How to Take and Nurture Cutting from Plants
Dave: Hi, I am Dave Epstein and Welcome to Growing Wisdom and I am here today with Tony Antonucci and I get to ask this question a lot. Folks have a plant, their favorite plant, but it is getting leggy and they want to start a new one. So I want to talk about how to propagate a new plant from an old plant and you have got, what is this here?
Tony: This is called Iresine Herbstii. They called this the beefsteak plant and it gets growing for about one or two years for us but we have to start this new ourselves also. What you want to do is you want to feel to start off with a nice fresh cutting of fairly new growth. You do not want to have anything too woody and you would not want to have anything too long. You only want to have about three to four nodelenghts and that is right where the leaves come out and that would be a good size cutting right there and we would cut that off with a nice, sharp instrument that we use.
Dave; Now, do you use a rooting medium at all?
Tony: Yes we do. Yeah there are many different ones out there. We use something, it is called a rooting powder formulated for herbaceous cuttings and it is humored one, that was we use but but there is another brands out there.
Dave: And how do you know when this is ready to be planted in a regular pot?
Tony: Just grab the outer leaf and just give a little bit of thug and I want to see some resistance in that sand and at that point I know that there is a fair amount of roots down there. What I would do is I grab on to the plant and I just come right on there slowly, jiggle it out and there we have the plant with all new roots and this is now always ready to be
Dave: And you put that in potting soil?
Tony: Yap, and you just need to pay a little extra amount of care because it does not have a tremendous amount of roots in it, so when it went to the soil, you just want to make sure that you do not put into a pot that is too large right away.
Dave: Now I noticed that you use sand, why sand?
Tony: Yeah, you got to be pretty tough to make it through this better sand, and so the roots that are growing there under the ground right now are already pretty tough.
Dave: If I am a home owner I want to use sand, is there anything that we can use?
Tony: Yeah, we can use a bit of peat moss plus perlite and/or vermiculate or something like that which is a nice loose medium and make a small bed of that about 2 inches deep.
Dave: Tony, thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed this segment of Growing Wisdom on hoe to propagate plants. We look forward for you every week here for all of our hints, tips, and help, at GrowingWisdom.com
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