Divisions and cuttings - what's the difference? Well, we get into the fine details of this propagation method in our final installment of our plant propagation series. As we've done in our look at growing from seed and using tissue culture, we'll see how we grow from this propagation type, it's benefits and costs, and get the scoop from the production specialist who's focus is this area at North Creek.
We interviewed Angel Altizer, (formerly our stock grower* in Landenberg but now our Quality Control Manager at Oxford - get it, Angel!) about the nitty gritty of divisions and cuttings. She gives us a behind the scenes about how she manages our stock house to grow the best plants that we use for our divisions and cuttings.
Note: Where applicable, we have updated information from this past interview to reflect more current information given by our Production Administrator, Victoria Bolden. Things move fast sometimes, here at the ol' Creek.
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What are cuttings?
Cuttings refer to cutting a piece of plant that we want to propagate by creating a clone of the parent plant and planting it in substrate to grow roots. Usually, cuttings are taken from stems, and more frequently the tips of stems, but they can also be taken from leaves and roots.
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What are divisions?
Divisions differ from cuttings. Divisions are propagated from plant parts and are considered a modification of layering since the plants are entire before they are detached from their parent plants. Examples of divisions include using plantlets formed from stolons and runners or from offsets. Offsets usually come from plants with a rosette stem where new shoots form at their base or leaf axils while stolons and rhizomes are modified stems.
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Grower Slang Alert!
At North Creek, we used to refer to our divisions as "scoops" because we scooped them out of the soil or from the main plant. Like with any good language that gets a lot of use, things change over time. Our production team now refers to divisions as "steals" because we steal a small portion of the main plant to propagate.
The more you know...
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How do we establish our cuttings and divisions?
Cuttings and divisions are taken by our skilled cutting crews. Fresh material receives a foliar spray of rooting hormone and planted into growing media within a short window of time. More difficult to root cuttings are treated with a dip into rooting hormone as opposed to a foliar spray. With moisture loss being of upmost concern, cuttings are frequently carried out in the early morning hours when the weather is cooler. If forced to take cuttings outside of this ideal window, material is held and maintained in a cooler. Freshly-planted material is placed in a growing house, which is warmer (in the winter and early spring months) and maintained at a high humidity level through misting or fogging. When the plants have established adequate roots, the humidity and heat levels return to a normal level and allowed to grow on.
Most of our plants can only have cuttings taken at certain times of the year. The timing of taking cuttings during the times of year can vary based on weather (i.e. if we have an unexpected hot dry period in early summer which pushes new growth hard). If cuttings are taken outside of their optimal window, rooting success will be dramatically reduced, even with additional rooting hormone treatments applied. Knowing your timeframe for when to take cuttings by reading the season is an art and a science, hard-won through experience. We keep information about cutting standards and records of the optimal time to perform this propagation method but applying this information takes skill.
(Kudos to the growers out there - as with most things in life, this is harder than it looks. It's skill and experience that makes it look easy to the casual observer.)
Now, let's talk to Angel.
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How do we manage our stock?
Angel Altizer (AA): Firstly, and most importantly, our stock plants are primed with a steady and varied diet of good music. I like to listen to pretty much anything and like to play it for my plant babies as well. They grow better with good music.
But really, our stock is maintained at a high standard – they are the mother plants and the origins of what our customers receive. Stock houses are scouted daily to watch out for pest and disease with weekly spray rotations and frequent applications of beneficial insects. Things can happen fast in stock and it’s important to be proactive before the problem or damage affects the mother plant and cuttings and divisions can’t be taken.
Each plant is different. After thirty years of trial and error, we have tried and true recipes to get the plants to perform at their best. Each plant type has a cutting standard and a protocol which tells us how cuttings should look, how often they can be performed, and estimates on how many cuttings can be reasonably obtained from a single plant. However, all these recipes are general guidelines – we’re still dependent on Mother Nature and with half our stock houses outside and exposed to the elements, what we can do is sometimes weather-dependent.
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What are some challenges to maintaining stock?
AA: We have over 120 different species and cultivars that we maintain in stock or over 50 different genera. Many of the plants have very different needs, susceptibilities to pest and disease, and timings. In addition, there is the weather. Some summers are hot and dry which can affect how and when we can take cuttings just as much as a cool and wet summer, inside the greenhouses or outside them. Stock plants must be routinely trimmed to encourage plants to push new growth, fertilized, and be kept disease and pest-free.
Why use cuttings or divisions when there are so many challenges to maintaining stock?
AA: It’s different than with seed or with tissue culture. First of all, stock takes up a fair amount of greenhouse space. So that’s a cost to consider – time, money, space, labor, heating, all of it – when you decide whether or not to have stock and take cuttings versus the other avenues out there. Cuttings and tissue culture are asexual plant propagation which ensure propagated material is the exact same as the parent material – especially important for cultivars. However, some plants – they respond best to cuttings or divisions than other methods of propagation. You have to observe the nature of the parent plant, with some trial and error, and if you observe that the plant spreads by stolons or runners, then that’s a no-brainer. Or if the plant roots well when you take a stem cutting – it has a faster turnaround than starting from seed and less financially prohibitive than tissue culture. So, the set-up cost of tissue culture makes keeping stock more attractive, as does the idea that you physically have it there if something goes wrong on the supplier side.
What's the most finicky plant we grow?
Victoria Bolden, pictured above (updated plant because... well, there's a few contenders): Porteranthus is difficult to grow from stock. This plant in propagation tends to be finicky. The cuttings will look just fine, but then they will not root. All it takes is one bad day with the mist and these plants will hide the damage, but the damage is done. Or if the cuttings are too hard or too soft, they will not root. They also take longer to root compared to some other cuttings like Nepeta(s).
Even the stock plants themselves are picky, they take a long time to wake up in the spring even with extra light and heat. And when the plants do wake up, they are stingy with their cuttings in the beginning.
We haven't quite cracked the code on this plant but we're working on it.
What are some personal victories in working with stock?
AA: There’s a lot of moving parts and it’s important to maintain communication between everyone on the team – from the production administrators to cutting crews and cutting crew leaders to the growers. We’re a team – it’s like a spider web and everyone’s job is interconnected – and for all of us to succeed, we work together. We’ve improved a lot of our processes by talking to each other and trying out different timings or rotations or standards – we’re a great team. It feels good to finally crack the code on a difficult plant and get everything working well so that our customers get the best plant they can when they need it.
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HAPPENING SOON!
Cultivate'21
Columbus, OH | July 10-13, 2021
President Steve Castorani will be speaking on green infrastructure and native plants at Cultivate™ this year. Want to talk native plants and hear what's new? We're at Booth 2910 and would love to see your faces again!
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