Can you propagate plants all year long?

When you propagate plants all year long, you maximize your new nursery growth potential. Can you propagate plants all year round? We say yes you can. This is PT 3 of our series on How to Start A Plant Nursery at a low cost. Always Be Propagating is our motto. We find we can be propagating plants for our nursery, almost year-round. Propagation is your secret weapon when starting a brand new nursery. It is your answer to How to Get Free Plants.

Watch the video on YouTube, Part 3:

 

In our article, How to Start a Plant Nursery, we talk about growing approximately 500 new plants per year. If every plant we tried to propagate, and every cutting, we took rooted, we would only have to be concerned with 500 plants per year. However, this is not the case, not every cutting roots and not every division is successful. And, can you really have too many plants, Shoot big, as in the beginning your success rate to propagate plants may not be that great? We promise it will improve over time but don’t assume you can root, grow and sell more than 50% of the cuttings you take at first.

Propagate early and often.

You maybe trying to reach certain annual goals or just grow as many plants as you can. Propagating all year is going to get you further than just focusing on softwood cuttings in the summer or hardwood cuttings when plants are dormant. Let’s break the year up into the four typical seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.

Propagating plants in the winter

 

All our plant propagation experience is in plant zone five as we live in northern New Jersey. For us, winter begins in late December and ends in late March . We still have freezing nights and frost into late April and even to Mother’s Day. Propagating in late Winter and early Spring is something we do each year. We take hardwood cuttings this time of year and most cuttings are successful. Hardwood cuttings are great as you can take a more substantial piece of a plant that is much less fragile than a soft wood cutting. It almost seems as if you could take the branch of a woody shrub or tree and root something a foot or two tall. That is not something we would attempt to do but you can get some good size hardwood cuttings to root.

Generally it is said, wood that is about the thickness of a pencil is ideal. Without going into every detail here, please see our plant propagation page on how to make a hardwood cutting. Plant propagation in the late winter and early spring is also when we are potting up plants as we order in a lot of bare root plants. While this is not propagation it is the time to bring in new plants into your nursery. Get them potted up, and increase your inventory. You will likely want to start buying and planting some bare root plants once your nursery starts generating some positive cash flow.

While plants are still dormant, you’re going to want to make sure anything you want to up pot into a larger pot has been addressed, any bare root plants you purchase are potted, and be sure you’ve taken lots of hardwood cuttings so that even if some fail, you will still have many new plants.

Propagating plants in the summer as softwood cuttings.

Plants do seem to root quickly and easily when they are actively growing. Most plants follow a cycle of good growth in the spring and early summer. They will send out new growth during this time. As the year progresses all these new shoots will begin to mature and do what is called harden off. Very early new growth is very flexible and soft. Once the new growth becomes a little bit more mature, it becomes stiffer and will even snap if you bend it. This current year‘s growth is what we are after when we are making softwood cuttings.

Rooting softwood cuttings is really a bonanza for a beginning nursery grower. Taking and rooting softwood cuttings is something you will likely do forever into the future. If you have or have located some good parent plant stock to take cuttings from you may be able to root far more plants than you can imagine. This is How to get free plants, propagate them.

How to propagate using softwood cuttings

Our basic method for making softwood cuttings is as follows. First, wait for new growth to harden off a little, so you are not taking cuttings that are too tender. Taking plant material that is too fragile, will decrease the likelihood that the plant roots and flourishes. The plant might not mature enough to be transplanted to a pot later. Even worse it won’t make it through the first winter. To increase our likelihood of successfully rooting cuttings, we do take lots of cuttings. We often take them at two different times in the late spring and early summer. The earlier the better so you can root and grow the plant out enough before transplanting and or winter.

Generally we use covered totes like these 18 Quart Clear Plastic Totes and a nice light mixture of perlite and peat moss to root most of our plants in. Using rooting hormone is our preferred method as we believe it increases our success rate.

Careful not to remove growth or flower buds when taking softwood cuttings

Many plants follow a cycle of putting out new growth in the spring and then that new growth later produces growth buds for stem branching or flower production at the tips of the new growth. If you wait too long to take softwood cuttings you will remove the growth or flowering buds for that year. If you take the cuttings early enough, the buds will generally still form. So, you need to get your cuttings taken in late June or early July. That of course only matters if you care about growth or flower buds.

Often times we don’t care about this and are just out to harvest cuttings when we have the time to do it. The rule here is you generally don’t prune or take cuttings after July 15th. This of course varies upon where you live, the plant and if you are trying to maximize branching and blooming.

Propagating new plants in the Fall

Fall is one of the best times of year to propagate new plants. Many of the woody shrubs and trees have produced new growth throughout the year and that new growth is now harden off a little. You can propagate some harder softwood and hardwood cuttings in the fall.  You will have the full fall and winter into spring for the new plants to form roots. Be patient and look for roots in the spring. Then get the rooted cuttings transplanted and established ASAP. They should really take off in the warmer weather and be well established pretty quickly.

Semi hard and Hardwood cuttings taken in the fall and winter root a little differently than softwood cuttings. The hardwood cutting needs to callus over, which is a process of cells collecting at the leaf nodes, or from a wounded bottom of a cutting. This callus allows unassigned cells to form from which roots or stems can form. This is a somewhat similar process with softwood cuttings sprouting roots but a little different and much slower.

Fall propagation takes longer

A hardwood cutting developing calluses and then forming roots takes longer. In some cases such as rhododendrons this process can take a year. For this reason getting started in your nursery from hardwood cuttings could be a very long process before you get to the point of having grown salable points. If you can imagine, a cutting can take up to a year to root and then up to three years of growing and pruning. With some plants, this is a long process. The bright side is you can root hundreds if not thousands of cuttings almost completely for free. Hardwood cuttings taken in the fall or winter can be nice size pieces of the parent plant. We have rooted many 6 inch tall, woody shrub and tree cuttings. These bigger rooted cuttings are tougher and more of them turn into plants you can sell.

Propagating plants in the winter.

Propagating plants in the winter is essentially the same as what you would do in the Fall and early Spring. You will be working with hardwood cuttings that are likely to be growth that occurred on the plant more than a year ago. We use winter propagation to catch up on cuttings we should have made in the Fall or late Spring. If you know, you took good cuttings that will root in the Fall or late Spring you might be able to rest all Winter. If we buy a bunch of plants on clearance sale in late October it may take us to really late Fall or Winter to get to taking some cuttings to root. To keep busy and make sure we have a steady supply of new plants, we just keep propagating all year.

Always be propagating.

We say Always Be Propagating for several reasons. Again, having a plan to propagate year-round ensures you will be rooting enough plants to meet your goals. What if you wanted to root 100 azaleas and you only took softwood cuttings in the early summer. You do you have a chance of falling short or failing completely. Your back up plan could be to also take hardwood cuttings in the Fall to make sure you reach your propagation goals. Sometimes we have taken dozens of softwood cuttings from a plant in late spring and then came back and cut a little lower to harvest some hardwood cuttings as well.

You may also be planning your new nursery in the winter and just want to get started. You can and should start when you are ready. Start now, no matter what the season!

Advantages and disadvantages of propagating hardwood and softwood coatings.

From our experience, we find some advantages and disadvantages of working with hardwood and softwood coatings. The advantages of softwood cuttings are.

• Nice time of year to work.
• Generally plentiful amounts of new growth available for cuttings.
• The warmth of the Summer, and the nature of softwood cuttings has them rooting in just a few weeks. You should get your summer, softwood, cuttings, rooted and established early. Then you can transplant all the cuttings into pots before Fall so your plants are well established before winter arrives.
• Our success rate on softwood cuttings can be as high as 90%.

The disadvantages of softwood cuttings. Since you were rooting softwood cuttings in the heat of the Summer, you must be careful not to lose your plants. Summer, sun and heat are very rough on tender young plants. Don’t rush to transplant to pots until the roots are really sturdy and plentiful. If you take your cutting too late you won’t get your tender young plants strong enough to survive the winter.

Advantages of rooting hardwood cuttings.

We like the relaxed timing of hardwood cuttings. They take a long time but nothing is urgent. Advantages include:

• You have all Fall, Winter and Early Spring to start Hardwood Cuttings.
• You get a bigger plant most often by rooting more mature plant stock.
• Summer heat is less of a concern.
• If you didn’t get enough plants started as softwood cuttings you get another chance at rooting a plant by just cutting a little lower.

Be encouraged and start propagating all year long!

Our Plant Nursery Start Up Series

How to Start a Plant Nursery – With super low start-up costs.
How to Get Free Plants – Your secret start up advantage
Propagate Plants All Year – Always be propagating
Make Your Own Potting mix – Inexpensively for your nursery
Propagate plants by Dividing A Great Way to Increase your Nursery Plant Inventory