How to Get a Start From an Existing Lilac Bush
Video transcription
Hi, I'm Marci Degman the aspiring gardener, and today we're going to talk about how to get a start from an existing lilac bush. Now in this case, it's all pretty intact, so what I'm going to need to do is I'm going to need to get a cutting and the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to come down here, find a nice pencil thick piece, we don't want to really go with something this fat and we don't want to go with something spindly like this. So, I'm going to go ahead and make a nice angled cut that allows a little bit more root space, I might even want to go ahead and cut that a little more. So, you kind of want to splinter the wood a little bit, you might even want to go in and scrape it a little because that allows the roots to come out a little bit quicker and then you want to go ahead and take off the foliage because that's just going to take energy from the cutting. I've got a pot with some nice loose rich soil in here, you can also use sand or a blend of soil and sand if you'd like to. You'd want to always keep your soil moist but you don't want it to be soggy and wet and so one way to kind of speed up the process of a cutting is slide it down into the soil. What I like to do is I just like to take these bags, these vegetable bags from the supermarket, they fit perfect over a one gallon container. I like just to put those over there, of course I've already watered. So, what happens is you have this little terrarium effect and it actually really speeds up the cutting. After about maybe a week or so, maybe two, I'll go in and I'll take, make a little hole or two to give it some circulation cause after a while you will have fungal problems but at first you want to just get it really warm and moist and many times this'll take a year to really get a good root base before you're actually able to put it in the ground, but if you just stick it aside, keep it moist, it'll grow, you'll have a new lilac plant before long.