Follow The Beginning Farmer's Wife on Facebook for additional personal peeks at building a family farm.

(Be sure to click both the Facebook "like" and "follow" buttons to not miss any posts.)

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Expanding Berries with Cuttings

I have been continuing to dig around a bit to find information on how to do cuttings.  I think I am slowly feeling more comfortable with the process and am about ready to take the step and get some cuttings - assuming I make the time to do so!  There are a lot of websites out there that give some good information on the subject, but this one I found particularly helpful.


Propagating Deciduous and Evergreen Shrubs, Trees, and Vines with Stem Cuttings

This website not only has detailed steps of the process, but it also has a nice list of plants and their success rate with stem cuttings.

I would like to do quite a few plants such as magnolias, rhododendrons, azaleas, etc, but I am most interested in doing stem cuttings to get my fruit and berries going without spending too much money.  I realize that it might take a bit longer to do it this way, but right now it is probably the best way to go for us.

I don't foresee our farm really being a berry or fruit farm, but what I would really like to do is be able to offer fruits and maybe even surplus vegetables to our meat customers.  (Right now we have pastured pork, grass-fed beef, and "run of the farm" chicken eggs.  We will soon have lamb and are hoping to add broilers and turkey as well.)


Right now we have a young orchard planted, a couple grape vines, blueberry plants, and some raspberries, as well as blackberries in the woods.  I would like to use hardwood cuttings from the berry plants and grape vines that I have to increase my number of plants.  I would also like to find some additional varieties to take cuttings off of, or purchase if I have to in order to take cuttings another year. I will probably continue to get some starts from raspberries and blackberries like I have in the past since they are ready to fruit faster, but I'm thinking that doing cuttings of them also will be a lot less work to get the amount of plants I would like to have.

I hope to be able to get some of these going soon since the dormant season for doing hardwood cuttings will soon be coming to an end.  I have my root tone (which I got at Menards, but you can also get it at garden shops or even off of Amazon) and peat.  From what I understand, now I just have to get some sand and my cuttings.  Hopefully I will be able to post pictures of the process soon!


Follow The Beginning Farmer's Wife on Facebook for additional personal peeks at building a family farm.

1 comment:

Nance said...

I like your drive! and I enjoy your posts. I have raised four children and know how busy your days are and still a woman has a need to do, to grow and to create. I have black raspberries in my backyard. We pretty much just leave them be but sometimes I have noticed the long canes will touch the ground and root. Have you considered this, as a way of propagating? Here's link to some info. Hope it works! Good luck in your rooting project!

http://www.ppdl.purdue.edu/PPDL/DGP/DGP165.pdf

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...