Last year I took cuttings off of our Chaste Tree (Vitex). It is a beautiful tree that blooms with pretty purple flowers that the honeybees love. In fact they've been giving out trees as door prizes at our beekeeper's club. I took seven cuttings and over time, four of the seven grew roots and leaves and are now over three feet tall! I'll be transplanting in the ground near our beehives.
Armed with a little confidence, I decided to try again with some other trees. I watched a tutorial from The School of Traditional Skills that was really informative. It was a free hour and a half-long class. Below is a screen shot from the training pertaining to what we're attempting to do again:
First, Experiment #1: I wanted to try a mulberry tree. The host mulberry is one that is a young tree about 12 feet tall that I actually got to grow from a cup-full of mulberries that I scattered in the woods behind our house. One of them grew and although it is not on our property, it leans over onto our property and last year fruited enough to eat a few off the tree. Delicious!
I want to try to get some more growing. Following what I learned on the class, I took cuttings and cut just below the node, dipped in water, dipped in rooting hormone and put in some moist potting soil. I'll keep the soil wet and we'll see what happens.
Experiment #2: Elderberry. We want to try to grow some elderberry trees from cuttings. I went through the same process on the back of my tailgate. Tick tock... We'll see what happens.
Experiment #3: Blueberries. We've lost almost half of our blueberry bushes due to, I think, drought. I want to get some replacements going. We'll watch these as well and see if we're successful.
I think I'm a little late in doing this experiment, so if we fail, we'll try again next year, but earlier, but all that can happen is that it might fail. But the upside is we'll get some new trees off of cuttings similar to the Chaste Trees or Vitex.
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