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Gardening in January, No Matter Where You Live.
Crazy right? Gardening in the dead of winter, even if you live in a cold, northern state? It’s not crazy and there are actually things work better now than they do during the growing season.
What if I told you that you could make hundreds of “Free Plants”, right now, in January?
Thousands of hardwood cuttings in a bed.
Trust me, if this didn’t work, I wouldn’t waste my time doing this.
Look at the above bed. Those are hardwood cuttings and we actually waited, waited and waited for the plants to freeze so we could take these cuttings and stick them in sand. Almost all of these were stuck in the month of December. We started filling this bed in late November and finished up in mid December.
Typically you can do hardwood cuttings from the end of November through mid to late March depending on where you live. Here in Ohio we can stick hardwood cuttings right up until April 1st. That’s pretty much the cut off date.
When it comes to plant propagation, timing is everything.
Our plant propagation schedule goes like this.
We start doing hardwood cuttings in late November and keep doing them until April 1st. Then we stop propagating completely. We don’t stick another cutting until early June. But once we start in June we make cuttings all summer long, right into September.
Why wait until June? See this article.
Of course you don’t have to stick them in sand, hardwood cuttings are very forgiving and will root in anything from coarse sand to potting soil to plain ole every day garden soil. You can stick them right in your garden and they will root.
Not all plants do well as hardwood cuttings, but here is a short list of the ones that will root this way.
Spirea of all kinds.
Potentilla
Rose of Sharon
Red and Yellow Twig Dogwood
Hydrangeas, especially PG and Annabelle, but the Macrophyllas will root this way as well.
Purple Flowering Sandcherry.
Willows of all kinds, including Pussy Willow, even Weeping Pussy Willow. (ask me about this one)
Did you know that you can actually buy “Unrooted Hardwood Cuttings” and have them sent to you in the mail? Just unpack them, cut about 1/4″ of the butt end so the cut is fresh, stick them and they will root and grow. In Our Members Area We Have Buy/Sell Area where members sell unrooted hardwood cuttings of all kinds of plants, seeds, flowering shrubs of all kinds, including rare Japanese maples. All at crazy low wholesale prices.
That’s the short list. But the good news is that it costs you nothing to experiment with other things as well.
For Detailed information about Rooting Hardwood Cuttings, see this article.
For a detailed list of Plants and How they are Best Propagated, see this article.
Questions or comments? Post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them for you.
Happy New Year! My gardening friends. May 2016 be your best gardening year ever.
Source: http://mikesbackyardnursery.com/2016/01/gardening-in-january-no-matter-where-you-live/
