Many favorite garden shrubs, such as a stunning weigela or perhaps a handsome viburnum, can be multiplied to enhance home landscape plantings cost- free. With a little knowledge, you can grow new plants from cuttings taken from the parent plants, which probably were started the same way by a commercial grower.
Becoming a plant propagator can yield personal satisfaction as well as savings. If your yard has many bare spots, that could be all the incentive you need.
This is likely to be a long-term project, self-propagated plants may take several years or more to grow large enough to fit into the landscape. Meanwhile, they will require frequent attention.
Propagating by cuttings is a popular way of reproducing many plants. Most gardeners have done it at some time or other by sticking stems into a growing medium to start new geraniums, begonias and other herbaceous specimens. Yet they often are hestiant about tackling woody subjects such as the shrubs, assuming these require more horticultural expertise.
Commercial growers obviously do employ special techniques and skills to fulfill production goals, but these are easily sifted down to the level the novice can understand and improvise with rewarding results.
Shrubs like the weigelas and viburnums and others can be propagated from green, or softwood, cuttings taken when the plants are in leaf and making growth, or from hardwood cuttings, which are taken from stems and branches after they have become dormant, as they are now. While commercial growers work with both, the amateur`s initial effort should be with the hardwood cuttings. These are easier to manage in their dormant condition and promise a higher percentage of success.
COLLECT CUTTINGS NOW
The dormant stems and branches can be collected now through February, whenever the weather is mild enough to work outdoors. Some gardeners gather them during routine winter pruning, selecting and setting aside the best wood from the prunings to use for their cuttings. Not all have to be made into finished cuttings at the same time.
When collecting many stems from different kinds of shrubs, tie each variety separately with an identifying tag to avoid any mixup later. These can be stored by burying them in moist peat moss or wood shavings in a cool place until you can get back to them.
Most of the shrubs commonly found in home gardens are readily propagated from hardwood cuttings. They include forsythia, privet, deutzia, quince, currant, mock orange, red-twigged dogwood, spirea, flowering almond and some euonymous varieties, as well as viburum and weigela.
The stems or branches from which you intend to make the cuttings should be of the current season`s growth, either cut from long canes growing from the base of the plants or new wood at the tips of the branches.
How the finished cuttings are prepared is important. Here are some guidelines:
– Each cutting taken from a portion of a stem or branch should be 5 or 6 inches long and about the thickness of a lead pencil. Make the upper cut an inch above a dormant bud, from which the first new growth will emerge. Make the basal cut just below a bud. Several cuttings can be taken from long stems. – Tie cuttings of one variety together with the basal cuts at one end and label them with the variety name.
– Store the cuttings in a plastic bag or containers of moist sand, peat moss, or vermiculite, where temperature remains cold but above freezing. A refrigerator (not freezer) makes an ideal storage place if space is available. – Keep cuttings in cold storage at least six to eight weeks to allow the basal cuts to form calluses necessary for later development of roots. The cuttings can safely be stored for longer periods.
PLANT IN EARLY SPRING
When soil can be worked in early spring, plant the cuttings in the open ground, preferably in nursery rows where it will be convenient to water and tend them regularly until they make sufficient growth to be transplanted.
It is essential when planting that the cuttings be inserted into the soil with the basal (callused) ends deep enough to allow only the tops buds to be just above ground level. The cuttings should be at least 10 inches apart in rows a foot apart.
Initial growth (from the exposed top buds) will occur sooner with some shrub varieties, such as privet and forsythia, but don`t give up on the slow starters such as the viburnums and weigelas. These may take several weeks longer.
If you are successful in growing new plants from 50 to 60 percent of the cuttings, consider yourself better than an average amateur propagator. Meanwhile, be prepared to nuture them in the nursery rows for several seasons before they make sufficient growth to be transplanted to their permanent locations.
