How Do I Start a Rose Plant?

Video transcription

Hi, I'm Marci Degman, The Aspiring Gardener, and today we're going to talk about starting a rose plant. What I have here is a cutting from a mature rose and it's kind of tricky because what you want is you don't really want the old wood from last year and you don't really want the new growth from this Spring. So, what you want is what they call semi woody wood and that comes usually about the time a flower has finished its flowering and the flower has faded. It's had a little time to mature. Now this one hasn't quite flowered so it's a little bit early but I want to kind of give you the idea of the process. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and cut it as close to the medium wood as we can. I'm going to cut off at a 45 degree angle so you have a lot of root space and you want to have about a six or an eight inch piece and then what you're going to want to do after that is you're going to want to take and cut about six to eight inches up depending on the leaf pattern. This one we want to leave at least this set of leaves so we want to cut above that. So, you're going to want to take the lower leaves off because you're going to want to have this area to root but you want to leave at least one if not two sets of leaves in order to produce food for this cutting. Okay so what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to make just a tiny little hole in your soil. Now I have some regular fine potting soil. You can use seed soil that's a little bit finer. Some people like to put sand in or use half and half. So that's a good thing to do as well but I've just got some regular potting soil and then what you're going to want to do if you have that is if you have some root tone this will help it to root faster and better. You're going to dip that in at least high enough up to the first node that you can see. So you get a nice little powdering. Now I'm going to put that into the soil and I'm just going to kind of tighten that up a little bit so that will hold and then the other thing is since there's no roots on this you're going to want to keep it moist at all times in order to give it a chance to root so you want to water the soil but then you want to also create a little terrarium and what I usually just like to do is I just take a produce bag, you can use a Ziploc freezer bag, whatever you have. These are nice because they're light and they don't, they hold int he moisture without being like too hot or too stuffy. Now you're going to want to check this every few days, keep it consistently moist. At some point maybe within a month or two you're able to pull on that and it doesn't come out and you can tell it's starting to root, then you can take this away. Now sometimes in really hot weather, if it gets really wet, you're worried about fungal, you can always make a little air hole, just maybe one little air hole for that. But that will be fine, it will just sit there and it will root for you. A lot of people go ahead and plant them once they root. I usually leave them a little longer in a pot, maybe even transfer them to another container until I know I've got a really good root base and then plant them out well before cold weather in the Fall so they have time to settle in. And you should have a rose plant.