 Okay, tonight, let's wrap up by talking about house plants, and house plants are very popular today. Here to show us how to propagate house plants is Dr. Esther McGinnis. Esther is an extension horticulturist. She's the director of the NDSU Extension Master Gardener program, and she's an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences. Esther and her graduate students, they conduct research on pollinator attraction, rain garden plants, high tonal production, and controlling of spotted wing drosophila. Esther, welcome to the forums. Thank you, Tom, for inviting me. Well, I'm going to start off talking about plant parenting, and that's because we have a lot of new plant parents. That's because house plants have exploded in popularity. So think about all the millennials out there, they're going out and accumulating a lot of different house plants, and in 2016, they purchased a third of all house plants in the United States. I'm sure by 2019, that number was a lot greater, but in addition, house plants are popular because interior designers are incorporating them into households, but also there's the new field of therapeutic horticulture where we're studying the benefits of house plants. They affect our health, they make us feel more focused at work, we're calmer, and they can even help us lower our blood pressure. So tonight, we're going to talk about propagation. So that's just a big word for saying we're going to make more plants. So in essence, we're going to make plant babies, and there are lots of reasons for doing this. You may have an overgrown plant, like my snake plant here, that needs a little bit of TLC. In this situation, you could certainly divide the plant, so you could actually make more of them. You may want to share plants with your friends and families, and what if you have an heirloom plant, like a plant that's been in your family for 50 years, you may want to propagate it so your sons and daughters can have a piece of that plant too. Now, we're going to talk about vegetative propagation. What this means is that you take a piece of the plant and you can regenerate an entire plant from that piece. So in essence, what you're doing is cloning. So did you know that you were cloning when you were dividing a plant or taking cuttings? So in essence, you're a mad scientist. Now there are all different ways of propagating plants. We're going to focus on five different ways tonight. We're going to talk about division, tip cuttings, leaf cuttings, cane cuttings, and air layering. First, we're going to start with division. And here's my poor Calathea plant. It was overgrown. It was really root balance. You can see that it's just a big mass of roots. So something needed to be done to this plant. So I decided to divide it. Now I could have divided it into many pieces. In this case, I decided I wanted to have two plants. So in essence, I decided to cut it in half. Now it's good to try and find a good place to do this. Now I don't know if you can see my cursor here. Maybe I'll try and get a pointer going here. What you can see is right where the arrow is, there's kind of a natural division between two shoots. So you want to try and find a natural spot and try and keep one or two of those shoots for your new plant. Now here I used a Hori Hori knife, but you can certainly use like an old kitchen knife too that's serrated. And what you would do is you would just slice right through that root system and in between those shoots as best you can. Now if the plant isn't as root bound, you might be able to tear the two halves apart, but it really just depends on the nature of the plant. Now what I did is I took those two halves and then I potted them each into its own pot using some new potting soil. Now I made sure to maintain the same level of the plant. I didn't pile a bunch of potting soil on top of the existing soil line because I didn't want to smother it. But after nine months, you can see this plant has filled out the entire pot again. But I have to admit, keletheus are my new obsession. I'm trying to collect more species of them, but you can see that the leaves are just so attractive. Now there are lots of different plants that you can divide in this manner by just taking a clean knife and then slicing out shoots. Now I'm not going to cover each one of the species here, but I wanted you to have a reference. You can certainly download my PDF handout and then you have that as a reference. I just wanted to show you an example of a plant that you could easily divide. So this is my Chinese evergreen aglonema. And here you can see we've got two discreet shoots. So that would be very easy to divide. Now it's not overtaking the pot or anything, but you can see that there are two discreet shoots to work with there. Now division is not going to work with a single trunk tree like we have in this picture. So we'll talk about other forms of taking cuttings and other forms of layering. First we're going to talk about tip cuttings. Now with tip cuttings what you can do is actually just take the top of the plant. And that's usually the youngest part of the plant and a little bit more amenable to developing a root system. So with a tip cutting you'd want to select a shoot and then maybe take about four to six inches of length. And what you would do is you would want to try and make the cut below a node. A node is where the leaves come together. And let's see if I can, if you can see my pointer here, but the node is right here where the leaves come together. You would want to make the cut below the node. You don't want to leave a huge stub because that stub would rot in the potting mix. But what you would do is you'd make a cut just below the node, maybe add a little bit of an angle, and you want to use a sterile knife, razor, or pruners. You don't want to introduce any bacteria or fungi into this wound because that could certainly lead to problems. And then of course remove the bottom set of leaves. And the reason you would do this is when you're sticking the cutting into your media, that bottom set of leaves would be submerged and it would rot in your mix. With your cutting to facilitate the development of roots, you know, you can certainly use a rooting hormone. Now this can be, it could be a powder or it could be a liquid. I prefer the powder formulation because I can see how much I'm putting on. What I typically do is I pour a little bit of the rooting powder into a Dixie cup and then I slip the cutting, the end of the cutting into that and then I shake off any excess. You don't want to have too much on the end of the cutting because it can in fact burn off the new roots. Now what the rooting powder is, is it's a plant hormone called oxen. And oxen is responsible for cell division. So what it does in this situation is it helps that cutting first develop callus tissue. And I would think of the callus tissue as being similar to like stem cells. And then it differentiates into root tissue and develops roots. Now once you've done that, you know, you're going to want to slip your cutting into a container filled with media. Now the different media that you can use, there's quite a few different things, but you want one that is well aerated because you don't want the bottom of your cutting to rot. So you can use perlite. So perlite is on the left and that's essentially a heated volcanic material and you see a lot of that in different potting media, but you can use straight perlite or you can use straight vermiculite. And vermiculite is essentially compressed silica. So those are two perfectly good media for cutting. You can use sand and that's what we used when I was in grad school, but you would want to sterilize the sand and use so by, you know, putting it into a pan in your oven and raising the temperature to 185 degrees and keeping it at that temperature for half hour because you want to make sure that your media is sterile. If you don't want to do that, there are other methods you can mix potting soil with extra perlite or vermiculite. Or you can use succulent media, succulent or cacti media, very well drained, has a lot of bark in it, but whatever you do, don't use garden soil and don't use compost. Those really just don't work well for rooting, all right. So next you would want to stick your cutting into your media that's well aerated. Now here you can mist your media or you can moisten your media, it's up to you, but the important thing is after you have stuck your cutting you're going to want to cover it in a clear plastic bag, you're trying to simulate a greenhouse situation. So if you can imagine, you've got this cutting and it doesn't have roots. So there's a danger that it's going to dry out. So what you want to do is you want to create that greenhouse situation with a clear plastic bag to raise humidity around, to raise the humidity around the plant. And then you would take your plant and you would place it where it could get some indirect light. You don't want direct sunlight hitting it, but you want indirect light so that the leaf can still continue to photosynthesize. There are lots of plants that you can propagate using terminal cuttings. So I've got a list here and so there's just a very long list of them. So this is really good method for a lot of different species, but just a special note about succulents. Now I'm not an expert on succulents, but the one thing I know is that if you are propagating a succulent from a terminal cutting, you have to allow the cut end to callus for a day or two. So allow it to dry out and that's very important because otherwise it'll rot once you stick it into the media. So allow the succulent to dry out for a couple days and then stick it in the media. So moving on to leaf cuttings. Now with leaf cuttings, we're going to focus on African violet and on snake plant. And with these two, since we're using leaves, I just need you to understand that this is a longer process. Now when it comes to doing tip or terminal cuttings, that can take probably six, eight weeks. With African violet cuttings and snake plant, we're looking at two to four months. So it's a longer period of time. That's because we're not working with any nodes or bud tissue. Now with African violets, you want to start off with a healthy leaf and one that is full-sized or mature, but you don't want an old leaf. The old leaf has trouble developing roots. Now you would harvest the cutting and you would make sure that it had a petio that was like an inch to an inch and a half. And with the petio, that's just an appendage on the leaf. You would make a little bit of an angled cut at the end and then you don't have to use rooting hormone. African violets do readily propagate. Now with your African violet cutting, you would insert your stem to about the one-inch level. You don't want to go deeper than that because the new plantlet is going to form at the end of that petio. And if you're sticking it too deep, that plantlet will not be able, it doesn't have the energy to emerge from the potting soil. All right, so stick your cutting at a 45 degree angle and you want to make sure that the leaf can in fact intercept some sunlight and be able to photosynthesize. And then once again, create that greenhouse condition by covering it with a clear plastic bag and placing it in indirect light. And then it'll take about six to eight weeks for a new plantlet to grow from the petio, but it may take even longer than that. It is kind of a longer type of procedure. Now snake plant, I love the common name for it, it's mother-in-law's tongue. Now with snake plant, you can propagate it by leaf cutting or by division. Now if you have a plant that is variegated, meaning that it has a little bit of variegated color on the margins, you can see that it's a little yellow or creamier. You want to divide it. You don't want to propagate it by leaf cutting. The leaf cutting will not be true to the original coloration. However, if you're not concerned about the variegation or you want an all green plant, you can certainly proceed with taking a cutting, but make sure that when you take your cutting that you keep the leaf orientation upright. The leaf knows the top of the leaf versus the bottom of the leaf. If you were to mix it up, it would not grow. So you can make many cuttings from one of those long blades, one of those long leaves, but make sure that you take about three to four inches and then you can certainly stick it in rooting media, stick it in your media and then enclose it in a clear plastic bag and have new shoots in two months. All right, moving on to cane cuttings. Cane cuttings are essentially taking pieces of the stem and it works really well for Chinese evergreen, dumb cane, and corn plant. You would take a three to four inch segment and then maybe you look for the buds. I've circled the buds in this photo and you can see these are just latent buds and that's where the new shoots would come from. So take a three to four inch segment and then you can bury it, you know, half ways, maybe even three quarters on its side, but making sure that you've got some buds facing up and then the buds will form new shoots. Now this process would probably take about two to three months, so you need to be patient with this process. And then finally, air layering. So I mentioned at the beginning that you can't divide, you know, a single trunk tree. That's where air layering comes into effect. Now this happens to be my fiddle leaf fig. I let it get tall and gangly here because I wanted to do this demonstration for you. So with my fiddle leaf fig, what you need to do is you essentially wound it to try and create roots on the stem. And then after it has produced enough roots you can sever that portion of the stem and then pot it up. Now how you would do this is you would move the leaves and the bud scales so you're giving yourself a little bit of space to work. So you can see that I've removed the leaves here. And then I have created a wound. And the way I've created the wound is that I have, I have taken a sterile razor and I've essentially girdled the trunk. So I've gone all the way around. And then I made a second cut about an inch, inch and a half further down. So once again I girdled it. And then in between those two cuts I peeled away, you know, the bark. Now if the bark isn't coming off the way you want it to, you can certainly scrape it off with the razor. That sometimes helps. You want to essentially get the cambion off of this trunk and then get down to the actual woody part of the plant. So you're wounding it. You're trying to create a response where it creates new roots. The help in this process, you know, we can use a little bit of root hormone. So here I've added the root powder and I've painted it on with a Q-tip to facilitate the process. The next thing is you want to keep that area moist until the roots emerge. Now typically you would use sphagnum moss, but I didn't have sphagnum moss in my house. So I had to use the next best thing. I happen to have ranger moss that I typically use in my terrarium. So that's why you're seeing that green moss there. But with this I wetted down the moss. I packed it around the wounded area and then I used plastic wrap to secure that and to maintain the moisture and then use twist ties to tie it all together. So air layering can be done with a number of different plants. So like your fiddly figs, rubber plants, crotins, weeping fig, dumb cane, and hibiscus are some common ones. But you can also do this to plants that you grow outdoors. All right, so I'll entertain some questions now. Okay, we invite your questions. Esther, do you have access to that chat box? Let's see. Do you want me to say that? Do you remember the good old days of Blackboard Collab? All right, I'm trying to see if I can get to the chat box here. The bottom right-hand corner. All right, so I'm taking a look here. Okay, we'll just see if there's any questions. Does anybody have any questions about propagating house plants? Wow, I've bored you all to death here. No, you covered it all completely, but no. Here we got a question from Amy about how do you propagate an umbrella plant, the Sheffelera? Okay, with the umbrella plant. I mean, you definitely could do a tip cutting. That works quite nicely, but if you've got some woody tissue on your umbrella plant, you can certainly do the air layering. Maybe you want to try an experiment, see what works for you. But definitely Sheffelera is fairly easy to propagate. Have you ever done ginger? No, I have not done ginger. Now here in North Dakota, I haven't had a whole lot of access to ginger, so I really would not be able to answer that question. Okay, if anybody has any questions that can open up their chat box, it's on the lower right-hand corner, the purple tab, and just click that, you type in your question, it will be happy to answer it for you. Okay, now we've got a bunch of questions coming. How about orchids? Have you ever propagated an orchid? Now with orchids, really the best way is sometimes you can divide them if they've grown like another shoot. Now there are some people that try and start orchids from seed, and that's a very difficult way to do it because the seed requires mycorrhizae in order to work. So orchids aren't necessarily the easiest to propagate. There's a person who has experience in propagation by taking a cutting and putting it in water to grow roots. Is that okay? Yes, yes, I didn't cover water rooting, but they're definitely a number of species that will grow very well. The one thing to be careful about is not to let it grow too long in the water. We find that the root system really would not adapt well to a soil environment if you've grown it for too long in water. So it's okay to start your plant's root system by putting it in water, but make sure that after the roots are a decent size that you quickly transplant it into a soil-based media. All right, how about this person has a very happy holla plant that's overgrown at space. Do you have any tips on what propagation method would work best for a holla? I have to admit I haven't actually worked with hollas a whole lot, so I'm trying to think here. That would be one of the more vining ones, so maybe more of a tip cutting would work on one of the vines that's extending over. If we're going to use air layering, can we use the dried peat moss that's used as fill by the flower shops and then wet it? I would look for a sphagnum peat, not like the peat moss that's broken down into a potting mix. I would look for the long strands, so you would find this in a smaller bag, but yes, you would find them at flower shops, and that would work a lot better than I think the reindeer moss. Okay, there's a question about snake plant. Is there a way to encourage new sprouts and new growth from the soil or roots to help make dividing it a possibility? I have to admit that I think snake plants grow quite quickly, so you'll find that if you keep your snake plant for any length of time, they grow quick enough that you'll have offshoots coming out, and then you'll be able to work with that, so I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to do anything, just give it a little bit of time, and when it's happy, it'll just start producing a lot of new growth. The one thing is not to overwater your snake plant. Think of it as being more of a succulent, so if your snake plant is unhappy, maybe look at your watering schedule and try and maybe withhold water a little bit more like during the winter. Have you ever propagated rosemary before? Rosemary. I have not actually... I guess I've grown it, but I haven't propagated it, but it really shouldn't be very difficult to work with. I think you could use a lot of the methods that we covered here tonight. Could you use a seed starter mix for the media in your tip cuttings? No, I wouldn't recommend a seed starter mix, because a seed starter mix tends to be very fine and it tends to hold a fair amount of water, so you want something that's going to be a little bit more well-drained. And let's see here, how about... There's some general house plant care questions here. Okay, what's the best? This person has a basement office and no windows. What's the best house plant for that? Okay, so you've got no windows. No windows. Well, if you have like a fluorescent light in your office, we find that golden pothos works very well in an office setting where you don't have windows, but there's also the possibility of purchasing a plant light. So we're seeing that there are a lot of new plant lights on the market. So you definitely can work with it. If you're not going to buy a plant light and you've got fluorescent ceiling light, I would definitely say golden pothos, but if you want something that requires more light, then I would say buy a plant light. How about a Chinese evergreen? You've grown that. Does that work in more low light conditions? It does. It does. So Chinese evergreen, in fact, if you put Chinese evergreen too close to the window, it can get sunscaled. I've actually burned leaves by having them too close to the window. So that happens to be one that does really well in a shady or type of environment or low light situation. I personally prefer a silk plant under those conditions. They're very low maintenance. That's what I have. It never dies. You know, we call that the plasticaceae family, Tom. I'm a big fan of that. How about this person has an African violet that stopped blooming. Is it safe to propagate it? You know, give it a shot. I mean, you really have nothing to lose at that point. You know, so feel free to experiment. I think everybody takes this so seriously, but when you're propagating, you're taking small portions of the plant and still leaving plenty of it. So take the time to experiment and have a little bit of fun. Okay. How about this person has a very upright chephalera. How would you get that plant to branch out a bit? What I would do is I would decapitate it. No, I'm serious. I'm serious. You can cut some of these back to a bud. You want to make sure that you're cutting it back to a bud or to a node and you can get it to branch. Now, if you go back to my fiddle leaf, I don't know if I can get back to my fiddle leaf fig. Yep. Come on. A bit slowing down here. So going back to my fiddle leaf fig, now I want that to branch, but I let it go just for the sake of having a little fun with air layering. But what I could do is I could certainly decapitate it and then what's going to happen is that the plant, there's oxen, which is a plant hormone that's produced in the plant. It will actually spur the development of branching in the plant. Yes, okay. I thought it was called pinching, not decapitation. Well, okay. I'm a little dramatic, huh? It's pretty aggressive there. Okay, how about this person? Kirsten has a snake plant. She had it for 40 years until a house said her over watered it. There's one piece left that's in water growing roots. What kind of soil should she put it in? I would choose more of a succulent based media. So we're seeing a lot of these on the market. You're going to find that it drains better than a traditional potting mix. And that may help prevent over watering of snake plants. So try the succulents and see how you like that. I think you may find it's harder to overwater. Back to the decapitation. How low would you decapitate that shuffle era? It's up to you how you want it to look aesthetically. So I think what you want to do is, you know, try and decide where you want it to branch, and then you would make the cut, you know, at that leaf. No. Okay. So you want to do it at a node though, so that you have buds that break. Do you know a website to help people identify their house plants? They got a mystery plant. You know, I can't think of a website right now. This is a good time to plug Ask an Expert. Now here at NDSU we have Ask an Expert, and your questions would go to various extension agents, specialists, and master gardeners around the state. What you can do is take a photo of your plant and upload it to Ask an Expert. Right. And if that's a great suggestion, if the expert doesn't know there's a net worth, they can send that photo around with, so we can tap the knowledge of lots of NDSU extension people. Okay. We have a question about a shamrock plant, like an oxalis, I think. They come in green and purple. And they're wondering why the green plant will fail when it gets to what it has decided that it has been overwatered. Why is a green plant seems to be less vigorous in the purple plant, less tolerant of watering? That's interesting. Now sometimes, you know, the purple indicates there's anthocyanin, and anthocyanin is a pigment. That is in various plants. We do know that anthocyanin can help a plant with stress. So I'm just guessing here. I don't know for sure what's happening between the green and the purple shamrock plant, but there's a potential that the anthocyanin pigment is helping the plant handle stress better than the green one. Yeah, I think this is anecdotal. You know, one purple and one green plant. I don't, I would be, I'd be, I don't know. I've never heard that before. As far as purple plants are more water tolerant, but who knows? We can all make our guesses, right? Yes, yes. We need the scientific process here. We need to get more plants out there and replicate it. Okay, Esther, how about a split leaf philodendron? How are we going to propagate that? It's all stringy and out of control. I think what you need to do is prune it. You can certainly prune a split leaf philodendron and get it under control. That's something we forget about, is that we don't always have to propagate it, but we can certainly prune it to get it back to a point where it looks more manageable. I was doing that the other day with my pepperomia, which was getting out of hand. So don't forget that you can prune an indoor plant just like an outdoor shrub. Yes, or decapitated, that works too, right? How about, Esther, can you give a suggestion about fertilizing house plants? Okay, when I fertilize, I should say that it's kind of a seasonal thing. I think a lot of people over fertilize their house plants. To tell you the truth, I stop fertilizing over the winter because a lot of our plants, some of them may go dormant, others are just not growing a whole lot during the winter. So what I tell people is cut back, maybe even stop fertilizing during the winter, and then when the plants start growing a little bit more in the spring, then that's a better time to start fertilizing. But it's better to use smaller amounts rather than larger amounts because when we use too much fertilizer, there's a potential for burning the plant. Okay, I think we just have some good conversation going about experiences with hoyas, how stem cuttings work with that. And it was a very pot-bound hoya, and they just did a couple pairs of leaves and stuck a vine in the soil, and it worked. So there's a lot of experience here in the audience. Okay, I think that's it for everybody. Thank you, Esther. Great talk, really appreciated it. There's a lot of thank yous on the chat box for you. Well, that's wonderful, and thank you for having me, and I hope you all have a great night.