How to Propogate Bonsai & Make Cuttings

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
[Music] many of you have asked me to do a video about cuttings I don't know why it fascinates people but I can understand why it certainly fascinates me when I was looking into the background of doing this video I went round the nursery to see all these types of cuttings we do and this is just a representative sample of all the cuttings that we produce at the moment and more now why are people so fascinated by cuttings cuttings is simply a method of propagation and most bonsai people are not just people who carve their trees and wire their trees I like to think that most bonsai enthusiasts are also gardeners and horticulturalists and when you are a gardener one of the great joys of gardening is to be able to propagate things yourself it's not just a question of saving money because I know some very very rich people who have loads of money they can afford to buy the plants and yet they will save every tiny scrap of material that they prune off and make cuttings from it so know that it's not a question of saving money it's just the fun of propagating for the sake of propagating I remember when I was a small boy I've always been interested in plants and the joy and delight you get when you stick something in the soil then it goes into a new plant when I was living in India things like hibiscus bougainvillea and sugarcane you stick a large thick trunk of sugarcane or bougainvillea into the soil and hey presto in two weeks it forms another plant and wouldn't it be wonderful if we as human beings could cut the tip of the finger off and stick it in a medium and it could become another person it is like that but plants have this unique property of self propagating that means you cut this material off stick it in the soil or in some medium and it will form another plant and it will be the exact clone or copy of the parent but I don't want to dwell too much into the realms of science fiction but I can envisage maybe in less than a hundred years we are already talking of cloning where you're taking the embryo of some cell of the human body and you can grow it in a medium and it becomes an exact clone they've done it with sheep so I'm sure you can do it with human beings as well so it's not that far-fetched when you talk of propagating by cutting so cuttings is exactly the same thing you're taking a bit of material and creating the self same genes in another plant another being so although they are another plant is it's part of the same being of the plant I don't know let's not get into that so let's talk about cutting so just the sample they're junipers here fig tree chinese-owned Catania aster this is crabapple more chinese-owned miniature roses zelkova camellias we make cuttings this is the ease of spruce cutting Satsuki Azalea this is a two year old cutting and he took our juniper Hinoki Cypress and so it goes on you can make cuttings from virtually any and everything but we've got to qualify that because like the earrings not all plants grow from cuttings before we get into the detail process of making cuttings let me just mention that there are many many types of cuttings there are what we call softwood cuttings there are semi hardwood cuttings and hardwood cuttings what I'm going to do today is mainly about softwood and semi soft or semi hard cuttings because those are the types of cuttings that we will use most of in making our bonsai so let's begin by taking you through the different types of cuttings before I show you the actual process of a making cutting I would just mention that another type of cutting which is really an aside of this demonstration and that is root cuttings now these Chinese arms or what is commonly sold as zelkova it's not gel cover it's Chinese elm ulmus parviflora they are made from roots when you group to a tree especially these Chinese and they have these take long straggly roots and if you just cut that root off and stick the head out this is really a root you can see all these new shoots will come so you can make plants from root cuttings so root cuttings easily made from wisteria and this is crabapple again to show you that I'm not cheating see these actually roots you can see that their roots stick the roots let the head stick out and you will get new plants so the three cuttings are put in one pot and this is only two years old from root cutting so roots of certain plants make cuttings you've got to know which so the Chinese arm does easily crabapple roots easily wisteria roots easily I don't think I know of many other varieties yes the fig also roots very easily the edible fig I will show you that also as another little demonstration then there are the softwood cuttings where you use soft material or you can use woody mature these catania as the cuttings they're only six months old and Catania's two by the way roots ever so easily you can see if you take a close-up view of this it is a very thick piece of wood I put in it's more than a quarter inch thick it's thicker than a pencil and yet it rooted so easily look at the roots on that this is another catania stand not a stick but it just shows I used actually the hard wood to make the cutting so you can make cuttings from all these different ways but let's begin first by showing you what softwood cuttings are a soft board cutting is something like this this is crass Allah this is soft you just stick in the soil without hormone rooting powder and I guarantee you in about two weeks it should root now this is a fake this ayah was made from a hard wood cutting but if you wanted to make a soft board cutting you would just use this soft material this is all the material that has grown in the last two weeks so you can just snip a bit off like that that will grow again remove the leaves remove as many leaves as possible because you don't want the leaves to draw too much moisture you may or may not dip this in hormone rooting powder sticking in soil and you get a new plant so these are the easy ones let me show you in detail about the Chinese juniper cuttings because Chinese juniper is one of the favorites for bonsai and they grow very very easily from cuttings now this is the Juniper China ANSYS San Jose or the San Jose juniper some people call it the Californian juniper this is a plant that we've made on sway to becoming a bonsai and this plant is only I would say 5 or 6 years old this is the same plant same age we don't do it big because we keep it pruned all the time if I had planted it after one year in the ground it would be about 10 times as big but I'd like to keep it dwarf and you know compact so I keep them in pots so that is the same age but I've not wired that yet and this is a two year old cutting of San Jose and this is something that I rooted only last September I can root it as late as September and I haven't taken it out but I can assure you look at the roots on that so that has rooted in the last six months and of course in the winter it didn't grow at all so it just shows how quickly they root so they root within about a month and this is after one year and this is after five years so it's not that long two to produce a nice bonsai from cutting so what do we do for cutting material we have a lot of large plants on the nursery from which we do the cuttings but I'll just show you what we do when we make a cutting so this is a good example here rather than go to the field and show you our big plants now I'm going to take a bit off from here [Music] so when you get a pruning like that you can either make what is called a heel cutting and a heel cutting is something that you would pull like that and that's called a heel cutting that is called a heel cutting and then you clean it up and then remove the lower leaves and then you're ready to stick it in the soil I'll talk about the propagating medium in just a minute so that is a heel cutting and where you've removed the here these little bits of callus that or these tear marks these if you smear with rooting hormone powder these could also root from there so that could make a cutting I will show you some typical Chinese juniper material that you can use for making cuttings on our nursery because we are pruning all the time we literally get tons and tons of material normally these we just compost or throw on the bonfire and burn it but sometimes I keep some of it and I propagate from it so this is a typical end of a branch that we have pulled off from Chinese juniper this is the ITO Ogawa the very fine foliage juniper now what do you do with a piece of material like this my advice is that you should never be too greedy I know that when we propagate we're trying to propagate because we want to have lots of the material and you tend to get greedy but don't be greedy by taking the hard wood some people think that by taking a hard wood you will get an instant piece of material like this which will almost look ready to be born site it may strike I'm not saying it won't strike but it is less likely to strike we use this hormone rooting powder you can have look at it and there are many types on the market and they all have this ingredient called IBA in de lisle butyric acid and the powder form is quite good if you use hard wood material like this you need very strong rooting powder so that would do and I always believe in sharing it and getting the heal cutting like that and you dip it in a hormone rooting powder and it should root but I wouldn't encourage you to use wood that is very hard the most best material to use is what we call young semi hard mature so if you go higher up the branch this is a softer bit so you're using much thinner mature so as I said don't be greedy and use the thick material because the ticket material they're less likely they are to strike their best material for making Juniper cuttings is something like a matchstick or even like a toothpick thick wood that has just been grown in the current season and which has just begun to get hard and you tear it off and this is what we call a hue you can you see that's a here then you clean the heel off by trimming it layer and you stick it in a hormone rooting powder and then we would stick it into the soil which I will show you how to do in a minute now the other popular thing is your Japanese maples now this is that famous shishi gashira or Lionhead maple very desirable plant and I don't like to throw any scrap of this away I used this the other day to make the hay layering but the top side trimmed off I didn't want too much foliage so I have this material if you look closely this is a very very good example of what we call semi hardwood that means the wood has just hardened all this growth is this year's growth in the last I would say four to five weeks all this has grown so it is still soft and still green if you compared to the old wood that is brown almost purple in color so that is last year's goat which has become too hard you can strike it from cutting using the hardwood but the chances of it rooting are less likely than this semi hardwood or the new wood cutting so again I prefer to use a heel cutting I tear away the here that's it I tear it away so I get a little here remove the bottom branches just leave maybe a pair of leaves very important to remove as much leaf as possible just leave one or two pairs of leaves the reason being if you have too much foliage it will make such a lot of demands on the root system that it will dry the cutting out so the less foliage the better some people the professional grows if you have a very large variety or there has large leaves they even cut off half the leaf if you cut off half the leave it reduces the transpiration even more and that is best shown maybe with the fig cuttings supposing this is a fig cutting I will remove half the leaf so that the transpiration is only going to take place from just that part of the leaf if you leave the whole leaf will transpire that means they lose too much moisture and they'll make the root rooting more difficult so that is the ideal cutting with the here clean the heel up and again you stick it in the hormone rooting powder and that would be an ideal cutting my dear cutting so you can use this for most materials you can use it for Satsuki azalea again Satsuki Azalea don't use the hardwood use the new shoots that have grown that is the secret the new shoots are more likely to strike so using this I get about 95% strike rate that means for every 100 cuttings I take 95% will route with junipers I get about the same rate of success these are the shoujo prunings that I did again if you look closely that is the old wood this is the new wood the new wood is really not soft soft but it has just turned hard and the cutting is like this maybe reduce the area of the foliage don't remove all the foliage leave leave some of it but reduce it by half and stick it in the rooting hormone and that is your cutting now those of you who are more knowledgeable will be wondering why I haven't showed the noddle cutting method because you don't always have to use the heel cutting to strike a maple now what is a nodal cutting a nodal cutting is simply a cutting where you prune a branch of say if you prune this branch off and you cut that that is what we call a nodal cutting but where you cut it is very important if I show you again on this they showed your maple I've just cut that off that would be a heel cutting but that's not a heel cutting so I'm going to cut over there but I don't cut anywhere I cut it just below the potential leaf joint or where I have removed the leaves so just cut it below there at a slant and that is what we call a nodal cutting again reduce the leaves in size stick it in and that's what you get so again please reinforce you the principle the nodal cutting so that's Chinese elm ulmus parviflora not zelkova and then removed the bottom leaves there's no heal there and I cut just below the junction so that is what we call a nodal cutting okay so those are the different ways of making it again if I can show you with this miniature Rose with this miniature Rose I can either do a heel cutting by tearing of the heel I still think the heel cutting is the most reliable so where you can just use the heel cutting so you remove that stick it in and that's it I'm now going to just show these all examples of different cuttings this is the etoy gawad juniper this has just struck in the last two or three months this was last year's cutting and so it goes on and they all root very easily you've got to know what variety routes certain varieties like the corniest er you can use really hard wood and you don't have to use very strong rooting powder either so certain varieties are easiest to strike roses are very easy the conifers like the cryptomeria and juniper are more difficult you can use many types of medium there is no magic formula for the medium what I have here this is our standard base compost that means we mix all the other materials like akadama Hyuga and things to it so this is just 50/50 orchid bark and Spagna peat moss so it's a very open texture so that's all I use you can add sand to it some species you can root purely in sand but I find that this is best to use and you also notice that because we are a commercial nursery we use these large propagating trays these are not carrying trays you can see they've got holes so there are what we call propagating trees we like to have good drainage you mustn't stand it in water unless you're propagating willows they have to have good drainage so all these trees have a lot of holes at the bottom so they're also very deep so you fill it so that it's completely full to the top some people use vermiculite vermiculite is also very good and I've also known people to use just ordinary bark bark is also possible so anything that is an open texture will be good for making cuttings so the other point I want to make is that you should plant the cuttings in as deep a tray as possible if you use these seed trays which are used for growing seeds they have rather shallow and because they are shallow they don't have enough depth to put the cutting in so fill it to the top so you have at least 2 inches depth you can even use these squat pots so a pot like this is about 3 inches deep 3 to 4 inches deep you can fill that up the thing is to have a lot of mass there are certain cuttings like this ficus every time I prune the ficus I can get millions of cuttings and this was just prunings that we picked off the floor and ficus as you know those of our youtube friends who live in the tropics will know that ficus grows ever so easily from cuttings look at that every single chute has rooted and then we just put these up so ficus is very easy some did not root but I think it will form root it will form see there's a new chute coming from there so Farkas very is very easy there's another box of these and how do you tell when it's rooted see when it produces new growth like this then you know that it has rooted this is not dead but it hasn't produced roots yet but let's tip this out and you can see look at the roots alert so these are ficus cuttings again you see that hasn't rooted yet but I'm not going to throw it away some of them have rooted so the rooted ones I will just put on don't break the roots that's a lovely plant and then that makes an individual plant so a flower pot like this can be used for making quite easy cutting so with the ficus we use quite hard wood so we didn't use entirely soft wood because I know that ficus is an easy species to propagate so let's take this tree there and show you how we insert it in fact it's quite simple so that's the very deep tray and these are the cuttings I've already dipped in the hormone rooting powder so I usually put it at a slant and as deep as possible so I put it almost 3/4 of the length of the cutting I made because the more contact it has with the growing medium the more chance it has of rooting so all these are going to be shoved deep into the compost at a slant so that I have more contact and they should root I usually keep the same species together because that mason oddly we're producing cuttings also because the different species root at different rates juniper may take longer to root than a maple and so on so we want to separate it at the right time and again if I can show you those of you who remember a video I did back in October if this is now third week in May we remember we did the program making bonsai from I think nursery material I showed a very rare form of Al Alberta spruce it was a PI serie of some kind and those cuttings like the cuttings we made in another program were just stuck in this medium and every single plant has rooted every single plant here has rooted so it just shows how easy it is to root Picea cuttings so this is no big deal very very easy to root I will just show you one more little trick and that is to make the root cuttings from the edible fig what I'm going to show you now is really not really cutting but there are just root cuttings now this lovely edible fig ficus carica they have this habit of producing suckers from the roots and if you leave all these suckers to grow it will take away the nutrients from all the goodness from the parent tree and the top may not grow so well so every now and then you got to get rid of these suckers so all these are actually self-made cuttings root cuttings and if you tease them it's such a vigorous plant that I don't have to worry about the tree dying at this time because I'm really just going to do a report just to show you that I'm not cheating so there are about twenty or thirty rooted suckers they will all form beautiful little plants and as I told you earlier the ficus carica also root very easily from hardwood cuttings but these are just root cuttings so you take the trouble you see every one of them have self rooted so that would make a delightful little bonsai so all these are in fact like root cuttings but there are suckers but if you planted the root of this tree even a sliver of root like this if you take that Jesus already root there you put it in a pot with that head sticking out it will form a new tree so these are all the different methods of taking cuttings although that's called a root cutting but making cuttings will propagate your collection of plants very easily and you get a lot of satisfaction making more and more material and then you can train it in whatever way you wish there you are I hope you've enjoyed this video about taking cuttings and the main thing to have a go yourself never mind if you have failures the thing is the more you practice the more confidence you will get thank you very much [Music] you
Info
Channel: Herons Bonsai
Views: 181,083
Rating: 4.9619393 out of 5
Keywords: how to propogate bonsai, how to take cuttings, how to grow bonsai, how to take bonsai cuttings, bonsai, bonsai tree, Spruce, Cotoneaster, Edible Fig, Chinese Elm bonsai, Azalea Bonsai, Bonsai Tree, Bonsai seller, UK bonsai, Bonsai in the UK, About Bonsai, Herons
Id: l5AYgpOFwNc
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)
Published: Fri May 24 2019
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.