How to grow new hydrangea shrubs for FREE by taking cuttings

Me and Dan, our technical supervisor here at News 12, have been talking about his gigantic panicle hydrangea forever. I want to grow a piece of it too, so I'm in his front yard to take some cuttings. Let me show you how. What everybody calls the flowers of a hydrangea are actually modified leaves called bracts, and they change color beautifully in the fall. So first we're just going to cut those off because you don't need that. These faded flowers are beautiful dried up. Cut off a stem that grew this year. You want to make sure that it has several leaf nodes. So that's the part of the branch where the leaves are emerging out. This is where the new roots are going to be. So you have one leaf node on the bottom of the branch. You have another one. That's your backup guys in case the first one fails we are just going to fill this up with some potting soil you just poke it so that way two leaf nodes are covered i'm going to stick a few of these in some rooting powder just to give them a better chance you just give it a nice little coating look at that it's like painting that's it guys you just keep it like this all winter long it's gonna start growing roots in april and in the meantime let's talk about mums because they need more water than you think they They are often crammed into very tiny containers. That, with very low humidity this time of the year, makes them thirsty. I'm Alex. Happy gardening.