My winter project this year is working on my first food forest garden. Fall and winter are the best times here for planting trees and shrubs, so I’m working toward having a variety of things to plant. And not just in my designated food forest. I’m looking to plant food producing species in our woods as well.
There are several ways to obtain these. One is to buy them. Another is to raise them from seeds, and I’ll have more about that in a future blog post. Still another way, is to propagate them from cuttings. I recently found a video on how to do this and gave it a try with cuttings from one of my pear trees.
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| Lengths of branches are cut and stripped of existing leaves. |
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| Live sticks are placed in a sealed jar with an inch of water. |
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| The jar is stored in a dark place until sticks begin to grow nubs. |
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| Close-up |
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| These are then planted in pots. |
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Once they develop a good root system,
they can be transplanted into the ground. |
Probably the best time to do this will be spring, since everything is going dormant now. But at least I know it works. I tried it with redbud branches, but they never sprouted, so this may be best for fruit trees. Starting with larger sticks would be better, because the plantings would be larger.
I can see this as being an ongoing project and good way to plant more food producing trees. And all for free! It doesn’t get any better than that.
