Recently I have been reading and re-reading a gardening book I bought at a Goodwill or Salvation Army some time ago. It goes through the entire year and maps out what you could do to work on your garden, even in the winter. It’s pretty amazing. But the most amazing discovery I have made through reading it is something called rooting powder.
Rooting powder is supposedly this amazing stuff that makes portions of plants grow roots and become independent plants in their own right. If I was more curious, I would find out what amazing chemical compound forces plants to do this, but I wouldn’t probably know what those compounds were anyway, so I haven’t bothered. (Is this lazy or merely efficient?) The time required varies widely for different plants to begin sending out roots, and some of them take so long that I would surely have thrown them out long before they had a chance to prove themselves. However, there is one particular plant for which I am willing to go the distance: the flowering almond.
Not to be confused with the sweet almond, which I mistakenly kept calling this plant until I did more research, the pink flowering almond is not as fragrant, and this is good for a nasally, allergic-y type like me. As much as I like the springtime scents of things in bloom, those same scents can be my undoing. With a flowering almond, I get to have the fluffy pink and white blossoms of spring without the itchy eyeballs and chain sneezing. The problem is, I don’t have a flowering almond, and a one gallon plant from the store costs at least $30, which I also don’t have, at least not for any more plants. Enter rooting powder.
A small container of rooting powder only costs $5 and if I can stay away from my favorite drive-thru $1.07 fountain beverage for a week, I’ll make up the difference in no time. I took some cuttings from a plant I had access to, I dipped the end of the cutting in water, then dipped it in the powder, then stuck it in some dirt. Later, I realized my mistake and repeated the process, only putting the dipped stick in a bunch of sand rather than dirt. Now I must wait. But before I wait in vain, I just wanted to ask if the plant in the photo below looks the way it is supposed to? My instincts tell me something is amiss.
These are root powder cuttings after a couple days. This does not bode well.
Hint: remove ‘all’ top growth. leave only 1 or 2 [sticks] above ground. the plant will need all it’s energy to be directed to producing roots not trying to support top growth [leave] growth.
Keep your sand mix damp not wet. keep in a warm place out of the direct sun.
Roots will appear in a few weeks. treat as a green house or house plant until late fall
transplant into it’s growing pot or outdoors where you want it to grow.
Don’t for get to keep it watered through out the winter months. it will come forth with new top growth and do very well next spring.
Those are great tips! Thanks for your comment, and I’ll see how things turn out once I make a few modifications to my current attempt.
I am curious about WHERE you got the clipping? You were a little vague. The cuttings look a little sad 🙁
I got the cuttings from some very healthy bushes that I can vouch for but may be unable to divulge the location of. They may be from a previously owned piece of property that remains unnamed and unidentified but exists in a suspended state of ownership limbo in its undivulged location. Does that clear everything up? 😉