Making Plants form Plants
Sometimes plants die. Yup, no matter how hard we try our best to keep the plants alive, some plants just don’t get that old. Therefore, it is very beneficial to make more plants from these plants. In other words, to propagate them. This week me and Joanna started making some cuttings from our purple basil, stevia and our sekukuni coleus (coleus venteri). This is how we did it:
Step One
First you have to find the right place to make a cutting from the ‘mother plant’. Since basil and stevia normally grow on one straight stem, we like to cut them quite regularly to give the plants a more bushy structure. There are a few things to pay attention to: 1) make sure there are enough knobs on your cuttings, this is the place where the leaves grow from the stem, 2) make sure your cutting is not too long. The longer your cutting is the more the plant has to focus on getting the water all the way across instead of on root formation (which we want). Did you cut of a stem that is a little bit to long? No worries, you can simple make two cuttings out of that stem.
Step Two
Remove the leaves from the cutting but leave a few leaves on the top since the plant needs this for photosynthesis and essentially to survive.
Step Three
Find the nob you want to grow your roots out of and cut right in the middle of it
Step Four
Dip your cutting in cutting powder and plant it in moist soil
That’s it and your ready to make plants form plants!
So do we just trow away the leaves that we took of our cuttings? Of course not. You can dry them, use them fresh as you would normally to when using the spices. From the sekukuni coleus we also made smudge sticks which we can use, after they have dried, to purify our homes with.
Written by Camil
