Free Fruit Tree's

beatitudes8(55)

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Rooting

The process we are using to propagate cuttings from our existing fruit tree's is called rooting. We take the cuttings that we removed during pruning and get them to "root" in another words we create a new sapling or tree. This is the simplest method when propagated cuttings.
NOW the million dollar question, is it the most reliable? The answer is a big NO. It is the least reliable and has the lowest success rate. So why am I doing it? It cost nothing. It's going to be a busy year here

@beatitudes8 Homestead I don't have the time or room at his point to try and pamper and baby hundreds of cuttings. If I had the proper green house setting and the correct root stock along with time to devote and an incessant need for more fruit tree's I would by all means get root stock and properly propagate and graft the cutting onto root stock. With any luck I'll get a green house this year and we can try grafting next year.

Until then Hey look at all my cuttings!

And More

There are more, but you get the picture. I took these cuttings and trimmed them up even smaller. Usually you want something around the 4-10 in or 1.5 dm. I have some that size and some a whole lot bigger.

This is what I had after I finished the initial clean up and labeling so that I knew what kind of tree the cuttings were from.

This is the trash pile.

Let me show you an example of getting usable cutting from after pruning.

Technically you can take these and cut them all in half again and that would be ideal size.

When I had everything cut to size, tied up and labelled I put them all into 5 gallon buckets with a couple inches of water and a root growth simulator.

I then placed a large trash bag over the cutting hoping to keep heat and humidity in and around the cuttings. I am keeping the cutting inside the house albeit a cool part of the house, but its better then the 40's and 30's of the garage.
I'm not expecting a very good success rate at all especially with the longer and bigger "cuttings", but we only have a couple hours of work and zero cash $$$ tied up in this experiment. We ended up with two 5 gallon buckets full.