Greenhouse Notes: Rooting Fruit Tree Cuttings

hey guys Veronica here and today I'm in the greenhouse and I'd like to talk a little bit about rooting fruit wood cuttings now rooted cuttings is probably one of my favorite methods to propagate plants specifically when it comes to fruit trees and shrubs because if you've ever gone to the nursery like I have you find yourself walking around and daydreaming about this beautiful orchard that you're gonna plant or maybe a couple of trees around your garden and then you start looking at price tags and you realize that this beautiful orchard is gonna cost you a ton of money to make happen most fruit trees at the nursery start at $20 and then kind of go up from there so instead of buying them what we're gonna do is we're going to root cuttings for pennies on the dollar and I'm gonna show you how now this one I wanted to use as an example I got it from my friend Efrain the other week and I just wanted to show you how quickly these roots form he's smart because he uses clear cups so that you can see the progress you don't have to use clear cups I'm just using your standard so little party cups in purple because I'm all out of red ones right now um and I recommend using some sort of container that you can drill holes in I don't recommend using glass um and something that is going to keep a lot of moisture in but that you can drill drainage holes in so I'm going to use a power drill to make this happen you can stab it with an ice pick or a knife or a pair of scissors but this just makes it really quick and gives me a nice even drainage hole so I just drill like a hole right in the bottom there you go now you have your container from there one of the tricks that I learned from him is if you live in an area where you're battling fungus gnats on a regular basis there's a solid chance they're going to crawl up into your planting medium and they're going to eat the roots as they're forming and we don't want that to happen so in order to prevent that one of the things that he taught me how to do was to put some just like fine playground sand you can get any big box store or you know if you live near beach you can use beach band and put a little bit at the bottom of your cup so that they can't curl in there because I guess scratches them up and they don't like shimmying through little shards of broken glass I mean who really does so we're going to put just like a half inch of that at the bottom of our planting cup and then we're going to fill it with a potting medium now I don't know that you have to be super picky about this the main thing that I do when it comes to whatever I'm going to use to plant my cuttings in is make sure that I'm using something that is a good organic material that drains easily and also maintains a certain level of moisture easily so it can be compost it can be seed starting mix it can be a potting soil just make sure you're not using like if you have you know native clay or like lots of rock in your native soil then don't use that but if you have you know a compost pile or you haven't mix you use in your greenhouse or proceed starting then that should work just fine so we're going to just fill this cup up almost all the way with this mix and you'll notice the mix that I'm working with has some moisture in it there's a little bit dry bits here at the bottom so I'm gonna fill it most of the way and then I'm gonna give that just a little bit of water because you want your mix to be fairly damp when you put your cutting in and the reason for that is that you're cutting does not have in your roots so it's going to completely rely on the amount of moisture that it's inside of your planning container now this is where a lot of people go wrong myself included because it's very easy to let what it amounts to a branch this is this one is a dormant cutting but it's just totally dormant piece of fruit wood it's very easy to let this dry out and this I kept in storage and there in a large bag with lots of other cuttings most of these are slated for grafting material but some of the rootstock I wanted this year I was not able to get so one of the ways that I'm going to try and save some of the genetics that I managed to acquire at the Scion swap a couple of months ago is I'm going to route them and then potentially take them and graph them once they go dormant in the fall you know it's kind of a roundabout way of doing this but it's a good way to demo how to grow a new tree from just a branch so what you want to do is you want to go find a friend or neighbor or maybe in like one of the fruit groups on Facebook or wherever and give yourself a couple of varieties you really want to try and go over to somebody's house who has a pair of pruners and be like hey can I take a piece of your fruit tree because I want to try and grow it and then get a couple because you may not be a hundred percent successful the first time you do it but hopefully you will if you follow these tips so what we're looking at here this is a pear Scion and it's a little bit too big for most of my grafting needs I could potentially do like a bud graft summer bud grafts with it but it's gonna be a little big there's maybe a tree that I could try grasp some of it but I'm gonna do it this way so that I can just kind of get a feel for how it grows and you'll notice there's all of these developed buds along the branch and you want to make sure the buds are developed you can do it with wood that's already like it's already it has foliage on it as well it's just you may have to trim some of that back so that it doesn't pull too much moisture out of the wood so I like to work with dormant wood so it can kind of come to life before my eyes and then I can see you know is it working or not and so if you're cutting this fresh then you're going to wrap it in damp paper towel or put it in a ziploc or just find a way to keep it fairly moist until you can get it home and get it in the soil because this has been dormant inside Ameri forgery I'm gonna go ahead and open it up just so that it will create that sort of like section up into the wood and get you know the moisture in there flowing again so I'll just trim the bottom off and each of these you can see right there that it's green on the inside each of these buds below ground has the potential to become a root for this Scion so you want to make sure that you have a couple of buds and you also want to make sure that your bud wood is fairly young it's only with them like the last seasons growth or maybe the season before but don't get you know like a really big thick branch that's really long thinking you're gonna have a full-sized tree because it either won't root or it'll take forever to root and there's a lot that can go wrong there so we're just gonna avoid that so I trim off the bottom and just an angle usually because I like the way that no look I don't know if it serves the purpose below ground then I trim it just to see kind of keep it open to keep it from Callison I guess is what I'm trying to get out there and then what I'll do is I'll take my this is my wood carving knife you can use a kitchen knife pocket knife whatever and I'll just very gently scrape the base of this anything that's gonna be a below the soil line and I'll go like try and peel it all off but I definitely want to just like rough it up a little give it a few spots to kind of open up and expose it so that it will go to heal and start sending roots as part of that result you could probably do without scratching but I just I like to kind of up my odds and I've had really good luck scraping so that's how I'm gonna show you I'm sure that somebody in the comments will tell me why that doesn't work for them but that's how I'm gonna do it for this so we're gonna scrape it up a little and then what I'm putting on it now is a rooting hormone powder you don't have to use it um I like to use it because I have it on hand you can also use everything from willow water to al two aspirin I think most gardeners have something that they use for propagation that they swear by I tend to have a little container of rooting hormone somewhere at most times just because I have it so after I've put that hormone powder on there all I do then is I make sure that my soil medium is pressed down just a little not like packed in there but definitely firm because it's going to be supporting this and then you just push the Scion straight down into that medium until I hear it crunching it's the sand at the bottom and I might give this a little more compost just because it looks a little low and that's basically it from there if you're doing especially if you're doing figs but you can do this with basically any fruit tree if you have a fungus gnat problem in your space where you live then you can put a little more does this find playground sand on top and that will keep it from getting fungus gnats crawling through the top of the soil and eating the roots and so then we're gonna put this in a fairly cool fairly direct place for a couple of weeks and check on it every so often now when I say fairly cool and fairly dark what I mean is someplace that gets a little indirect light like the base of these shelves here back in the corner um I'm looking for a temperature in the neighborhood of say like sixty to eighty degrees any colder and the roots are going to grow really slow or your plant material might start rotting in the soil any warmer and you may start seeing issues with disease and you'll also have a much higher chance of the top of the Scion drying out now you don't have to have it this tall and this one was probably about 12 inches usually like 8 to 10 is good you can go as low as this and still as long as like 3 inches above the soil and you'll still potentially get a tree out of it but the main thing that I'm focused on is getting as much plant material below this as possible because every node and all the spaces in between have the potential to grow some level of roots so that you get a nice a nice like group of roots like this little fig has so this next step is where I have screwed up in the past and only recently I've gotten a lot better at it and I'm gonna show you a few examples of what I'm talking about so from here we have to create some way to keep humidity on the rest of the Scion while it's forming roots because if this dries out before the roots happen like it's dead in the water so one of the methods that I use is just your basic old saran wrap now you can buy buddy tape you can buy parafilm there's lots of things for grafting that will biodegrade over time and the plant will push through but if you don't want to go out and spend the money or you don't have any on hand and you want to do this and you have access to materials then just use regular old saran wrap would be like my first choice for this you just want to wrap it and it will eventually push through the top but you want to wrap the entire Scion basically all the way to the soil line and over the top of the Scion so that you're creating this really nice humid environment now that's worked really well this is a persimmon I have another persimmon I did that with as well as this little fig and so you can see that saran wrap and just like a plastic wrap is a pretty solid way to ensure that your cutting is going to stay humid enough and moist enough until it takes and begins to grow you know another thing that I've done that I really like the way it's worked out is I'll use drink bottles so you know you're on a road trip and you already have something in your travel mug but you really want a soda or you really want a Gatorade or you really need a bottle of water cuz what if you get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere like there's lots of things so sometimes I'll end up with drink bottles we all know recycling isn't real and we have to recycle at home like the part of it and so what I'll do is I'll pull the label off the bottle and then I'll just take a pair of scissors try and find a spot pop that open try and find a spot to kind of pinch it so you don't stab yourself trying to cut them and then just get a nice cut in there and then just cut all the way around the base and I really like using drink bottles because they already have a cap so when you need that environment to the United human as the Scion is starting to take and grow then you can keep the cap closed like this but once it starts to grow and you don't need it to be as human and you'd like to keep a little humidity around the Scion but not have it like really concentrated then you can take the cap off or open the cap up and that will help vent it so it makes it work out really easily this is gonna be a little it kind of fits right in the mouthpiece so we might actually try that one mmm this is gonna be a little small but that's basically it like I'm able to water this through the sides here and that's really nice because I don't have to take off the dome that I've created from a drink bottle and I can kind of monitor you know how the growth is progressing and if it is and then as I see leaves emerging what I'll do is I'll move it out to a spot where it gets a little more light and a little more light until I can take off all the plastic wrap or take the dome off completely and let's look at this guy cuz I did this one let's see this is on the 22nd so see today's like the fifth or something um so that's why it's like good just under two weeks or right around two weeks so this one is two weeks ago we'll say two weeks and and look at that he has little buds so this is it persimmon one of them is taking the other one looks like it might not it may not have had developed enough buds it may not have you know just something happened there but you want to numbers games so if you're going to get some material to work with maybe take a couple of cuttings you know go to your neighbor's house knock on the door say I really a lot of this persimmons or figs or peaches or whatever you have can I take a couple of branches to try propagation project usually they'll say yes I've never had anyone say no but your mileage may vary take a couple of cookies with you and make a deal they can't refuse the other bottle container what I really like is this one this is a big gallon water bottle if you live in an area where you can't drink the tap water for some reason it seems to become more common these days um this one worked out really well all I did and I'll loosen it up so you can see is I cut the base out this and then it's able to sit right on the lip of this cup and I can pour water into the top and it kind of pulls in and then goes down into the cup but also creates this kind of humidity chamber on the bottom ledge which is cool because and it's constantly condensing inside of the bottle and as you can see these goji berries are doing pretty well there's a little few little fuzzy spots as far as mold and so if you notice that you can go over it I honestly I usually just I'll get in there and kind of um just push it off with my fingers you can hit it with a q-tip and some peroxide or a little bit of rubbing alcohol but you don't want to let it keep going this might be too much humidity for this guy but it looks like it's gonna be alright so we'll just keep an eye on it so definitely if you use the actually any humidity to be honest you're going to as it warms up and this is why we don't want to go over eighty degrees when we're doing this you're gonna see a little bit of like mold or fungus problems so you just got to keep an eye on them they're growing and you know take care of that as you see it pop up but it's probably not going to kill your plant unless you completely ignore it so and then here's one of my little FIGS it's just starting to get its leaves and so I have I don't know like 20 figs that I'm doing that I've never tried before that I didn't have to pay anything for except for a little bit of time and effort to get it in some soil so I think that this is just a great way to amass a lot of plants so you can have the orchard of your dreams if you try it out please let me know in the comments below and if you have any questions or you're really struggling with this and also leave those in the comments below because either I or somebody else maybe can help you know troubleshoot and we'll work through those and as always if you like what you see then please hit that subscribe button and we'll make more content to try and help you guys grow those gardens of your dreams and follow me on Instagram in the meantime at flavor kit there's lots of cooking gardening running around in the woods right now is just trying to get lots of stuff in the ground and a half a dozen cute fluffy dogs and big like lanky lookin dogs and all kinds of mutts chasing and barking in the background and half of the Instagram like daily update stuff that I do and I think that that's it for today you guys so until next time happy gardening you

Channel: Veronica Flores

Views: 589,566

Rating: 4.8752079 out of 5

Keywords: greenhouse, rooting cuttings, grow your own food, budget gardening, gardening tips, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, fruit trees, organic gardening, propagation, figs, indoor gardening, small space gardening

Id: bVXBptgCwFw

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019