it makes me so mad that people aren’t taught that you can just... clone plants.
W h at
yeah!! it takes like, five minutes and costs nothing/next to nothing (depending on what plant it is). which is why im especially mad that literally no one talks about it except for like, exclusive gardening circles :/
each plant has different cloning techniques but here are the ones i remember;
basil/peppermint/tomato/most leafy greens with a stem; cut a piece off your main plant about the size of your hand. trim all the bottom leaves, cut stem diagonally, put in jar of water. when roots are about the size of the stem, plant in garden.
onion/garlic; the easiest. just leave whole onion or a garlic clove in a nice sunny area. eventually it will sprout. plant in garden.
pineapple; takes a long time. take spiky leafy part, trim off the bottom leaves, put in water about as deep as the leafless part. wait. a. long. time. (mine took two weeks to root.) when roots are big, plant in garden.
flowers, bushes, trees; get your hands on some rooting hormone (or willow tree branches). cut stems the same way as the leafy greens above, make sure to cut stems diagonally (greater chance of rooting.) dip in water, dip in rooting hormone, shake off excess, and place in water/dirt. these are pretty hard to get to root, especially if you don’t have rooting hormone.
some plants won’t ever root because of gmos (some companies create sterile plants and when they’re cloned they just die off) but generally any plant you get at a garden store you can clone.
This is called propagation!!! And it’s awesome!!!
Water propagation comes with some caution tho! While it’s a great way to watch the roots grow and ensure it’s actually propagating, it can shock the plant to remove it from water and suddenly plant it in soil. Water contain no nutrients, so to go from surviving on no nutrients to an abundance of nutrients in soil can potentially shock the wee baby.
Also, unless the water is changed out every day or every other, the oxygen in the water gets used up. Make sure to replace the water often so there’s a constant supply of oxygen.
If you have a fish tank, that is an excellent place to propagate certain plants! The nutrients the fish leave in the water will help the plant thrive, and ensure less shock when transplanting in soil. Fish might nibble on the roots, but probably not enough to cause any issues. Pothos, philodendrons, and monstera adasonii (vining Swiss cheese) are good ones to propagate this way, as they like the humidity from the tank.
Soil propagation has its own downsides, such as not being able to see if the roots are growing, but you can give the cutting a gentle tug in a few weeks, and if it resists, it has roots!!
And with ANY propagation, there is basically a 50/50 chance it will take, no matter which method you use, no matter how careful and attentive you are to technique and care. So don’t be discouraged if your cutting never roots, or dies. Not all plants can be “cloned” either of these ways, as well. Some need grafting from another plant which fruits or flowers! Some can only grow from seeds. Some cuttings need to scab over before propagation.
So if there’s a plant you really love, just Google how to propagate, and then Google some more. And instead of trying to propagate just a single cutting, try a few at a time, just in case some fail.
Happy planting!!!!!
It’s true that it’s difficult to get trees/bushes to grow roots with this method, but there is a pretty cool technique to get around this! It’s called air layering and it won’t work for ALL trees but it does work for many.
What you do instead of cutting off an entire limb and hoping it will root is you select the portion of the tree you want to be your new tree, and at the bottom of it, scrape off all of the bark, at least an inch long. Then you need to put your root hormone around the top of the shaved portion on the space where the tree still has bark. After that you’ll need to pack the area you want the roots to grow with sphagnum moss and wrap it in a plastic bag to keep the moss in place.
Once you have roots growing (could take a couple weeks) you can remove the bag, and cut the limb at the dead barkless section. Now you’ve got a new tree that’s already producing sap and as thick as the limb you’ve chosen! WAY faster than waiting the YEARS it could take to grow a tree to that size from a seed or a sprout.
Planting the new tree in sphagnum moss is a good way to help it grow lots of new roots and make sure it stays healthy before transferring it to a different soil mix or into the ground.
You also want to make sure that you leave probably a couple inches between the part of the branch you shave the bark off of and the main trunk of the tree, because after you cut off the limb, the wood beneath it will die back a bit and you don’t want part of the trunk to start rotting.
This is a good intro post!
It’s a good idea if you want to get propagating to search “[specific plant] propagation”. Every plant has a different method that works best, and there are bound to be loads of articles and videos out there of folks who have propagated that species before. Experimentation can’t hurt either.
Some plants need extra humidity or misting, some do best when trimmed a certain time of year, some grow roots when dry and some need to be wet
The “gmo plants are sterile and don’t root” thing in the OP though is complete horseshit and a misunderstanding of what GMOs are. There are only a handful of approved GMOs in the United States and they are all agricultural crops. I would assume many of them are also not sterile.
However! Many common plants you see in garden centers have either been selectively bred for less seed production because not going to seed = more flowers or they are hybrids (plant mutts) or often both! Hybrid plants CAN produce viable seed but there’s no guarantee that those seeds will “breed true” aka have the same genetics/qualities as the mother plant. If you are looking for veggie plants and see the word, “heirloom”, you know that you can save the seeds from those plants for next year.
Being sterile has NOTHING to do with producing roots or not, it’s about seed production. All sorts of fancy hybrid plants can be propagated via cutting. Fun fact though: many fancy plants are patented so propagation with intent to sell is illegal. Most plant breeders use a method of propagation called tissue culture (test tube babies but for plants) to continue the plant’s genetics into the next generation.
It’s a common misconception that any kind of hybridization or selective breeding = genetic modification, but this isn’t the case in a legal sense. There must be some kind of actual tampering with genes in a labratory, not just old-fashioned plant breeding. A few years ago actually there was a big kerfuffle because a number of fancy petunias were tested and found to have been genetically modified, not registered or labelled as such, and then sold illegally in the US and used in breeding programs. All those petunias had to be pulled and destroyed.
Kinda got off topic here but the illegal gmo petunias story is actually pretty cool. Mostly because it came out because some plant biologist dude saw some orange petunias went “huh petunias don’t come in Orange last time I checked but this reminds me of some GMO plant experiments back in the day” and he tested the plants and discovered they did indeed contain foreign DNA
Growers destroy plants after biologist spots forgotten flowers
