Propagating Hydrangea Cuttings the Easy Way

hey guys so I just got back from our family trip to Oregon this summer and we had a lot of fun but it was time to come home and on our way home we stopped by this really awesome nursery they had a lot of really neat stuff there being over on the Oregon coast it's just cool and in fact it is hotter than heck after coming inland more and being back home but it's just real cool and breezy over there is probably like 60 70 degrees with the Sun beatin down but just nice and cool so everything is just so much more lush and green over there this nursery anyway was really awesome and while I was there they had a hydrangea that was just blooming with the most beautiful deep blue flowers and I have been trying to figure out hydrangea for awhile never have been able to so I just asked them if they would let me take some cuttings and they said sure you know I offered to pay they didn't want any money and this was a nursery they just had its growing in the ground I took a whole bunch of cuttings from their nursery and we'll go ahead and stick these guys and see if they take and that way I'll know when they finally do start blooming whether it's the actual hydrangea or whether it's me and what I'm doing to the soil now I've heard you know you've got to have the right acidity in the soil to make them blue but I think genetics play some part in it so we're gonna find out well propagate these show you how we do that and we'll see you know knowing that these were actually I saw the flowers with my own eyes they are deep deep blue really beautiful and we'll find out once and for all is it mirrors at the flower and then we'll come back and see how things are rootin in a couple months so let's go ahead and see see these things getting potted up alright so here's my potting bench we've got everything I think that we're gonna need for this and let's see here we've got a few 4-inch four-and-a-half inch pots we've got the hydrangea cuttings that we're gonna kind of Whittle down here and then we've got form it in 3 this is the rooting hormone I like to use for just about anything I've used dip and grow and other are other forms of routing medium in the past but I really liked that hormone in three because I do roadie cutting so much and they really need more a stronger hormone so there's my little diddler actually it's just a stick I just found but it'll work and then pruning shears we need and so let's go ahead and get started and I don't know if I showed this in a video before but I like to use these alcohol swabs you can get in any drugstore to just wipe down the pruning shears first so they're clean from whatever you were doing last time so when I take any cuttings especially cuttings like like these these are more softwood cuttings I know it's we're in the middle of August you could call them semi hardwood maybe but it's such succulent growth that I don't know you could almost call it softwood maybe somewhere between softwood and semi hardwood but I will go ahead and just take off a couple of these leaves here and then clip it down and when I when I take the cutting I like to take it right below a leaf node so you saw those leaves were right there coming out of there and I pulled them off and just cut right below the node because there's a higher concentration of differentiating cells in those nodes that can actually then go and form roots and then just like rodia's will strip the excess leaves off of these guys and then take just a little sliver little sliver from the bark here to get down to that cambium layer so that these things can root a little bit easier and then of course we'll cut these leaves down by half maybe just to prevent excess moisture loss so there's our cutting and we've got a rooting hormone here and go ahead and swirl that around in there tap off the excess and there you have it all covered up with rooting hormone that's just a real nice cutting and should form some awesome roots stick it in the pot actually get the diddler just get our $5000 diddler here and I don't do that for roadies but for these I softer plants I'd do that cuz I don't want to damage the stem and bend it break it anything like that well pack down that rooting medium which is actually just the same fine bark that I use our medium bar well not medium probably more fine bar that I use for the roadies and then that's all you have so I'm gonna go ahead and finish all these guys up and then I'll show you what they look like all right so it's actually the next day August 18th I ended up having to wait another day because the I wanted to propagate a few other plants that need to get watered well and just needed to soak in some water into the plant and just really hydrate well before I took the cuttings so I waited today anyway this is what I ended up using now definitely not a large scale propagation bed here but for just odds and ends and little cuttings of plants that I like you know I like to grow other plants besides roadies and so occasionally I like to take cuttings and just do things you know just grow on a few other different varieties so in here I ended up decided I did all hydrangeas that I'd showed you I labeled I'm not sure the varieties of a couple of them because I just was able to get those cuttings at the nursery and that it had been growing there for a long time they didn't even know the particularly and then one of them was just wild I found off of the side of the road there leading down to a beach called hug point on the Oregon coast so I just labeled them hug point and this one here is glowing glowing embers that's a variety that I bought that's the real deep pink that I really like and then this is that blue one right here I just label them blue because once again we don't know the variety but they're going all the way back here down all these rows so and then I went ahead and did some white gel I really liked variegated white jealous so I did a bunch of those cuttings I think I've got was at four five ten eleven twelve thirteen cuttings total and you know they'll do perfect in those little pots they don't need anything big you could actually probably put more cuttings in one of those little pots but I just took thirteen that was what was easily accessible on the plant and then some Java red Y jela the Java Reds are real pretty variety too and they go well with the variegated but so that's all I've done right now I could definitely fit more in here if I want to just fill the whole bottom with the bark that would work out too but I just you know wanted to do individual pots so I could pull them out and put them in the in the hoop house when they started rooting on so these little totes I mean this makes it super easy I found this if I think Walmart for like 15 bucks and it's even got a foam lining along here that when clamped down it just seals it up and keeps all the moisture in and that works out great for cutting so the latest clear stuff can let light through I've definitely got all of this on the back side of my barn or you know you could put on the backside of any building the north side so that the sun's not hitting it directly you want lots of overhead light which right here I have plenty of overhead light between these two buildings and it ends up protecting from the Sun really well the Sun never will hit this except for maybe if that may be 15 minutes and the evening just right up between those trees and the roof of the barn so I'm not too worried about that at all but I might even move it behind the house but this works out really well like I said like 15 bucks and you can't go wrong you just pot up your cuttings put them in this little tote seal it up it's the summertime we've got plenty of four months to go at least in Washington we usually have Indian summers and so we have plenty of Sun and warmth up through October so I'm not worried about bottom heat at all for these guys they'll they'll root on just fine especially the varieties that I have in there the white jello really take off soon so we'll come back and we'll check this out in I don't know probably two months and we'll see where things are at I'll let you see how well they rooted on all right well it's been about a month since well a little over a month since I took these cuttings of these hydrangea and why Gela let's see what we've got locks down on this lid I love this little propagation box and how it turned out is just been really cool I love out seals up everything stayed real humid in there alright so we've got the cuttings here it's been I think it was August eighteenth or nineteenth when we did that last little clip of video and you saw that when I said when I took these cuttings but we're what is it September I think 26 or seventh now so you know a little over a month like five weeks and I pop this box open and look down in here look at what I saw this is absolutely crazy because there's so much humidity in here these roots are just growing right into the air you can see them growing down into the soil there too these are that hug point rhododendron i need them hug point because that's where I got em Huck Point Oregon they're just grown wild on the side of the road but anyway those things are just rooting like crazy so let's uh let's see how are we gonna do this let's take one of these out and see what we get how this is gonna work I'm gonna try and tip this guy upside down yeah nothing going through all the way there but let's see maybe we can peel some of that back and just kind of pull it out tease it out yeah look at those roots all right there we go all right so you can see I think all of these roots here growing out through that little hydrangea I mean that's the whole root ball right there you can see the root little roots coming out through the end there anyway I mean we're talking five weeks and this isn't even springtime this is in the late summer so I don't think it really tell matters when you take these cuttings something else I want to show you already kind of looked in this box and I was looking at the white gellick because I know those really really quickly you put these guys back those white gelly root really really quickly so I pulled them out I took a look at them already and they have got a massive roots growing in here let's see here I can do this again and they're just growing like crazy five weeks variegated white Gela taken in the middle of August anyway I'm gonna have to pop them suckers up or they're gonna take over get all intertwine there become a real problem so if you're ever interested in propagating hydrangea or why Gela I've got variegated white Gela and java red white gel in there's several different types of hydrangea they all rooted these guys are in here really firm I'm excited about that that's that blue variety I was telling you about so if you're ever interested in that that's all we did we just used some some fine pine or fir bark and a tote that I bought at Walmart and then just a bunch of little four or they four and a half inch pots and just potted them up nothing special water dam in real good and five weeks later there we are I you know I used some rooting hormone that I showed you but other than add there's nothing special here so hope you guys can take that and make something happen and have an awesome day all right adios

Channel: Mike Kincaid

Views: 1,077,946

Keywords: propagating hydrangea, hydrangea cuttings, rooting hydrangea, hydrangea, propagating hydrangea cuttings

Id: l6L_Gf6r698

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2016