Single Bud Cuttings

[grapeman]

I am always curious about methods for doing things to propagate vines. I don't want to get into too many chemicals and hormones so I have just been making hardwood cuttings. It always seems so wasteful to start with a stick a foot long with about 4 or 5 buds on it. It always roots from the bottom bud and then you get 2 or three shoots forming above it. In an old book I saw online from 1863 I think, it mentioned single bud cuttings and give the method for doing it. I purchased a copy of the book on Amazon a couple months ago.


Yesterday I took the Marquette vines that were small last year and pruned back to a few buds each. That gave me a lot of small wood that had been protected by the snows over winter. I made a bunch of single bud cuttings and put them in a bucket of water to soak overnight. It is said that even the hardest to root varieties of grapes root easily this way. They say to use sand from the bottom of a pond or stream since it is free of excessive iron. I tried to get to the stream on the property yesterday, but gave up a few hundred yards away from it due to mud and ice. I dedided to use perlite as an alternative to the sand. I rounded up a bunch of flats from my brothers yesterday that plant plugs had come in, so they are only a bit over an inch deep.


Today I layed the cuttings out and put about 200 per flat. I did two flats for this experiment. The cuttings are covered a quarter inch or so. I then moistened that. You leave them this way in about 50 degree temperature for 2-3 weeks where they will start to root. Once the roots begin, the temps are raised to about 80 degrees to for the bud development. Once they sprout the shoots and start with roots, they are planted into small individual pots.

This is an empty flat.

This is some cuttings laid in the flat. Not pressed down yet or covered.

And this one is the cuttings covered up. Geez it looks just about like the first one, but it is deeper now.




Please keep in mind this is an experimental method for me and I am just documenting it here. Also this method is only intended for rooting vines that you can grow on their own roots.


More to follow...........

 

[Waldo]

Very interesting appleman..Will be interesting to see how they fare

 

[reisjdmd]

fascinating. i wish i would hahve read this sometime last week. i spent yesterday pruning my vines, but i discarded the cuttings. rats. would have been fun to try. my guess is that it will work very well.

 

[chiefmike]

Very interesting, indeed. I look forward to watching your progress.

 

[AlFulchino]

did you do this before or after writin' the er....umm...royalty fee?

 

[grapeman]

Just a bit of an update here. This is a picture of just a few buds growing. They had been calloused in the cool two weeks and now have been on the heat mat for one week. There are a few shoots pushing up through the perlite. The biggest are only an inch tall and still lack chlorophyl.I will monitor them and as some roots develop they are going into plug trays holding 38 vines per normal bedding plant flat. It is hard to see them so I tried to circle them crudely in red.

Here is a tub with 1000 assorted cuttings- they are tied in bundles and identified with tags per bundle. I have them on the heat mat callousing. These are all hybrid grapes - some seedless so they will all be self rooted. This is part of this years rooting efforts. I will update this as things root to compare rooting sucess between both methods and subsequent growth.

And yes Al, when things are rooted I will be paying royalty/patent fees to those who have them coming!

 

[Joanie]

Appleman, did you use rooting hormone on the ones in the pail?

 

[grapeman]

no rooting hormone on any of them Joan. It might increase rooting, but even that hasn't been proven yet. By the way it isn't a pail- much larger, it is a 20 gallon tub. I can't get more than about 250 per 5 gallon pail. The tub fits on the 18" x 48" heat mat, plus the two flats of single bud cuttings. Time will tell how effective both methods are. The single bud cuttings are said to have a high percentage of rooting. They could produce 4-5 times as many vines per amount of wood because each bud can grow as opposed to one vine per 4-5 buds in a normal cutting.

 

[Joanie]

Then what is the white stuff on them?

 

[grapeman]

That's the perlite I set them in. After I stood them up on a base of one inch of perlite(think ground styrofoam) I poured a couple inches of perlite on top of them and then watered in well. Some of the powdery perlite stuck to them.

It's the same stuff as in the flats.

 

[Joanie]

Gotcha!