A Simple Way To Root Plants From Cuttings

all right it's in this video I'm going to show you a really easy way to to route plants and start new plants from softwood cuttings or semi softwood cuttings now on my website free plants com I've got a page on the homemade plant propagation system that shows you of building a flat and putting screen in there and using a fish tank and painting some white stripes on that and so on and and that works really good but today I'm going to show you something that's easier and quicker and just much more simpler to do first of all you're going to start out taking some cuttings now when you when you take a cutting this is a big burning bush behind me you're going to take that cutting anywhere your cuttings can be anywhere from two to five or six inches long you're gonna make your cutting out step up here we're going to this is what the cutting looks like and now I'm going to strip all those leaves off and really you can even do that you don't need but a few leaves at the very top depending on the cutting maybe that you could this cutting could be like that or this cutting could actually be that short right there so the the length of the cutting really isn't critical it doesn't make that much difference what's important is that you take the cutting the right time of the year the early spring is not a good time because this new you want to work with new growth now this new growth came out this spring it started growing around mid-april and then by early June this the wood is soft or hard enough that when you stick the cutting it will actually stand up and not weep right over so that's what you got to be careful of so you don't take your cuttings too soon now if you go into the winter months later into the fall in the winter this would just continues to get harder the harder the wood the more difficult it is to root the cutting so the ideal time in most areas is June July August so again and it's it's really easy to just take you know dozens of cuttings in just seconds on a plant like this you can see that in that short period of time I took all these cuttings very very simple to do now I'm going to show you exactly what to do with the cuttings all right now in order to I showed you how we we took the cuttings out the burning bush you can do this with all kinds of different flowering shrubs you can do with evergreens so it's it's really a lot of fun to just experiment and try a lot of different things now to make this simple I went to Walmart and I picked up this is the plastic dish pan it's about two dollars as you can see I drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of it that's really important you've got to have good drainage I also found this at Walmart and this is like a food storage container and it's already got holes in the side and that left a little bit of a rig a reservoir here so I actually drilled four holes in the bottom in the corners so that any water that were to get in this area around the bottom can still get out now this is a you know an aluminum baking tin this one does have a wire support I don't know how well this would hold up when you fill this thing with sand but it doesn't matter if it crinkles up a little bit it's just gonna be harder for you handle it so I'm not gonna use that one today I'm gonna use this one either one of these are work I've got a lot of my customers members of our backyard Growers group they buy these things at the dollar store and a film they got dozens and dozens of them that they're using it all at the same time so basically this is a pretty simple process I'm going to this is a bag of play box and you can pick this up at just about any big box store or hardware store and I'm going to fill this tub you want a sand it's a little bit coarse and this has this has there's there's pebbles in there and they're very easy to see so you got different grades of sand I mean from tiny particles to some small stones and that's ideal because when you water this you want the water to run right right in this stuff and out the other end so basically now I know people worry about the holes in the side once it's sanding it's wet and it packs in it's not going to come out those holes at least not very much of it well now if the sand we're bone-dry it would filter out of there just like sand does in an hourglass but when you're rolling cuttings you never want that sand dry so just put it in there like that it's good to go what I do is just take a broad knife like this and just make a slice in the sand so that it's easy to stick your cuttings in there because some cuttings like some tiny spy-ray or potentail are very very flexible hard to get in now I showed you earlier that's all I do is strip the leaves off of that cutting and then I take all my cuttings I strip a bunch at one time and I take all the cuttings and I line up the butt ends so they're just about even doesn't have to be perfect and then we use a rooting compound rooting compounds help they're not they're not a magic potion that instantly give you roots so if you don't have any rooting compound it's going to mean the difference between you making some cuttings today and not don't worry about it a lot of things will wrote without it but they're rooting compound helps and increases your chances of success there are liquid rooting compounds that you mix with water there are liquids that are ready to use you just dip your cuttings in them there are powders that you wet the cutting and you roll them in the powder there are gels like a plant cloning gel or you know and it's it's kind of a stick they all work one is not better than the other so we don't get all caught up in that whatever you get easier that's going to work any kind of a plant rooting compound you don't want it's got to be a rooting compound you don't want something that's full of fertilizer you're not trying to make the plants just trying to make them rut so other words you got them all pushed together in a bundle you're going to mix your routing compound in a container like there's a plastic cup of any kind and then you're going to be about a five or six second dip it's not that critical just make sure it's at least five or six seconds if you're in there ten or twenty seconds it's not going to hurt anything and then just take the cuttings and stick them in the container like this I put mine in about an inch apart know the roots once they get rooted they they don't really get tangled up because when you take them out of here the sand is going to be loosened a little bit drier and it's going to drop right off that's Cir one two three four or five six seven eight there's nine right there so you could easily put 50 or 60 cuttings in this little tiny container once they're in there I'm going to take something as simple as a pencil to use as a prop because we're going to make a ten and I'll put these in the corners and all this is going to do is just keep the keep the plastic up off of the the cutting a little bit if it touches the cutting it's not going to hurt anything now well now that I got those in there I'm gonna water those in real good because I want that all that sand washed around the roots I don't want air pockets around the stems of those cuttings so I'm gonna take the hose and I'm going to just really drench this so that all the sand washes down in and then I'm gonna slide the whole thing in a white trash bag don't use clear because clear is gonna heat up too much so you're gonna slide the whole thing whoops inside of the white trash bag which is easier said than done once I had the whole thing in there ashin will pick it up to do this and I can reach in there and adjust those pencils that I stuck in to make sure that I haven't knocked them over basically that's it I'm going to take this into the bag now I'm also going to spray some more water in there because I want plenty of humidity so then I'm going to take the hose and I'm gonna spray some water in here so there's plenty of water in a bag and then I'm going to take these ties pull them up tight and then I'm going to tie that bag shut I'm going to take this whole container bag it all and I'm gonna put it in a shady area because I don't want the Sun beating on this and that's it and I believe all now when you come back tomorrow you're going to see some humidity inside of the bags of moisture condensation that's good now yeah there are things that can go wrong you can get it it's not gonna hurt to come back after every week or so and open this off and just let some air in there for a few hours and then close it back up always make sure that when you close it back up there's plenty of moisture in there if there's not just go ahead and wet all again real good you can open that all the way up but basically this is very very simple and a lot of plants are gonna root like this this is something that you can start doing in June July August September you could even do some in October but it's going to be a slow process but you can do them in October or November or December and just stick them outside the woods don't worry about them they may not run in the fall but there's a good chance that they're gonna root in the spring so again you know once once fall gets here you're not dealing with a softwood cutting like I was here today the cuttings are going to get harder and hardwood takes a lot longer to wood but it will still run so this can you can do this with purple santuary and flowering dogwood shrubs like red twig or yellow twig dogwood Rose of Sharon and I got a whole list of stuff on my website it tells you how to do it if you just go to the website in search and look for that homemade plant propagation system there's all kinds of links on there to tell you how to do softwood cuttings hardwood cuttings soft woods of evergreens and you know there's a ton of information but this is a very simple system anybody can do it at home you don't need anything special this tub was about $2 a SAN was two or three dollars 47 cents for a package of pencils and if you have cuttings those are free so again it's a very easy way it's an improvised way of doing the homemade plant propagation system where you got to paint fish tank and do all that this is a shortcut but it works very very well give it a try I think you have a lot of fun with it

Channel: Mikes BackyardNursery

Views: 5,544,469

Rating: 4.8558507 out of 5

Keywords: root plants, cuttings

Id: WyXSNzywqvw

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Umbrius]

Nice. I might try this.

Anyone here use other methods for cloning? Aeroponics?