ON THE GARDEN PATH by Carolyn Herriot

This year, many garden centres sold out of anything to do with food gardening – seeds, starts, fruit trees and berry bushes – and many of them started wait-lists for next year. This is a good sign that gardeners are planning for greater food production and that we will see more food at garden centres next year. In the meantime, we could be propagating our own fruits and berries; it’s a lot easier than you think. If gardeners shared plants with friends, neighbours and local gardening clubs, imagine how much we’d increase the amount of home-grown fruit – this is how we could start our five-year plan for greater food security.

Propagation falls into three categories: vegetative division, rooted cuttings and grafting. (We’ll leave grafting for another column). Tip: An axe comes in handy when splitting large root masses such as rhubarb.

Cuttings need a sterilized, free draining and moisture retentive propagation mix. I mix 50 percent organic growing medium (available at garden centres) with 50 percent coarse, washed sand (from landscape suppliers) in a wheelbarrow until well blended. Tip: Add a dusting of rock phosphate to aid rooting. Fill half-gallon, square pots with rooting mix and moisten well. Put in nine cuttings per pot, spaced as three rows of three, inserting with chopsticks to avoid damaging the cuttings.

For rooting hormone, I soak cuttings overnight in willow water (see recipe), which contains salicylic acid, a natural rooting agent. Tip: cuttings can go in the water at the same time the willow is soaking. I use willow water to water cuttings in too.

Willow Water (Salix): choose sections of young willow branches the diameter of a fat pencil. Strip off leaves leaving only twigs. Chop into two-inch lengths and soak these in a ¼ full bucket of water for 24 hours. Tip: If you strain off the willow sections, leaving only water, it will keep for seven days.

Light triggers rooting so place cuttings in a bright place, but out of direct sunlight to avoid wilting. The secret of success is keeping the rooting mix moist at all times; periodic misting helps. Plants require different amounts of time to root, but you’ll know when they do because they start to grow. After roots develop, it’s time to repot cuttings into their own pots. I use screened compost for a growing medium, but any lightweight potting mix will do as long as it has fertilizer in it.

The best time to take cuttings is when pruning. The rule of thumb for cuttings is that the cutting should be flexible; if it snaps, it’s too woody and if it is floppy between your fingers, it’s too immature. Ideally, a cutting should have the thickness of a skinny pencil. The length can vary but it should not be over six inches.

Figs and elderberries are fast growing softwood shrubs that can be pruned yearly to keep them in check. Currants and gooseberries are fast growing bushes that root easily from cuttings taken in fall after fruiting. The best blueberries are produced on two to three-year-old wood. To prevent bushes petering out, remove 20 percent of the oldest wood every year at ground level.

You get three years of production from a strawberry patch; expect the second year to be the best. Take strawberry offsets in fall and over-winter to plant them out in spring. Raspberries are easily propagated from the young rooted canes that creep outside the support framework.

In fall, choose sections of grape canes to root in propagation mix over winter. Kiwis Actinidia deliciosa: Pruning is needed to keep these vigorous vines in check; this is best done in spring while dormant, before the sap starts to flow. Don’t forget that kiwis are dioecious vines, with male and female flowers on separate plants, so you need one male plant for every six females.

This general method works for ornamental shrubs and roses too so have fun experimenting. This article comes with a word of warning though: rooting plants can become addictive.

Carolyn Herriot is author of A Year on the Garden Path: A 52-Week Organic Gardening Guide. She grows Seeds of Victoria at the Garden Path Centre where she teaches The Zero Mile Diet - Twelve Steps to Sustainable Homegrown Food Production and Growing an Edible Plant Business. www.earthfuture.com/gardenpath