Garden

[Lilysmom1]

@Mom2Dogs , gardeners are good at sharing!  I am sure she was delighted to receive it.

[Black Pony]

Hyrdangeas are pretty easy to root.  I like to take cuttings at a time the mother plant is pruducing new leaves.  Mine are still growing in Arkansas, our weather has stayed very warm.  To take a cutting pick the end of a green stem (not ot too soft as it wont stand up straight and not woody) about length of a long pencil.  Trim off all the lower leaves, leaving only two at the top.  If it has large leaves, I even trim those down in size..  I did the end of the stem in rooting hormone and place in soil in a styrofoam cup.  Moisten soil, bag it all up in a ziploc bag and set it on the ground near the base of the mother plant.  Not full sun. I keep the soil moist and covered by the bag.  It can root pretty quickly, say 2-3 weeks.  With roots it won't need the bag.  I also put cuttings in a 6" pot and cover them with a vented 44 oz clear drink cup you get at the stop and go stores.  That works good too.  I gradually test the cutting by leaving off the cover, if it droops replace the cover and check back after more roots form.  Oak leaf hyrdangeas, gardenias,butterfuly bushes, climbing hydranges and even viburnums I have propafated by cuttings.

I'm too cheap to buy something if I can propagate it!

[gardenman]

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@Lilysmom1 wrote:

@luvzchiz I have never had one produce babies like Quickfire.  With both hydrangeas and rhodos, you can anchor a branch to the garden bed floor (I use a stone to hold it down.)  Eventually it will produce roots.  I leave it attached to the mother plant until it is big enough to survive on its own and then I sever the limb to the mother shrub.  Eventually I move it to a new location in the garden.

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This is called ground layering. If you wound the bark where you want the roots to form and apply a bit of rooting hormone to the wounded section before anchoring it to the soil it can speed up the root formation process, also light deprivation of the aboveground portion of the ground-layered branch can also speed root production. (That's counter-intuitive but it seems to work.) With the bark wound, you don't want to make a wound all the way around the stem, just on the bottom. You still want most of the bark left intact for water and nutrient movement to the upper parts of the branch, but the wound will trigger root formation in the wounded section.

Some commercial producers will bury a long stem nearly the whole length of the stem with wounds in the stem every six inches or so and roots and new vertical stems will form at each wound site. They'll leave a little bit of the stem out at the tip of the stem but bury the rest, up to five or six feet of stem, and get lots of little plants from that one stem buried in the ground. If you visit one of those nurseries right after they've done the procedure and see what's left of the parent plant and the buried stems you wonder what the heck they're doing. If things go right though they can get as many as a hundred, sometimes more, baby plants from that one parent plant in a single season. Faster-growing plants will make new vertical stems from the base of the original plant to let them redo the process again the next year.

[GoneButNotForgotten]

I used to have hydranges and they were HUGE. The big flowers are pretty but once they stop blooming, it's a lot of work to take them off and tidy up the plant. I finally took them out a few years ago; my poor back pleaded with me and I gave in.

[Lilysmom1]

@gardenman Fascinating!  I have several small shrubs taken from one of my Endless Summer hydrangeas.  I share them with neighbours.

[Lilysmom1]

@GoneButNotForgotten Unless I am pruning a hydrangea I let Mother Nature take care of the blooms.  High winds through Fall and Winter usually take them.