Fight garden inflation with your own cuttings

Since 2019 the cost of gardening has far outpaced official measures of inflation. Newcomers during the lockdowns mostly shopped online. They paid ample prices for what had previously been on offer at everyday nurseries for half as much. Fuel prices then spiked and so did the price of compost and fertiliser. Up went the figures on labels at every level of the trade. I bet they will be as sticky as a horde of aphids, but if they bring newcomers into the nursery trade and sustain its veterans, so much the better for gardeners in the long run.

Shoppers online may not yet realise that propagation is half the fun of gardening. It is now an economic imperative. At last week’s Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, takeaway lavenders in one-litre pots were offered to me for £9.99 each. It is so easy to take cuttings of lavenders next month, root them, pot them on and have dozens ready to plant out in late autumn for minimal cost and maximum satisfaction.

For the Hampton Court show, Carol Klein devised a garden based round different habitats, wet, dry and so forth, and filled them with plants which owners can easily propagate. On TV she has been a constant champion of propagation. Her 2010 book, Grow Your Own Garden, is my first recommendation for gardeners who want to propagate, not shop. Last week the RHS honoured her as an Iconic Horticultural Hero for 2023.

Here are some guidelines on cuttings which have served me well. A first essential is to devise a good soil for the job. It involves shopping, but a bag of each of the ingredients goes a long way. To judge from a recent film, Master Gardener, there is much confusion about what types of soil really are.

Starry Quintessa Swindell, playing young Maya, comes to work in the big garden of her great aunt, played with chilling hauteur by superstar Sigourney Weaver, herself a major supporter of gardens and gardening in real life. Her head gardener is played by Joel Edgerton, who obliges Maya to attend the lessons on horticulture which he gives to staff in the potting space. He orders them to take a handful of soil and smell it and to remember this equation: “Soil plus perlite equals loam.” Obediently, they write it down.

Quintessa is welcome to come and sniff handfuls of the soil in my garden, but my lesson will be different. Soil plus perlite does not make loam: it makes a good medium for rooting cuttings. The film’s credits honour Sara Shields, PhD as “horticultural consultant”. Did her doctorate not extend to loam, the soil that comes off slices of turf when they are stacked with the grassy side down, or did her advice on it go into the directorial sands? I do not think it is meant as a cryptic sign that there is a dark hinterland to the head gardener, who soon reveals it, not just by bedding his classy employer at her command.

For cuttings, make a mix of two-thirds perlite with one-third of seed compost, a John Innes number one mix being a good one to buy. Perlite gives sharp drainage and is ideal for silver-leaved plants and half-hardy cuttings, which root quickly. For slower rooters, use vermiculite instead. Whichever you prefer, be sure to water the mix thoroughly before you plant into it. A major cause of failure is the postponement of watering until the cuttings are in place in the pots. Soak the mixture well in advance on a tray or shelf and leave it to drain for a few hours. I do so after breakfast, reckoning to take and plant the cuttings in late afternoon. The mix must be wet before you begin to plant in it.

Choose a healthy parent plant and use sharp scissors, not secateurs, to snip off strong sideshoots that have not flowered

I agree with Carol Klein that a clay pot is the ideal receptacle as it absorbs water and sustains cuttings set around its inner side. For easily rooted cuttings, old yoghurt pots, punctured at the bottom, will work well, as will the plastic strips in which your summer bedding plants were bought. When planted, the pots are best covered, one cheap option being a plastic bottle of water, lemonade or cola with its bottom knocked out. Over the years I have built up a store of plastic rectangular hats which fit over several pots or an entire seed box. I use the Stewart brand, available on Amazon.co.uk as Stewart propagator covers for £2.50 each.

Now for the actual cutting, a lesson Quintessa never receives on screen. The next fortnight is an ideal time to take cuttings off pinks, salvias, lavenders, penstemons, helianthemums and daisy-flowered marguerites. Choose a healthy parent plant and use sharp scissors, not secateurs, to snip off strong sideshoots that have not flowered. Take them just below a leaf bud or bulgy node or where they join the plant’s main stem. Then cut off the lower leaves so that you can fit a least a third of the stem into your damp compost mix. If the salvias or penstemons have long upper leaves, reduce them by half, using scissors.

I never bother to dip easy rooters into powdery rooting hormone, which is one more expense for no reason. Poke a hole of sufficient depth into the compost with a peg or bit of bamboo cane. Put in each cutting, preferably near the side of the container, and firm it in from the bottom up so that it will not pull out when tugged.

Cover the pot with a bottomless plastic bottle or plastic hat. Stand it away from direct sun. Do not lift off the cover for at least four days and then only to check if the compost needs watering. Most of the cuttings will root and begin to show new growth within three weeks. Never poke around to look for roots before it shows. When it does, take off the covering.

I lost most of my half-hardy salvias in February. Cuttings taken now from their replacements will save the cost of buying them yet again next summer.

Plant the cuttings as soon as you take them off their parent. Otherwise, have a clear plastic bag to hand so that you can slip them into it and knot it until you can plant them.

If your cuttings fail, here is an alternative I learnt at a presentation of the European Cities of Culture for 2023. At the Greek embassy in London, we heard about Elefsina, a hideous modern mess on the ground but once the birthplace of the great Athenian dramatist Aeschylus, and of Timișoara in Romania, linked to the dramatist Eugène Ionesco and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara.

In 1920, Tzara described how to make a Dada poem. Take a newspaper, cut out a bit of it, then cut individual words out of each line, jumble the cuttings up in a bag and pick them out one by one, writing each one down. He did not specify gardening columns but they can be given the Dada treatment too. I prefer cuttings to be living bits of plant, making sense as poetry in a pot.

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