Lots of people ask me where I get my plants or how I keep making more. Well It’s easy I’m a stick farmer. What’s a stick farmer you ask? Stick farming is exactly like it sounds. Its the process I use to propagate many of my flowering shrubs, bushes, grapes, and many of my berry bushes from sticks. I’m running a little late this year in starting my winter hard wood cutting propagation but the plants are still dormant for now. We keep having weather like today and things will start budding out quickly though, so I’m in a bit of a race against the weather. Today I put on my stick farmer hat, went out and took hundreds of cuttings from various shrubs including gold mound spirea, ninebark ‘Monlo’, purple leaf sand cherry, nugget ninebark, dappled willow, Autumn Jazz arrowwood, miss kim lilac and a few others. I had to do some pruning on an Ayers pear tree so I’m even going to give them a try however, I’m not even certain you can propagate pears from hardwood.
The process of stick farming is super simple. You go out to your favorite flowering shurb and prune off some of last years growth. You then begin cutting those branches into 2 or three node sticks. I typically any use 2 nodes but I had so many cuttings this year I used 3 on quite a few of them. Once you have your sticks all cut up into the proper length, you then dip them in a rooting hormone. I use a liquid rooting hormone called Dip-N-Grow but there are many types available in both liquid and powder. Rooting hormone isn’t absolutely necessary especially on the things I was planting today but it does help the process along a bit. After you’ve finished dipping the ends of your cuttings its time to get on with planting them. You’ll want to use a good draining medium so that your cuttings don’t rot. I typically use a coarse sand but sometimes when I run out I’ll just uses some of my pine bark potting soil. I’ll said in around 4hrs I did somewhere between 1000-2000 cuttings. I lost track of how many I was doing after I passed 1000. I’ll probably have another several hundred or more that I’ll do tomorrow morning as well. Stick farming really doesn’t take up a ton of space. I use 6″ pots filled with coarse sand. Each pot will hold anywhere from 20-30 cuttings. Here is a photo of several of the cuttings I completed.
As soon as the soil temperatures warm up to above 50 degrees most of these will start working on forming roots. Some will have rooted by mid May other may take until June or July. I typically just leave them alone in the shade, keeping them watered periodically until fall. Then I’ll pot each rooted cutting into individual pots. Many of these you’ll find at next years spring plant sale others might be a year or two before they fill out enough to sell. If you’d like to learn more about making new plants from cuttings Purdue’s website is full of useful information.
