Plant Propagation 101: Clone Your Own Garden

Hey BUD-dies!

As Mikaela and I start to dig deeper into the topics of sustainability, food, and gardening something to consider is that while growing your own plants (edible or otherwise) is very fulfilling for your soul (and stomach) … it can be draining on the wallet. That is unless you know how to do so in a more (drumroll please) sustainable way.

One way to keep more green in your wallet but still grow the number of plants in your inventory is to explore different ways of propagation. To the casual and new to plant parenthood, this can seem like an intimidating word being flung around. I am here to tell you that it is easy-peasy.

In the case of plants, propagation literally just means reproduction by natural processes. Plants already want to reproduce so you are just helping things along and the biggest hurdle is knowing how your particular plant likes to get jiggy with it. So let’s go over a couple ways to propagate AND some basic categories of plants that are easily propagated by the different methods.

So let’s start with the biggest, most obvious way to propagate…

SEEDS

When a boy plant part (stigma) likes a girl plant part (pollen from an anther) and gets some help from a buddy (an insect, bat, bird, puff of wind, etc) they can make a seed. This is not a biology class so I am not going to dig further into this BUT I do want to bring up how this information may save you some money and what to beware of. So, to start I want to say there are multiple places you can get seeds and some pros and cons to each.

• Garden stores are a great place to get seeds and they are relatively cheap. You know they are fresher seeds and have a great chance of germinating (sprouting). The packaging is great because it will give you instructions and care as well. The negative is that you are still spending money AND usually they only have basic flowers and crops because they are catering to a majority.
• Online is a mixed bag… you have an insane variety, but you are going to spend more and it is tough in some cases to verify what you are getting (new seeds, old seeds, is it even the correct plant?). I have had some really great successes doing this though.
• Farmers markets have a couple options. Some vendors will actually sell seeds, but you can also just look for interesting fruits to eat and save/plant the seeds. Things to consider though are that you once again can’t really verify what a seed is or if it is any good until you are planting AND this applies to even ones coming out of a fruit. This is because members of the same species can cross pollinate. For example, pumpkin and winter squash are technically the same species so they can cross pollinate. They would still taste fine but their little seed babies would/could grow something weird. Let me tell you- I have STORIES about peppers because I was growing like 40 varieties at one point and they DEFINITLY cross pollinated.
• Save seeds from your food at home. This is staple and one of my favorite methods because you are not spending extra money and you can do so infinitely to continue your garden. The con here is that you are only going to get seeds from what you already have on hand so you are limited to what you are already growing or what you find at the grocery store (an let’s be honest the everyday gardener may not have the resources to grow some of those fancy, exotic, tropical fruits).

As for who and what can be propagated this way…. Anything with seeds! Fruits, bushes, flowers, veggies. Some are harder to actually harvest seeds from and you are better off just buying them unless you are really serious. I do not bother when it comes to herbs or flowers (though a lot will reseed themselves). Fruits (drupes, peppers, tomatoes, etc), melons, and guards are great ones to start with.

So, before I leave this to talk about our next method, I just want to say that even in cases where you are spending money for seeds, it is still cheaper than buying a mature plant. From personal experience, always plant lots of seeds as well because even the most quality ones you get, only a certain percentage will germinate. I also want to point out that even weird crosses are fun.

CLONING

Mwahahahaha…. This is where you get to be the most holistic evil scientist ever…

Cloning sounds complicated and cool when talking to friends and family. In reality though, you are selectively picking parts of plants (sometimes from public settings) like a 5-year-old, ignoring your moms voice in the back of your mind saying, “don’t pick the flowers”, and then hording them in little containers everywhere around the house until they become new plants. Or that might just be me.

We have lots of options for how to clone! Taking cuttings, layering stems, dividing rhizomes or offsets, bud cuttings, and root cuttings to name a few. The hardest part is knowing what method words for your plant. If you know the type of plant you are propagating, it is easy enough to google propagation methods. If you took a piece of a plant out of your neighbor’s front yard under cover of darkness (who me?), you might not have an exact name for the plant but there are some indicators, and you will quickly get a feel for it.

I want to point out that the best time to try any of these methods are going to be during the growing season just like with planting seeds. You will get the best result this way BUT especially with indoor plants, you will still get varied success the rest of the year.

Like I said, there are a lot of options, and it would be a lot to cover all of them in any depth (plus there are different options and ways to tweak each general method) but let me give you an idea of what some of these options are.

Cuttings

This is one of my favorite methods and the first type of cloning I ever attempted. The root of the process is you are taking a cutting or trimming of a plant and roots will grow from it to form its own plant. I find that this is usually my go to with herbaceous, tropical plants. Vining plants in particular; I will find a node (bump where roots would come out, cut right before it, remove the lower leaves, dip the end in a rooting hormone (tons of garden places sell liquid or powdered hormone for this reason so they are encouraging my habits), and plant your new baby into a sterile seed sowing mix. You want to keep these guys in bright indirect light and a moist/humid environment (a cover works great) since they do not have roots to suck up water or nutrients easily yet. Some of my plants root so easily that I just stick them in a vase with water (no hormone or dirt or anything) and wait for roots to appear before I plant them. Pothos, fuschia, and impatiens are great examples of these.

Similar to that, some tropical plants that have long stems on their leaves can be propagated in the same way. Great example of this are African violets and Monstera’s (I do this with mines suckers or tiny offshoot leaves I do not want to take his energy).

If you know your plant species, I recommend a quick google search to see how difficult they are to do cuttings, how deep to plant, where to cut etc until you have a feel for it because there are some differences.

Layering

Once again, not complicated, but layering can be done 2 different ways. Compound layering can be done with anything flexible that you would do a cutting on (like a Pothos vine). You basically can plant (or layer soil over) portions of the vine where there are nodes and encourage root growth from those places and once roots have started, they can be cut apart and planted. You can also do Air layering where you purposefully damage parts of the outer layer of stems and then wrap damp moss/soil around that place, enclosing it with Aluminum foil until roots appear and the plant can be separated. Once again, this method may have slightly different requirements or processes depending on the type of plants, but this is the gist of it.

This is a little involved than taking cuttings BUT it isn’t hard by any means and has less chance of a cutting withering away since it is still getting nutrients from the parent plant. I have had good success using this process with roses in particular with the aid of some rooting hormones. My great uncle raised and bred new crosses of roses and did shows. I loved them and wanted a couple varieties, so this was one method we used to get clones with the most success. Just make sure that once you have roots and you cut your new baby off, you seal the new wood on your old parent plant (Elmers glue works great!) so you do not get pests or diseases in there!

Division

Division is exactly what it sounds like… dividing what is already there. We are only going to talk about 2 types of division.

The first is rhizomes. Some plants (like strawberries) can spread by branches along the ground growing roots into the soil. This can be on the surface but in the case of many plants it can also happen under the soil, and you will see -SURPRISE! – a new plant come up in the parents’ vicinity. You can easily dig up the rhizomes, divide the sections using your fingers (keep the pieces with roots AND leaves_ and replant the babies elsewhere.

Secondly, I will bring up offsets. Some plants like Aloe will have fully re-plantable pups grow around the base of a mother plant. These can be separated and repotted elsewhere. Other plants will need to be cut with a sharp knife to remove them but wait until they have already grown roots or else you may need to go through additional steps to help the babies root.

So you may have noticed I still had more types of propagation listed that I have not touched on. I am not going to get into them today but instead wanted to focus on those that are the easiest to start with and work with a wide variety of plants.

I hope this article knocked your stalks off!

Taylor