Propagating (Rooting) Oak Trees from Softwood Cuttings

good morning welcome to Planet Mojo today I'm going to show you how to propagate softwood cuttings from trees [Music] hopefully this wind isn't gonna mess up the sound but what I have here is this is my sample scissors this is what I used to take tissue samples from vines down in the vineyard so what I'm gonna do is just get this cleaned up I don't want any spores or anything on this because once I take these cuttings are gonna go into four inch pots or is my four inch pots it's quite the mess in here because I've been like bringing stuff in here when the rain starts we've had so much rain like here's the four inch pots so I'm gonna set up I'm gonna probably take like six cuttings and I'll have the pots set up in here I'm gonna go get them I got to take the Gator to go get them they're down at the end of the road the neighbors have let me take some cuttings from well it's kind of a messed up tree I'll show you that in a little bit but now with this clean and I'll just bring this soaked in alcohol along I have some fresh rooting hormone and this is the gel type they say you're supposed to always use fresh every year I don't know if that's true or not but I don't want to take any chances I'm gonna have to study up on that a bit more and see if that's actually true at any rate this is fresh rooting hormone in the gel form so I will be dipping the stuff in that or dipping the cuttings in that when I get back so what I'm gonna do now is make a mix of half vermiculite a little bit of perlite added to it and then some potting mix which potting mix is almost always let's see what the ingredients are in this okay it's got a wetting agent and it has 95% peat moss so it's basically peat moss with a wetting agent and but it's more finely ground than the stuff you get you know you know Bay also fifty percent that fifty percent that roughly and this has a little bit of fertilizer in it so I'm not gonna be adding any fertilizer at all so I'm gonna mix up four pots of that I believe actually I'll just mix up a bag this pigs about half full I'll just add vermiculite to get it full and then I'll mix four up to start with but I might come back with six cuttings so I'll be able to quickly make some more if I need to so let's get started on that [Music] [Music] [Music] all right while this is soaking up water grab this stuff get this nice and clean right before I take my cuttings and we will run down to the end of the road snip off some shoots [Music] okay here is our subject now what I want is shoots that are at least six inches long so they have enough stored energy to make it long enough to grow some roots but not over ten inches long which is the point that they're gonna start getting woody and it won't grow roots and there's not a whole lot like that on here they're all up on this branch right here oh there's one over there so I got a few one two three yeah there's plenty okay they're just not not many over here so what we have here is it looks like about a five or six inch tree now it's a little smaller than that one that the person who used to own this land cut it off because it was right in front of where he wanted to build this little shack so he cut it off and this Reese pouted and I don't know how many years it's been gone this is a bur oak and they they have this real funky cork like wood but bur oak is what I need on my property so the people who just bought this land who owned land over here as well they have allowed me to take some cuttings off of this I don't know if they're gonna keep this or not I'm not sure it's really worth it they have other burr Oaks back in here so and they can take cuttings from any of them if they wanted cuttings but I don't know if they're gonna do that or not or they could keep taking cuttings from this forever if they wanted to get some burr Oaks on their land but their land is is mainly woods right now so I don't know how many trees they'll be planting if any so standing up on a stump here I will have access to this upper part oh and there's also the fact that this is right under two other oak trees so it's not in a good spot yeah this would be best used as just uh as a bank for taking cuttings probably do it for a few years before you would damage it okay so I need six cuttings let me go get my my scissors sterilize that once again and get to it here wiped it off on my shirt and go take some cuttings all right I need cuttings that have at least three leaves on them and I want something that looks fairly nice these have been chewed on then that's not going to hurt at much but so with this one that's one too three [Music] or five and one more where yeah yeah we are six okay I'm gonna rush these back and get them in their pots [Music] okay let's get these things potted okay so one out of here what I am gonna do you want at least three leaves on it I have a very small leaved at the bottom and then I have a medium one after that I'm gonna bury this thing up to about here so I'm just gonna remove the bottom two leaves and I'm gonna make our fresh cut on there I'm gonna actually go right to that one there and my routine for Mona's in here this particular tree Burr Oak can have gigantic cheese well hi kitty I'm busy kitty okay I have to get that catchy she's a real big whiner and she wants me to pet her luckily the other cat don't make so much noise I can just pet him alright I'm gonna poke a hole get that down in there and firm it up so I want oh jeez this is not gonna stand up very well because of the size of the easily use I just don't want these flapping around oh this I forgot this method a normal method wants you to cut each of the leaves in half so that makes it easier to easier to pot but I believe that also keeps it from transpiring too much of its moisture I believe that's what that's for but that is the method you cut it cut all the leaves in half and then dip it and stick it in there so let's do another one the other version I'm going to use this stuff on which is a wilt stop and I'm gonna try to do one that does not have a bag over it I'll be putting these into a bag in a little bit so when I get rid of that leave cut the leaves in half dip it in a rooting hormone get a good amount on it help me a hole and jab it in and then I'm gonna firm it really well around that the biggest problem with these softwood cuttings like this is having them dry out before they can shoot roots so cutting putting the leaves in half and putting a bag over them all that stuff is designed to help them retain moisture until they can create some roots but the problem is when you put a bag over the top of these I've had it several times now where it gets yellow or yellow gray mold in the bag and if once you have mold its they're pretty much shot okay you got a good amount on there now for the last three what I'm going to do is I'm gonna leave the leaves full I'm still gonna take off these bottom two and get nice and close to that nodule there and what I'm gonna do is cover up this bottom part so I don't get any spray on it and I'm gonna spray it with this wilt stop okay I'm gonna recut this and just in case I got some wilt step on it and I think the next time I will just cut the end after spraying that because you you do not want that on the end because it's not gonna allow water to get in there so these that were sprayed with the wilts top will not go into a bag and I'm hoping they don't dry out looks like we got some kind of gall on these yeah it's on this lower branch too hopefully that's not gonna affect things all right well let me spray this first hey that should do it yeah I'm gonna cut these ends off now that the wilts top is spray down there and give it a good dip in the rooting hormone and hook it into the soil so I've never done it like this before and I'm hoping it works because when you put them in the bag there is just so much of a chance that it's gonna mold if it works like this that'll be great okay last one okay add a little bit of a camera malfunction there I put these three in bags these are the ones that had the leaves cut in half and they did not get the wilts top spray on them this is the standard method you don't want the leaves touching the bag but that is nearly impossible I don't know any way of doing it so you just try your best to keep the bag from touching the leaves because the bags gonna have condensation on it and if that gets on the leaves they can get moldy and that'll ruin the whole thing and that's that's what happens a lot of the time is you get mold when you have them in bags like this I haven't heard any anybody mention that before but that is what happens a lot which is why I'm hoping that this method works the wilt stop and not cutting the leaves I might try cutting the leaves and using welts top but the main thing is not being in a bag so hopefully this works and then I'll never have to do that again but in the end both of these could fail so only time will tell how this stuff is going to work out if you want to see the progress of these make sure you subscribe and click on the update icon that way you'll be notified when I post new videos a thumbs up would be great as well and if you have any questions about any of this stuff make sure to put them in the comments below I generally answer thanks for watching and have a great day [Music]

Channel: Planet Mojo

Views: 14,972

Rating: 4.6453204 out of 5

Keywords: Propagating (Rooting) Oak Trees from Softwood Cuttings, Propagating oak trees, rooting oak trees, Oak Trees from Softwood Cuttings, propagating, Propagating trees, tree propagation, softwood rooting, rooting softwood cuttings, Oak Savanna Restoration, rooting, rooting trees, bur oak, propagate, propagate softwood, oak, oak tree propagation

Id: Oc73vZmvrKM

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019