An endless stream of daughter plants

One of the fond­est mem­o­ries a lot of peo­ple have about learn­ing to care for plants involves cups of water, a bro­ken stem and a win­dowsill. Many of the plants we keep in our houses and gar­dens will pro­duce an end­less stream of brand-new plants for you, if you know how. Most of my prized house­plants were from snips of a friend’s plants.

Prop­a­ga­tion from soft­wood or stem cut­tings is the old leaf-in-a-cup-of-water trick. This involves tak­ing a por­tion of stem, prefer­ably with some leaves attached, and keep­ing it in a shel­tered, moist envi­ron­ment until the plant can grow itself some roots. The most impor­tant part of the process is to keep the humid­ity high. The plant can’t effec­tively bring any new water into its sys­tem with­out roots, so you must care­ful guard against the loss of water. Even some­thing as sim­ple as a plas­tic bag­gie over the leaves will help pro­tect the plant from los­ing too much water when it breathes.

Many gar­den­ers pre­fer to use a good, soil-less plant­ing medium for these cut­tings. When you tran­si­tion your cut­ting from a cup of water to a soil envi­ron­ment, it can be very stress­ful. If the plant devel­oped the roots in a sim­i­lar envi­ron­ment, trans­plant­ing is much less of a shock to the sys­tem. If you decide to start cut­tings, make sure there is no fer­til­izer or heavy soil. You don’t want to rob the new slips of the water they’re work­ing so hard to keep!

One of the most impor­tant things about prop­a­gat­ing plants from cut­tings is to keep your equip­ment clean. New starts, like seeds, are very sus­cep­ti­ble to fun­gal infec­tion. Because it is so crit­i­cal to keep them moist, you need to make sure there aren’t a lot of spores that will take advan­tage of the situation.

You can also grow roots on a woody plant. One of my favorite tricks for this involves wound­ing a branch of a tree or shrub, dot­ting the wound with a bit of root­ing hor­mone and cov­er­ing the entire area with plas­tic wrap. Because the branch still gets water and nutri­ents from the mother tree, there’s less worry about tran­spi­ra­tion. Once the roots grow, you sim­ply prune the new daugh­ter sapling from the mother branch.

Many peren­ni­als can be dug up and divided. This is often done in the early autumn, after the weather begins to cool. Make sure, when divid­ing, that there is enough grow­ing time after you plant the divided parts to get estab­lished before the first frost. After a hard sum­mer, it is always reward­ing to see the new divi­sions thriv­ing in the cool autumn weather.

Mas­ter Gar­dener School to be offered in 2013

If you would like to become a Delaware County Mas­ter Gar­dener, we will offer a school in Feb­ru­ary and March 2013. Space is lim­ited, so please call the Exten­sion Office at 740–833-2030 to request an appli­ca­tion or for more information.

Upcom­ing com­mu­nity gar­den program

Join the Delaware County Mas­ter Gar­den­ers for our gar­den­ing edu­ca­tional series from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Aug. 16 at the Delaware Com­mu­nity Cen­ter YMCA on Houk Road. The topic is fall plant­ing — come dis­cover ways to extend your gar­den into fall and early win­ter and a selec­tion of what to plant.

Wendy Wolpert is an OSU Exten­sion Mas­ter Gar­dener volunteer.

Posted by Master Gardener on Aug 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.