Propagating plants - cuttings

What would it take to revegetate my acre? If I plant a plant every 4 feet on center I could end up with over 1,800 plants! At $1 to $25 per plant this could easily add up to many thousands of dollars. We cannot afford to “buy in” the plant material we need to create a truly robust and complex planting over any but the smallest areas. Plant propagation is a critical part of revegetation on the cheap.

Over my years in landscaping I noticed an ironic discrepency between people's confidence propagating plants, and easy dedication plants put into propagating themselves. Many folks don’t think they can grow their own plants, and meanwhile, plants are out there spreading their seed, flinging their roots wherever they can. Plant propagation books prescribe meticulous methodologies for growing plants, largely based on commercial practices, making people to think that growing plants from seed or cutting is difficult. Indeed, the retail plant industry depends on people not growing and sharing plants.

Developing a labor efficient plant propagation nursery is a big part of realizing our hopes for our land (Jan 2007) and for revegetation in general. That means working with seeds or cuttings. Taking hardwood cuttings is VERY EASY. Take a branch and stick it in the ground. Then keep the soil moist. That’s it. The rest is extra credit, and may have minimal benefit/cost for the home grower. I won't bother talking about physiology. Plants are powerful. Cut, stick, and water -- that’s all. Even rooting hormone doesn't even help in all cases.

This season I have stuck thimbleberry, Scouler’s willow, red-flowering currant, rosemary, thyme, Senecio greyii, three kinds of garden sage, salmonberry, red elderberry, oceanspray, snowberry, Sempervivums, Indian plum, lavender, Rubus calcynoides and some other things I am forgetting (the leaves will pop soon). Some are sure bets, others are mysteries.

In late summer I start looking for places to take cuttings. Natural areas, nice gardens, old clients, friends and associates. As soon as leaves drop I start carrying pruners and plastic grocery bags in my pocket. As a matter of integrity, I always ask permission to take privately owned cuttings -- its good way to meet strangers over plants. Here is an overview of the basic approach, a mixture of good science-based policy and superstition:

• Use healthy parent stock growing under sunny conditions (for the species in question), and select vigorous shoots.
  


• Use species that are likely to grow roots. Look at propagation books, or think about the life history of the species. Think about which plants benefit from easily throwing roots from their stems: plants that get buried in flood sediments, plants on unstable slopes, plants whose branches lean out, lay down and root. Research, but take risks. What do you have to loose? Fast growing deciduous plants adapted to life on floodplains are a great group to start with (Symphoricarpos, Cornus, Salix, Lonicera, Oemleria, Rubus, Ribes...). Dry land plants don't seem to do as well, except those species that are adapted to unstable slopes (Fragaria, Sempervivums..). With rhizomatous plants you might as well take a hunk of rhizome (Rubus, Gaultheria), and many low lying plants and vines root well from stems (Artostaphylos, Thymus, Senecio, Lavendula, Rosmary...). If one botanical family or genus roots well, try cuttings from related genera.


• Use young wood, typically 1-3 year old stems. Except in particularly precocious species, root primordia get old and fade away when stems get old.


• Take cuttings when leaves have fallen or are dormant (in winter.)


• Store cuttings buried in wet wood chips between cutting and sticking, or stick them right away.
  


• I generally try to get at least 3 buds below ground when I stick my cuttings.


• Stick cuttings in a garden bed, or in pots. Try sticking cuttings where you want them to grow -- but irrigating during establishment is easier in a garden bed.


• Use sharp shears to cut the basal end at an angle (so you remember what end goes down).Try to get at least 5 buds. My shrub cuttings are typically around a foot long, and sub-shrubs are 6 inches. Unceremoniously strip leaves off the part of the stem you stick underground.

A Green Cloak

Here’s my first philosophical entry:

I once had a teacher, Rainer Hasenstab, who described people as being defined through four relationships: relationship to the self, to others, to the land, and to the unknown. As whole beings, and in practice, each of these relationship patterns is just a different projection of our selves. But by focusing on one relationship at a time we can get some traction and make some sense of the whole.

At some level this blog is about our family garden. By zooming in and looking at relationship to the land I get some traction on the phenomena of being human. As I record my perceptions and choices related to the land, I get the opportunity for insight into that relationship. Perhaps as I formulate and select my land use patterns I produce a more accurate reporting of my relationship to the land than if I were to try to use lots of words.

Before getting much farther, I think it is important to tell that I tend to think about plants and soils as a unitary thing. We can break this green cloak of peds, clods, bacteria, humus, roots, fungi, stems and leaves down into various bits and pieces, and that can help us think about what is going on. By labeling and isolating these bits and pieces we can understand the processes and structures at work. In the end it can be very difficult to parse any clean distinctions. There are no solitary actors -- too much interdependence and interaction. So I usually work with this mental image of a living cloak of soil and plants and fungi and bacteria draped on the rocky earth. The land I am talking about here is a self-designing plant-soil system.

So my motive for gardening is really pretty simple. The sun shines down on the land, an endlessly finite budget of energy. That energy is either captured or it is lost. The plant-soil system, the green cloak, grabs carbon from the air to capture and store sun energy in complex organic forms. That is the source of all life. Nothing else makes life – not concrete, not water, not petroleum, not words. There is only this one source of life. We just hang out and eat, somewhere between parasites and symbiants. We can harvest a chunk of the plant-soil system and put it on a styrofoam tray, wrap it in plastic wrap and ship it across the world under refrigeration, and trade it for currency, but it is still the same thing. It is still sun energy trapped in the green cloak, and we still need it to survive. So I think of landscape design as a kind of devotional art, but also an art of survival, because if our relationship to the plant-soil system is symbiotic than we live, and if it is not we will die. I really think it is that simple.

So gardening is about being in an effective relationship with the land – with a plant-soil system. And making it a right-relationship, so we can grow the green fabric, and maintain life.

A first post - about my land

Welcome. I finally decided to web-publish some of my thoughts about revegetation, both on my home site, and at large. Better this way than forever in drafts. This site is the focus of most of my attention, though I plan on pulling in observations and pictures of revegetation from out and about in my region. This blog documents the decision making process and design concepts underlying my work on this site, as I try to integrate my work in agriculture, horticulture, and vegetation ecology into this thing called permaculture.

The site is about 1oo feet above sea level at around 45 degrees north latitude. Our climate is maritime temperate with 50 inches of rainfall in the winter, with the potential for 5 months of summer drought. Local soils are an inclusion of silty loam in a landscape dominated by compacted glacial tills. The landscape is undulating. We have somewhat of a low spot-frost pocket shared between our site and the neighbor to the south.

This first image shows existing structures and hydrology. Blue marks indicate flows. Blue areas indicate sinks where there is seasonal inundation or saturation. Blue stars are potential water sources from roof runoff. Soil saturation persists in the light blue areas for a couple days after rain or a week after heavy rains. Dark blue areas are low spots that appear to have ground water influenced hydrology that persists for longer after heavy rains.

This second image shows the current conceptual plan for the layout of different vegetation communities. In permaculture lingo, the whole site could be considered zone 1-2, with some areas like the hedgerows, wood lot , herbal ley, and wet meadow-shrubland complexes approaching the characteristics of zone 3 in that they are intended to become largely self regulating systems with minor maintenance while still providing yield. Red stars show primary activity nodes: driveway parking, and entrances and exits to buildings. Red lines are community trail easements.

Winter is just beginning to loose its grip on the land. Buds are looking plump, but no action yet. This years focus is on renovating existing fruit trees, developing the nursery, improving soils and weed control in the vegetable area while getting some crops out, installing a first wave of fruit trees, and installing the beginnings of the W and SW hedgerows, and mulching the kitchen garden. We really want chickens, but I am leaning toward waiting until the first wave of earthwork and planting is under control.

My current project is designing the hedgerows and in particular around wet meadow-shrubland 2. Next post will be a discussion of how that guild is shaping up and how I have been evaluating site hydrology, and how I am thinking about managing successional planting.