You can’t just snip a plant and expect your cutting to grow. Sometimes it will, but most often it won’t. If you want to grow new plants from old without using seeds, you need to help foster strong new roots, and the way to do that is with rooting powder.
Our neighbourhood has a problem with a rough local cat that comes in everyone’s houses and bullies their own cats – ours included. Several times we’ve come home to find evidence of a fight having taken place in the lounge, and sometimes that had resulted in bits of our money tree being snapped off.
Money trees (also known as jade plant or crassula ovata) are very, very slow growers so we didn’t want to lose those snapped off branches. They are also easy to take cuttings from (with or without cats) and will happily form their own new roots. Nonetheless we wanted to give ours a helping hand, so out came the rooting powder.
The first step is to make a clean slice on your cutting with a very sharp knife. This should be done at an angle to expose more of the core of the branch. If you have other branches or shoots close to this you strip them off to give yourself a nice clean stem, and then dip it into the rooting powder.
Dipping a cutting in rooting powder
You should dip it to a depth of around 1cm and then put the cutting into a prepared pot of soil or compost. You will only need to make one application, so once it is in the soil give it a good watering and set it in a suitable location to start growing, being careful to follow any general growing guidelines for your particular plant. Our money plant, for example, doesn’t like too much direct sunlight, or extremes of heat and cold.
And here’s the finished product: two new money trees setting out in the world. They are a little wonky because their stems were so curled, but they’re cute nonetheless. When they find their feet they’ll be given new homes in the kitchen and bathroom.
Re-planted cutting
One word of caution: rooting powder is highly toxic. You should be careful not to breathe it in, and should wash your hands thoroughly after using it (you should also consider wearing gloves). Be careful how you dispose of unused powder and the container as it can cause harm if it finds its way into a watercourse.
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Hi
Great blog – just found you this evening.
Quick question about rooting powder – do you use it on vegetables? Like lettuce? Spring onions? Basil?
Sharon