs if you have multiple tubs like we do we have an a b c d tub we'd say what tub it is what end we start with I put an x on one end so I know working from the x away from it I had 10 of this 20 of this 12 of that whatever it is because your memory doesn't serve you as well as you'd like it to when you've got lots of different cuttings another reason you want the journal is not to identify the plants but how they responded to this treatment I found that different plants take longer to strike for instance the grow low sumac it put out copious amount of roots in two weeks however some of the privet that I was growing it took almost four weeks to get the same results so what's the next thing you need to do well now we need to moisturize the plants and just using water in a plant mister or sprayer you just go ahead and mist this all down get all of the surface of the plant really coated nicely where it's not necessarily running off but it's very moist and you can see lots of droplets on everything there it's ready to go then you're going to go ahead and lid the box and trap the moisture then put this in an area where there's indirect light light comes in through the side I kind of rotate it from side to side and you're going to leave this about for two weeks if you feel this drying out or the moisture isn't holding then go ahead and add some more moisture again no standing water I miss these about every other day to keep it nice and moist and the reason you're doing that remember everything wants to live but you've taken away this plant's roots you've taken away some of its ability to photosynthesize and what you've done is say make roots well that takes energy to do that so anything you can do to support it give it moisture both along the stem down at the bottom as well on the leaf surface allows it to put its resources to creating the roots to strike all right well let's look and see what the results are when you do this after this is set for a couple weeks this is the result you're going to make sure you tease the little plant out of the growing medium you don't want to strip off those little roots they are pretty tender so here I'm using a barn spike and I simply lift it up and get the little plant out and then we carefully plant it in a little four inch pot using a growing mix of perlite peat moss and sifted soil water them well put them in a shady spot keep them very moist and they'll take off what's the results let me show you well those are those same plants that have been growing in these four inch pots for about two more weeks and what we'll do next as the roots really work through the growing medium we'll either plant them in the late fall and get them in their new homes which is the preferred method because there's a lot of root development that happens over the winter or we will put them in a sheltered spot cover them with soil up to this line let them over winter in a place that doesn't have a lot of wind and let them stabilize these will work well over the winter it doesn't matter the winter just fine and then in the spring we'll plant them this is a great way to increase your plant inventory at very little cost if you found this video to be helpful please like it and better yet subscribe to our channel and when you do ring the bell because that way you'll be informed approximately every Friday of great episodes related to the kitchen the home the garden the shop and just great things homeowner skills where you can just do it yourself and if you're interested in learning another way to propagate plants this is a little honey locust tree that was done using seed you know sexual propagation then just stick around for the end card you can click on that and learn how we grew these from seed until the next time this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com going out to plant some more plants