How to propagate large numbers of hostas in a nursery// Divide plantain lillies // Hosta Production

in today's video i'm going to show you how to take a hosta and turn it into many many many hostas many times over you can take these beautiful plants and grow them in pots into a sellable nursery product and i'm not talking about just taking a large hosta and dividing it into two or three clumps i'm talking about taking hostas and dividing them into many plants that can be repotted and sold in your backyard nursery let's get to it if this is your first time visiting my channel good to see you if it's not your first time good to see you again today we're going to take one of the plants on my best selling must have plants to start your nursery with and i'm going to show you how to turn these into a lot of plants for free and this is a big step and you becoming an actual grower and nursery owner you got to learn how to propagate and you got to learn how to grow your own plants why is that so you don't have any money or very limited money actually in the plants that you're growing and ultimately going to sell today i'm going to be dividing a variety of hosta called vulcan and as you can see vulcan is just an amazing variety of hosta variegated variety it grows to be a pretty large size and it's a great seller does great in pots and the reason that i have chosen this particular plant and when i say plant i mean why did i grab this pot instead of that pot i grabbed this one because when i look inside of it i see a number of stems coming up i'd say four or five or more stems in here now that doesn't mean that i can divide this into exactly that number of hostas but chances are when i dig this out of this pot i'm gonna be able to make several hostas say at least three maybe four or more out of this one plant so that's the reason i've chosen this one instead of a different one now the first thing that i'm going to do with this hosta is just pop it out of its pot and get its label out of the way and just pop it out of here and just have a look at it and there's quite a few roots there and i just keep my wheelbarrow here of potting soil and i'll just kind of shake out as much of that loose dirt as i can these were just potted just last season i bought these from a local wholesale nursery as small starts and you can see how much in just one season these have grown and i'll give you a look at that you can generally see what's left here you have a root balls a little potting soil in it and you can see the stems there you can just see one two three four five i think there are six or seven stems here i can't tell exactly but i'm going to wash the rest of this potting soil off of here simply in a bucket of water to get this nice and clean now before i wash the soil off of these roots understand that the way that i do propagation of hostas is for nursery production this is not me trying to divide hostas to place in my yard or divide my own plants in my own yard for my own use if i were doing that there are better ways to do that that are a lot less trouble so for example if you had a big hosta growing in your yard that was three or five or ten times this size a huge clump you can just dig that up with a shovel and just whack it in half or in fourths and have three or four or five nice big clumps of hostas that you can just take and just stick right back in the ground and spread those out in your yard or share them with your neighbors or friends all you want to but that is not what we are doing here as backyard growers we are growing our own plants and it would take so much space to do hostas the way that people typically divide them in their own yards it would take you hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of giant hostas and it would take up your entire property and your entire nursery just to keep that alive and moving so the way that i do this again this is just the way that i do it is i divide these into very small clumps and then grow them out for a season or two in order to create a sellable plant in a reasonable amount of time without taking up so much space because for most backyard growers one of the primary things that we have to figure out is how to best use the space that we have i'm going to take this plant and just kind of swish it around in the water by its roots i'm not going to make any attempt at all to be careful with it hostas are incredibly tough you can disturb their roots um a great deal at just virtually any time of the year and what i'm doing is washing all of that loose potting soil out of that plant and the reason i'm doing that is so i can see what i'm doing and so i can see down tight into the root ball exactly what it is that i'm doing now that's getting pretty clean i want to take a little more water and wash that out just as much as i can you know this is a hard thing to do on a really cold day so i try to do this in the spring or in the summer really anytime the weather is even a little bit warm this is just not that difficult of a thing to do more a plant that's bigger with more extensive roots that may be more tightly root bound it's a little harder to work with but you can work with those as well you can also work with plants that are a lot smaller than this one this is just an example that i am going to show you today now this is pretty clean it's got a little bit of loose dirt on it but what i'm really looking for here inside is places where i can begin to take a sharp blade a knife a razor something like that and cut these to begin separating them into more plants now i'm going to take a pocket knife which is what i'm using you can use any sharp blade and begin looking towards the middle of the plant or wherever you think there's a good spot and just cut right through that crown that's called your this part of the hosta here is called the crown or the rhizome where the individual plants arise from and there you can see i have cut that and then we just kind of shake these out sometimes it's good to go back to your bucket of water with both of these and kind of work them apart again no real need to be gentle with hosta roots i really can't do this with most plants don't ever try to do this with a flowering shrub of any kind or an evergreen certainly but you can do this with hostas they are well known for their ability to be separated so now in my hands i think i have three stems there and three or four stems there so let's see if i can cut out another one from this one just take your knife you want to try to make sure you get part of the crown part of the rhizome and some roots below it as you cut let's see i may have cut into one of the stems in the back and that's okay if you do that you're not going to get every single one of them but there is a plant that will be a six dollar plant next season so i'll take this and pot it and grow it out for a plant next season so there's one uh let's see mike can get another division out of this just cut right through that crown and there you go kind of cut part of that off there now i may have injured that one a little bit there but it's always worth a try let's see if i cut it anyway it may it may survive and it may not but i'm going to plant that look these don't take much root material at all to survive so that's probably going to be just fine and there's the third plant from that half of the division that will be totally good next season and uh very very simple to do we'll take the rest of this hosta and let's see what we can get here this has one two three this has five potential places to divide this i'm not gonna be able to get five out of it they just don't work that way but i can get let's see there's two there if i'm careful and if i cut this right i should be able to get two more from this one but let's see if i can get some roots on both of these with a cut right there there you go nothing to it really there's a little hostile plant and there's a little hosta plant so you got a big chunk of roots coming off of this side you got a piece of the rhizome or the crown here you got a nice little plant there okay let's see how many more we can get we're kind of running out of root material here but i think we can get two more out of this anyway let's see all right now this one will be a survivor for next year's crop and let's see i'm just going to take a knife and cut this little guy off of here because there's no well you know what i'm going to just save that whole thing i don't know how well that shows up on camera but there's a lot a little beginner roots starting out right in there and you can see some root material here on the back so i'm just going to save this whole thing even though it has two stems there's no way i'll get two plants out of that so that's pretty good let's see so that's one two three four five six and seven plants that we have gotten from one hosta for next year's crop of plants what will ultimately wind up going into a pot i'll take one of these small plants that i've just divided and i'll cut the top out of it and i know that that looks like hosta murder but these things will thrive just fine in their pots just like this i'll take a pot grab a little potting soil right here from a wheelbarrow put a little in there shouldn't take that much at all and stuff all of those roots in there that's really more roots than need to go in that pot but for right now they'll be fine that's the reason that you use small pots like this for just a growing season when you're growing out small plants is to save space if you put these in a regular size pot right now they'll do just fine but they will take up a whole lot of room all summer long when you can be using that space for something else you just take it over here and snap it into a pot we'll do the rest with the rest of these put them in the shade and that's it and as always you have to include the tag you have to know what kind of plants you have at all times no matter what the plant no matter what you're working with you've got to know what kind of plants you have that's basically it for dividing these hostas let me show you one last thing if we could fast forward in time one year this is what we would have the process that you just watched me go through i did with these last year and this is what i have now i have a tray of 18 of these i have many trays of these just this is just an example but these will be ready to sell next year and some of these will be ready to divide next year you always sell some and you keep some to make more divisions from so even if those hostas that i just divided on camera even if two or three or four of those don't make it we still have three or four or five free plants that we have propagated ourselves and after a season or maybe two seasons of growth they'll be ready to sell at retail for six dollars and once you start this process once you do it for a year then two years then three years then you always have another crop coming along that'll be ready to divide and ready to propagate to grow your next year's crop of hospitals final step on these little beauties is to give them a really good soaking to settle all that potting soil down in there and then place them in a shady location where they're safe from the burning sun and these will simply sit here keeping them moist every once in a while they'll just sit here until next spring pretty easy but pretty effective so we divided all the vulcan hostas that we had that was the same thing i showed you just a minute ago and out of five hostas we have a total now of 31 and you know two or three of them may die and that's fine but the point is this is the magic of plant multiplication and if you're gonna be a backyard grower you gotta learn how to do this if you find this kind of material helpful i hope you'll like and subscribe to my channel and i hope to see you again on my next video this is savvydirtfarmer signing off i hope all of you watching have a great day today

Channel: Savvy Dirt Farmer

Views: 273,840

Keywords: Divide hostas, Multiply hostas, Hosta propagation, backyard nursery, Work from home, make money from home, plant math, plant propagation, easy hostas, unique hostas, plantain lilly propagation, start a nursery, nursery business, propagate large numbers of hostas, nursery production hostas, divide plantain lily, multiply plantain lily, separate plantain lily, separate hostas

Id: L7BBzOMCpak

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021