Repotting the fig cuttings
Remember my willow
rooting hormone experiment? The three fig
cuttings above were the control and the fig to the right is one of
the cuttings treated with the willow hormone. An unscientific
observer would probably say: "Clearly the willow rooting hormone did a
great job!" But let me throw a bit of data at you:
Celeste
Fig:
- Willow: 1 awesomely-rooted cutting (shown to the right), 1 well-rooted cutting, and 1 cutting not rooted at all.
- Control: All three cuttings have small roots (photo above).
Dwarf
Fig:
- Willow: 1 cutting with a small root and three unrooted (photo
below).
- Control: 2 cuttings with small roots and one unrooted.
Black
Mission Fig:
I haven't dug into this
pot yet.
After looking at the
data, my conclusions are:
- Celeste Figs are easier to root than Dwarf Figs.
- The willow rooting hormone may do nothing, or it might impact
different varieties in different ways. It seems worth trying the
willow rooting hormone again with Celeste, but maybe not with the Dwarf.
All of this geekery aside,
the reason I was delving around in my fig pots is that I noticed the
plants with the biggest leaves wilted a bit when I placed them in full
sun this week. Now that I see how few roots most of the cuttings
have, I understand why.
I had originally planned
to transplant these cuttings into a nursery bed in the garden for the
summer, but I opted, instead, to pot them up into individual pots large
enough for a full summer's root growth. That way, I can keep the
cuttings in partial shade on the edge of the porch until they've got
their feet under them a little more and are ready to go in the ground
in permanent locations this fall. Plus, now I can start rehoming
the extras --- the three figs shown here have already moved to our
movie-star neighbor's high-class accommodations.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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