Flower Gardening By Starting With Cuttings
If your home gardening efforts have been modest thus far, and you’d rather not just plunge straight into rose growing without easing in gently, you might get some experience in growing roses by starting with cuttings.
If you have a friend with some roses, perhaps they’d be willing to give you a few stems so you can try to start some in this way. Floribunda roses grow well from cuttings, as do miniatures, but others don’t have as much success.
You’ll have to pick your roses carefully, though, because not all types of roses grow well from cuttings. It’s likely some expert gardeners have managed to do it even with the difficult varieties, like hybrid teas.
But if you still don’t know much about flower gardening, or you’re not very experienced, then you will find varieties that simply will not grow by this method. Floribundas and many others that are actually garden roses do much better, and miniature roses are usually grown this way.
You should do the rose pruning in early spring, taking three or four six-inch stems (or for miniatures, three-inch stems). With these flower gardening tips you can cut them on a slight diagonal, in the morning before the stresses of the day.
In the past, people knew how to grow roses with cuttings protected by Mason jars, and the practice still works well. So once you have your cuttings, take off the bottom leaves, with just a few at the top, and dip the stems into a rooting powder.
Then set them either into your garden soil or into containers of potting soil. At this point, place a Mason jar over each stem and water now and then over the next few weeks.
How to grow roses from cuttings might vary slightly in different regions, depending on the climate. For example, in a warmer location you might just skip the Mason jar altogether and root your stems in the soil of your garden outside.
In a cooler climate, you might want all the help you can get, with an indoor container and Mason jar, or with a heating pad under the container. You can probably find gardening tips from a local rose society or the internet to help you decide on your exact procedure.
If you succeed at starting a new rose plant from a cutting, then this may encourage you to go farther, and get into rose growing in a serious way.
