Rooting Japanese Maple cuttings!

hi this is jealous from growing bonsai i am a big fan of japanese maples i always want to know how do i propagate this and how do you create more of this and as we are in the middle of spring the branches are now at an ideal time to take cuttings off i've decided to make a video i'll show you how i take cuttings off japanese maple particularly of an archiva maple and i will show you the outcome of a cutting that i took last year so you know yes this technique has been used before it does work and if i try it there's a good chance that i also am successful in taking cuttings of course it's important that you wash off the soap quite well and you don't want the cell to stay on these leaves all that long so if you do this and use soap water make sure you wash well and you wash immediately when you're ready with taking the cuts so we're now ready to start rooting our cuttings for this i use a rooting hormone that comes in form of a jelly and i prefer to not put the cuttings directly in the pot so i'm putting so much jelly here on a container lid next to this i have a pot with substrate consisting of cocoa husk i don't know how this will root i've never used this for cuttings before and this is an extruded glass substrate i need to look up the exact name because to be honest it fills me right now i'll put it on top in text after i'm done of course i've got my cuttings and then i've got my secret weapon and i'll get to that in a second now how do we go ahead and take cuttings and the basic premise is not all that difficult this is an agriculture maple this was a cutting last year this year it looks like this it has grown exceptionally well last year this whole branch was grown over the last growing season so the technique i'm showing you here is the technique i used to grow this cutting so we have a cutting here and effectively what we want to use as a cutting as a base we want no leaves in the ground the growing tip itself i also do not want to have in there and i take it off so what we're left with is a cutting with two leaves i'm clipping it off here at the node this is the place where routing occurs most easily by cutting it off here rooting occurs easily but also there is two little buds on each side so when at some point i want to cut the routing back all the way to the roots i can clip it here once established of course and then new branches will come out on the side so we take the scissors we clip it off at the bar at the node we dip in the jelly poke a hole push the cutting in and make sure it stays a little bit above the ground now do this another 50 times and fill the pots this is an interesting one this is an old wrench that i removed but this is new growth so i'm going to clip this one at the base here split them put them in the jelly put them in the jelly and get them planted as said before i am using young branches for this all this year's growth there is a reason for it this young immature growth still needs to diversify some of the cells and as such they're more capable of growing roots than the somewhat older plants the reason that i'm removing quite a bit of the foliage is because foliage loses water it transpires water and with that it is harder for the cutting to take so the success rate of taking cuttings in this way depends on a few factors one of which of course is how much water is in the cuttings when you are taking these cuttings this is one of the reasons why i have put these in water and i'm keeping them in water but also why i'm now working in the shade out of the wind rather than somewhere in the garden the other is the position and the aftercare so all these cuttings for me they go into the shade i do not want these cuttings to be exposed to full sunlight other than maybe early morning or late evening sunlight but during the day i do not want these plants to experience any sunlight because that would immediately heat up the pot and cook the cuttings of course another part of the aftercare is how do you plant them after you've done this how do you then continue well step one is of course watering them watering at this point serves two purposes one is of course getting the soil hydrated the second is what you see here it basically pushes down the substrate so the stems of the cuttings really connect to the soil having drained the pots i now use these plastic sandwich baggies to plant a tree this is also an iffy job to do because it's very easy to pull the cuttings back out of the pot so i'll go slow and be gentle and hope i don't pull any of them out to wear the leaves just sliding it up and what we've created here is a mini greenhouse i closed the bag and effectively i now have a tiny incubator for my cuttings i'll put this somewhere under a bench and i'll tie the bag up so it doesn't fall over in a big gust of wind and over the next eight weeks i'll just leave it alone every once in a while i'll check whether water is needed but besides that i don't do anything i'm also not going to try whether the cuttings have rooted by pulling on them or anything silly like that if they root their root if they die i'll see that they die anything in between i'll just let it do its thing time for the other one we'll do the same thing this of course also explains why i use round pots and not a large cutting or seedling tray this way on the one hand the pot fits nicely in this bag on the other hand it also reduces the spread of diseases so this tree was repotted in early spring and so far i've just let it grow and as you can tell from the branches it has been growing quite well it is now time to prune it back and at the same time i will take some cuttings taking cuttings of japanese maple there is two main times to do it the first is in fall when the tree has dropped all the leaves and those are called hardwood cuttings the second one the type that i'm taking right now is called softwood cuttings and they are in early spring as you might be able to tell i moved back into the greenhouse the wind outside was just too much for working on this tree the lower branches are typically weaker than the upper branches that also means something for taking cuttings although the lower branches have short internodes which is really really good for bonsai and if you don't know why this is good for bonsai let me know in the comments and i'll do a little video on the internet length and why short internets are good for bonsai but the upper ones are stronger they have longer internet length which is a bad thing for bonsai but they have a lot of stored energy and they will in generally root better quicker and grow up faster so when taking cuttings it is important to take cuttings mainly from the upper part of the canopy on this maple i do have some aphids so when taking cuttings it's important that you don't include the aphids in your cuttings so i've prepared this little container in it is water and soap and rubbing alcohol and this i will use to make sure that there's no living aphids left on the cuttings before i plant them up working in the greenhouse has one big benefit outside it is not all that warm but here temperatures have risen and i would say it's probably about 20 to 23 degrees so i've taken off my jacket enjoying spring weather i hope you also have the chance to do that as you notice i'm already taking out the tips of the plants that i might take cuttings off and the reason that i do that is because the tips are generally too weak and they have a lot of avids so i'm just clipping those off for the final cuttings i only need a few leaves so i'm not concerned with keeping everything that is on the tree so with that this video is done um i wish you lots of luck taking cuttings of your japanese maple drop me a line and let me know whether we were successful and see you next time maybe next time i'll show you the rooted cuttings

Channel: Growing Bonsai by Jelle

Views: 243,881

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Id: mLRLUcv5Ro8

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022