Hi again, it's Jason at Fraser Valley Rose farm I'm going to talk about propagating plants by cuttings and I have done a lot of videos Related to specifically doing cuttings on things like roses and dogwoods and willows and so on But I wanted to drive home the point today that once you understand the basics of the technique (in this case the semi hardwood Propagation technique) then you can apply it across a wide range of plant material with a lot of success and it becomes very very easy but to do that It's best to get some practice on some plants that are relatively easy to root And so today I'm going to take you through four plants from my garden That are really really easy to root by the semi hardwood technique and I'll show you Step by step how I do it and you'll realize that the steps aren't all that different depending on which plant we're doing So the first one I'm going to show you here is the ever familiar Hydrangea, and very easy to take cuttings from hydrangeas You hear stories of people saying they just stuck the stem into a glass of water and it calloused and that's true I Find the semi hardwood technique done in soil to be Just as easy and takes less attention because you don't have to change the water quite so much So how does this differ from the rose cutting and I've done a lot of rose cuttings. Is that the Internode's So you see this leaf on the bottom and you see this leaf right here That distance between them is called the internode that little section there is quite long in comparison to doing a rose So typically when I do cuttings on roses I leave four four nodes quite possibly every time I do a cutting if I tried to leave four nodes for this would be the entire length of This stem. So in this case, I'm gonna do it by just doing two nodes and take a cut right at the bottom and a Cut above the next set of leaves and then trim down those leaves. I don't need quite so much leaf surface area the more leaf surface area there is the quicker it loses moisture and That to me is a decent cutting of a hydrangea and like I say, there's only you know one node at the bottom That's the place where the leaf came out. There's only one node at the top For a hydrangea. That's what I'll do and Here Just a touch of rooting hormone top it off the bottom and stick it Into a pot you don't have to stick it deep into the pot. You're not looking to bury the stem deeply I'm just looking to give it some support at the top of the pot and that's it Okay. Now I didn't show you me cleaning my blade before that. I did clean it off off-camera, but every time you take cuttings You should clean your blades in This case I'm using a quaternary disinfectant. You could also use Lysol, that'd be fine. Just something to clean your blade Between doing varieties and that's it. Okay, so that's a hydrangea and Hydrangeas, as I say are very easy. Here's another one that has a reputation for being really easy to take cuttings of and This is a currant currants or gooseberries They're just closely related cousins root very very quickly in this kind of cutting system So what I'm looking for here is I'm looking for a semi hardwood Okay, and I've shown you this difference before on roses that if you go to the top of the stem and take a bend here this here is Softwood it's very pliable It's in my case. It would actually dry out Too quickly So I'm gonna go to semi hard with and you want to avoid the very very very firm Material at the back end of this. That's what I would call hardwood. So somewhere in the middle here It's semi hardwood and doing a cutting on this one is very much like doing a cutting on a rose I'm going to take a cut below a node Then I'm going to count up one two three four nodes to a length I like strip off the bottom leaves And In this case, I'm just gonna leave a little bit of leaf surface area on the top and that's it so that should be a viable cutting of a Currant in this case. I'm doing a an ornamental red flowering current from my garden Okay, third one I wanted to show you here is Actually, not a shrub, but kind of a well a perennial that produces woody stems in this case. It's Russian sage or perovskia and I just wanted to use a perennial to show you how adaptable this technique is so on the Russian sage again, you do the same test of firmness, and I should have done it on the hydrangea, too, but Being that it was behind a flower I knew it was going to be in that stage and you do that test of firmness and on the Russian sage I think right here is a good spot. You don't want to go up into the section that has flowers emerging from it already that's not going to Send new shoots properly so you have to go back down to this area here and I'm going to take a cut below a leaf node here and above a leaf node here and You can see very similar stripping off foliage on The lower nodes and on the top nodes They're just trimming them back Give it a dip in the rooting hormone and Stick it. And again, you just stick it just deep enough To support it and not very deep it down into the pot Okay, last one. I wanted to show you here is Actually just saw it out in the garden and thought I know I've had good success taking cuttings of Saint John's wort before and st John's wort is a I guess you'd call it a a shrub or a perennial sort of in between there and this is a florist's variety so it shows these long stems for cut flowers that are attractive both for flowers, but also later on for the berries and Again, I'm just going to do the test for the firmness of the wood up here might be a little bit too soft So just by feel I can feel that this is the semi hardwood section. So Same technique cut below a note cut above a note trim The top leaves strip off The bottom leaves and Give them a dip So now I have four different plants in four different pots and when I go after this stage after I've taken my cuttings I place them in an environment that is going to be conducive of them rooting and That rooting environment is actually about the trickiest bit of all of propagation It's like how do you stop them from drying out? But at the same time not add so much water to them that they're going to rot in the meantime some people accomplish that by taking like a clear plastic container and putting it over top of a tray like this and then you'll see the moisture from the plants and from the pots condense on the inside of that pot that leave it in a semi shady spot and Then hope for the best and that's fine the hazard to that Is that often when you tent or cover cuttings they will rot? So to keep that moisture level up you'll be opening it up. You'll be spraying on the inside You'll close it down if you crack it to let air circulation in or out You may find that it dries off too quickly. And then you come back home and you find that the tent is is Completely dry on the inside and the cuttings have suffered but if you don't crack it enough at all, what you'll find is that they'll start to rot and what a Plant looks like when it begins to rot is it starts to blacken from the bottom up? And I've got a propagation bench full of plants here. So I'm gonna see if I can find one here Here we go from some roses they took cuttings of this one here is black from the bottom up So that one's not making it and that's indicative you get a lot of results like that When you use the tented technique, so what I prefer to use I don't know if I can pull this into the frame of the camera is a mist a timed mist on my benches here so I grow them in a fairly open environment and then I Use the mist on an intermittent mist on a day like today It might only come on for 10 seconds every 10 or 15 minutes something along those lines So it isn't a frequent miss, but it's enough to wet the leaves to probably keep the soil surface a little bit moist, but it doesn't keep the The soil soaked and it doesn't keep them soaked in between misting They tend to dry out a little bit between the misting and so it's kind of perfect for that stage or letting them Not dry out too much, but also not stay soaked Okay, what I'll do is put a pause in this and I'm gonna show you the results in a couple of weeks Here three weeks is what I'm expecting I should either see some early Callusing or some early routing and so I will put a pause in the video and I'll show you that It's been exactly three weeks since I took those cuttings 21 days. The greenhouse is a bit bright. So I've moved my Conclusion video over here and all four of the varieties that I tried Responded to the cuttings, although some quicker some slower So the quicker one would be this perovskia and I'll try to get a close-up view of this But it went directly to root just an incredible amount of roots on both cuttings So and that's across the entire variety. So perovskia very very easy to root this way. No problem at all. Very quick Next one here. This is Saint John's wort and the st. John's wort Is also rooted to the bottom of the pot at least on one of the cuttings I think the other one is pulling back now. So it's on its way the third one here again, the Red flowering currant and It is routing to the bottom of the pot on one of the cuttings and then pull out the other one here and show you That it's routing as well now the slowest one to root here is the hydrangea and I've said that hydrangeas are easy to take cuttings from I've had good success rates and if I wait long enough I'm a hundred percent sure that these ones will come through right now What I have is I have good callus on the bottom of the cuttings But they just have haven't been as quick to root and I recall that being the same last year So I'm gonna try something different now and I know this is a follow-up or the end of the video but I may have to do another follow-up after this because I've taken some additional cuttings of my hydrangeas and I Put them into this box here and Some people have asked me in the past Well, what if I don't want to make a misting system? What if I don't want to spend $100.00 or $150.00 and go through the trouble of making a misting system I'm just trying a few cuttings a box like this is a good option You can probably see there's condensation on the outside of the box and I've rigged up across the top here some vent holes Which I've just covered off with a piece of scrap plastic And I can adjust that to allow it to vent or not vent as much as I want to here I've taken some additional cuttings and I want to show you what I'm going to have tried differently her on the Hydrangeas is that previously I showed you I was doing semi hardwood cuttings and that would be from the region down Here where you can see there's some firmness to the wood what I'm trying with these cuttings here and I'll try to get you a again a close-up shot of those is I'm trying some tip cutting some softwood tip cuttings, which Softwood cuttings are a little trickier in terms of having to try to keep a lot of moisture on them But they can root a lot faster. I just want to see if that's the case here so I'm going to give this a cut below one of the top nodes here and Pull off and you see that I'm just I'm even leaving the tip the growing tip of the plant on and then stick and also in this tray, I've got some I've got some penstemon It's a a blue flowering variety of penstemon that I found that people were crazy for at the farmers market So I've got those cut as well. Alright, so that's the update on this Propagation video by cuttings I hope the conclusion you can draw from this is that it's actually really adaptable to a wide range of plants I've done this with fuchsias have done this with Japanese quince the list goes on and on so it almost every shrub or perennial that is able to do cuttings can do cuttings by the semi hardwood method under mist or Underneath in container like this
