- 5 hours ago
Turn a healthy branch into a new plant with little more than water, warmth, and patience. This practical gardening guide explains how to prepare cuttings, remove lower leaves, keep water fresh, and choose a bright spot out of direct sun so roots can develop.
Learn simple propagation methods for rosemary, grape vines, and tomato suckers, plus an unusual way to root a fig branch while it is still attached to the tree. The guide also explains why a lemon cutting may grow into a plant without reliably producing fruit like a grafted tree. A useful introduction to growing plants from cuttings, home gardening, and low-cost plant propagation for beginners and balcony gardeners.
Learn simple propagation methods for rosemary, grape vines, and tomato suckers, plus an unusual way to root a fig branch while it is still attached to the tree. The guide also explains why a lemon cutting may grow into a plant without reliably producing fruit like a grafted tree. A useful introduction to growing plants from cuttings, home gardening, and low-cost plant propagation for beginners and balcony gardeners.
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00:00There is a thing most folk never learn, and so they go on paying the nursery good money,
00:05year after year, for plants they could have had for nothing.
00:09Here it is.
00:11Near every plant you own, the rosemary on the sill, the fig in the yard, the grape on the fence,
00:18the lemon on the terrace, the very tomato in your garden, will make you a whole new plant, free,
00:24from nothing but a cut piece of itself and a little water.
00:29Not a seed, mind, which is a slow and chancy thing, but a cutting, a piece of the branch,
00:36that will grow its own roots and become a plant the exact twin of the one it came from.
00:42One rosemary bush can give you ten, one fig tree a whole row,
00:48and I am going to show you the plainest way there is to do it,
00:51so plain you will wonder why you ever bought a plant at all.
00:56Stay with me, for there is one of these, the fig, that I do in a way so strange you
01:02will scarcely believe it works,
01:04and it works the best of all.
01:07Now let me tell you the simple truth of why a cut branch will grow roots,
01:12for once you see it, the whole thing makes sense and you will trust it.
01:16A plant is a living thing that wants above all to live,
01:21and when you cut a piece of it away, that piece does not know it is doomed,
01:26it only knows it has lost its roots and must grow new ones or die.
01:31So given half a chance, given a little water and a little warmth,
01:36that cut piece will throw out roots of its own from the wound, reaching for life.
01:41All you are doing, in all that follows, is giving the cutting that half a chance.
01:47You are keeping it alive and comfortable, warm and watered,
01:52long enough for it to do what it already wants to do, which is to root and live.
01:58That is the whole secret.
02:00You are not forcing anything, you are only helping a thing that wants to live, to live.
02:07I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
02:12The book is the long version.
02:14If you want it, it is there.
02:16I will not mention it again.
02:18Let me start with the rosemary, for it is the plainest and a fine one to learn on.
02:23You take your cuttings from a healthy plant, and you want them a good hand and a half long,
02:29say eight inches or ten, cut from the newer wood, not the old gray woody stuff down low.
02:36Take as many as you want new plants, for each one is a plant to be.
02:41Now here is the one bit of preparing, and it matters.
02:45On the lower part of each cutting, the bottom few inches, you strip off all the leaves, pluck the little
02:52needles clean away,
02:53for that bared lower part is where you want the roots to come,
02:57and a leaf left down there sitting in the water will only rot and foul the whole thing.
03:04Leaves up top where they belong, the lower few inches bare and clean.
03:09That is your cutting ready.
03:11Now the rooting itself, and here is where the old way is so plain it is almost funny.
03:17You do not need pots of soil, nor any special thing.
03:21You need only water and something to hold it.
03:24The man I learned this latest trick from used nothing but a sandwich bag.
03:29He pours a little water into the bag, stands the cutting in it,
03:33so the bared lower part is down in the water and the leafy top is up out of it,
03:38and then he gathers the mouth of the bag up around the stem and ties it off snug with a
03:44twist tie,
03:45so the bag holds its water and its damp air about the cutting like a little greenhouse.
03:51And he does the same with every cutting, a bag a piece.
03:55Now you may just as well use a jar or a glass if you have them,
03:59for the water is the thing, not the bag, but the bag is free and it holds the damp close,
04:05and I rather like it.
04:07The water can be plain rainwater, which is the best, soft and clean.
04:13And here is where you may, if you like, add the one bought helper there is, a rooting hormone,
04:20a powder or a liquid from the garden store that nudges the cutting to root faster.
04:25It is no cheat and no shame to use it.
04:28But I will tell you honest, you do not need it for the easy ones like these,
04:33for they root fine in plain water, and the old folk had no such powder and rooted their cuttings all
04:39the same.
04:40If you want it, use it.
04:42If you would rather not, plain water does the work.
04:45Then you set your bags or jars somewhere warm, but, and mind this well, out of the direct hot sun.
04:54A cutting in a bag in a sunny window will cook.
04:57The sun will heat that trapped air to an oven and kill the thing outright.
05:02Warm but shaded is the rule, a bright spot out of the direct beam.
05:07And a word on the season, for it matters to your patience.
05:11A cutting roots in answer to warmth.
05:14So a cutting set to root in the warm part of the year, the spring and the summer, roots quick
05:20and willing,
05:21while the same cutting set in the cold dark of winter will sit and sulk for months and maybe rot
05:28before it ever roots.
05:30So take your cuttings in the growing season when you can, when the warmth is on your side,
05:36and you will wait weeks where the winter gardener waits a season.
05:41And then, the hardest part of all for an eager gardener, you wait, and you do not fuss.
05:48The rosemary will take its time, four weeks to eight weeks before you see a good set of roots down
05:55in the water.
05:55And that is the honest span of it, not a day or two as the flashy folk would have you
06:01believe.
06:01Leave it be, and here is one small bit of tending that makes all the difference, for it is where
06:08most folk fail.
06:09You must keep the water fresh.
06:12Every few days, or whenever you see it going cloudy or growing a green film, you tip out the old
06:19water and pour in clean.
06:21For stale water goes foul and will rot your cutting at the very foot before ever it can root.
06:29Fresh, clean water every few days, and the cutting stays sweet and sound.
06:34Do that, keep it topped up, and in its own good time it will show you a fine white head
06:40of roots down in the glass.
06:42And then, and only then, you have your new plant, and you pot it up gentle into a small pot
06:49of soil, and later, when it has grown to a little bush, into a bigger one.
06:55One cutting, one new rosemary, for free.
06:59Now the fig, and this is the strange one I promised you, and the best.
07:05For the fig you can root a cutting the same plain way in water, and it will, and faster than
07:11the rosemary even.
07:13But there is an old trick for the fig that is cleverer still, and it is this.
07:18You do not cut the branch off the tree first. You leave it on.
07:23You take a living branch, still attached to the mother tree, and you wound it a little where you want
07:30the roots.
07:31And then you wrap that spot, right there on the living tree, in a bag of water or damp moss,
07:38tied top and bottom.
07:39And because the branch is still joined to the tree, still being fed by the mother, it roots with a
07:46will, fat and fast, often in less than a month, far quicker and surer than a cutting struggling alone.
07:54The tree feeds the branch, while the branch grows its roots.
07:59And only once the roots are well formed do you cut the branch away, below the new roots, and there
08:06you have a big, strong, rooted fig plant, near a little tree already, that scarcely knows it was ever moved.
08:15It is the surest way there is to get a fig, and it is the old way, and it costs
08:20nothing but a bag and a bit of patience.
08:24Now the grape, the grape vine. And this one roots just as willing, only it likes a little more room
08:31than a bag.
08:32For the grape I would use a cup, an old plastic cup or a jar, with water in it, and
08:38stand the cuttings in that.
08:40It roots the same as the rest, a bared, lower cutting, standing in water in a warm shaded spot.
08:47Only the grape, I will tell you honest, is a touch slower than the fig, and takes its time like
08:54the rosemary, a good many weeks before the roots come strong.
08:58But come they do, and a well-rooted grape cutting planted out will give you a whole new vine, and
09:06in a few years your own grapes off a vine that cost you not a penny.
09:11I have put mine straight out into the ground, once well-rooted, to see what they will make.
09:17For a grape grown from a cutting is the true twin of its parent, and will bear the very same
09:23grape.
09:24And the lemon, and here I owe you an honest word, for I will not let you go on a
09:30fool's errand.
09:31A lemon cutting will root in water the same as the others, yes, and you will get a lemon plant
09:37from it, a fine green thing.
09:39But, and here is the catch the sellers do not tell you, a lemon grown on its own roots from
09:46a cutting will often be slow and stubborn to ever give you fruit, and may never bear a proper lemon
09:52at all, the way the grafted trees do.
09:55To get a lemon that fruits true and strong like the one on my terrace, you must graft it, join
10:02your rooted cutting to a proper hardy root.
10:06And that, the grafting, is a whole art of its own, and a topic for another day, so I will
10:12not rush it here.
10:14But know the truth of it, that the rooting is only the first half of a lemon, and do not
10:20be sold a bare cutting as if it were a fruiting tree.
10:24And last, the tomato, and this is the one that will please you most for how quick and easy it
10:30is, and how it turns a thing you throw away into free plants.
10:35When you tend your tomatoes, you know those little shoots that spring up in the crook of the arm, where
10:41a side branch meets the main stem?
10:44The suckers, folk call them. Good gardeners pinch those out to keep the plant in order, and then toss them
10:51on the heap.
10:51Well, do not toss them. For those very suckers, those bits you were throwing away, will root in water faster
11:00than near anything, a few weeks and often less.
11:04For a tomato is desperate to live, and roots at the drop of a hat.
11:09You stand the pinched sucker in a jar of water, warm and bright but out of the scorch, and in
11:16no time it has a head of roots and is a whole new tomato plant, ready to set straight in
11:21the ground.
11:22The scraps of your pruning become a second crop of plants, free, and these make a fine late planting to
11:30carry your tomatoes on into the end of the season after the first plants tire.
11:35My grandmother always had jars of cuttings standing along the back of her kitchen window sill, the whole year round
11:43it seemed, bits of this and that rooting in water, and I thought nothing of it as a boy, for
11:49it was simply how the sill always looked.
11:51A jar of geranium, a sprig of something in an old glass, roots feeling down into the water.
11:59I asked her once why she did not just buy her plants at the nursery, like the town folk did,
12:04all neat in their pots.
12:06She said, Child, why would I pay a man for a plant, when the plant I already have will give
12:12me another for the cost of a glass of water, and patience I have got for free?
12:18Every plant on this sill came off another plant of mine, and so will the next, and I have not
12:25bought a plant in forty years.
12:27I did not understand her thrift as a boy, I understand it now.
12:32She had a whole garden going, free, off the back of plants she already owned, and all it cost her
12:39was the knowing how and the waiting.
12:42So let me say plainly who gains by you believing that a plant is a thing you must buy, new,
12:49in a pot, from a nursery, every time you want one.
12:52The nursery gains, of course, season after season, selling you back for good money the very plants that your own
13:00plants would give you for the cost of water.
13:03It is not that anyone schemed it so.
13:06It is only that a potted plant can be sold to you again and again, and a jar of cuttings
13:12on the windowsill cannot, so the one is pushed and sold, and the other, the old plain knowing of the
13:19cutting and the jar, is quietly let slip from memory.
13:22But the cutting was always the thrifty way, and the true way besides, for a plant from a cutting is
13:30the exact twin of its parent, and a seed is a gamble, but a cutting never lies.
13:36Now tell me this in the comments.
13:38What is the first plant you will try this with, the rosemary, or the fig, or the grape, or the
13:45humble tomato sucker?
13:47And tell me as well what you are growing in, a bit of garden ground, or pots on a terrace,
13:52or a balcony.
13:53For the balcony gardener above all has the most to gain from this, turning one plant into a whole, crowded,
14:01happy, railing full for nothing.
14:04Next time I will show you that grafting I spoke of for the lemon, the old art of joining one
14:09plant to the root of another so that you can make a cutting that would never fruit into a tree
14:15that bears heavy and true.
14:17But for now, do not go paying the nursery for what your own plants will give you free.
14:24Take a cutting, strip it, stand it in a glass of water in a warm shaded spot, and wait.
14:30The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.