Coldframe Evergreen Cuttings
One wonderful use of a section of a cold frame is growing your own evergreen cuttings. Take out about four inches of soil and put in a mixture of equal parts of sand and peat moss. Make cuttings of the tips of branches of the past season’s growth of evergreens, put them an inch deep, half inch apart in a row, two inches between rows in the sand and peat in the frame.
This works beautifully for all the different varieties of yew and for most of the junipers, and arbor-vitaes. I doubt if it will work for you for pines, spruces, hemlocks, and firs. Try some of the broad-leafed evergreens such as boxwood, being sure to get cuttings from hardy strains in your locality. Also try fire-thorn, the evergreen wintercreeper (Euonymus), and evergreen barberry. But I doubt if you will find it will work for rhododendrons, mountain laurel, and leucothoe.
If you need some evergreen ground covers – now (November) is a wonderful time to put in all the cuttings you will need of Japanese spurge, of any hardy interesting strains of the evergreen English ivy that you can find and of the many varieties of the creeping types of wintercreeper (Euonymus) used for ground covers. As for me, i have added ground covers around my norfolk island pine and a beautiful landscape was created.
Half the fun is to tuck in a few cuttings of this and that and the other thing just to see if it works. Soak the cuttings well after you put them in, being careful not to let them dry out from the time you take them off the plant until you get them into the cold frame.
Tack a piece of muslin on the inside of your cold frame sash to shade them and then fasten the sash on so it won’t blow off. After things freeze up, cover the cuttings – after thoroughly watering them – with a piece of gunny sack and fill in the top of the frame with leaves. The gunny sack is merely to make it easy to lift them out in the spring. Don’t expect any of them to be rooted before May and some like the boxwood may not root until late summer. I will tell you later what to do with them after they root. But the big thing is that they do not dry out anytime between now and when they are rooted and taken out of the frame. This is just one more use of a cold frame.
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