Kelsey Wulf

Otter Tail County Master Gardener

One of my favorite things about visiting friends who have fantastic gardens or a robust collection of house plants, is the ability to bring a little part of their greenery home with me. Many plants will quite happily root from a small cutting and, given enough time, bloom into a beautiful and best of all FREE addition to your own collection. Even with cooler days approaching, there is still time to root and plant perennials and certainly there is always time (though maybe not the space depending on the size of your current house plant posse) to root new houseplants.

When growing plants from a cutting, there is a basic method to follow. First, you want to take cuttings from a healthy parent plant for the best success. Next, select a non-woody piece of greenery. Take the cutting just below a node on the plant. A quick google search will show you exactly what to look for. Clear away any leaves around the node, leaving just a couple leaves on the top of your cutting. Next, we are going to apply a rooting hormone/agent to our plant. More on this in a minute. After that, place your cutting in a pot of well moistened soil. Some folks like to wrap a clear plastic bag around the top of the plant, creating a little greenhouse. It also can help keep cats and kids at bay, or might prove to lure them in, go with what works best for your set up. 

Continue to water the soil around your cutting every few days so it stays moist but not dripping wet. After about three weeks, your plant should have put on sufficient roots to transplant to its forever home, if it is meant to be kept indoors. You might let it go another week or more if you are moving it outside. If you are rooting and starting perennials outdoors at this point in the year, you will need to offer the plant a little support in the way of extra monitoring, watering, and potential frost protection, depending on how vigorous the plant variety is and when frost decides to show up.

When it comes to utilizing rooting hormone, many folks turn to products like Root & Grow. While folks have success with this, I have found incredibly that cinnamon makes a wonderful natural rooting agent. Technically it is not a hormone because it does not contain any sort of stimulating hormones. It is, however, highly anti-fungal. In my own tests at home, I have found that dipping plant cuttings in water, then in a little dish of cinnamon, then planting, have led to excellent results on par with commercially bought rooting hormones. Another natural rooting agent to try out is honey! A 50/50 mix of water and honey applied to the cutting can also aid in the development of roots. Again, honey isn’t a true hormone like cinnamon, but offers anti-fungal properties which allow the plant to do its rooting thing unhindered.

A final method for helping cuttings to develop roots is to take your cutting and pop them into a clear jar or vase, leave them in a semi-sunny spot, and let the roots develop! Some plants will work better in the jars than others, which would make a fun experiment to see which works best between soil or water methods. Let me know your results!