"Jane Ransom" wrote in message
...
In article , Franz Heymann notfranz.
writes

Why has the concept disappeared from the scene?

Possibly because people realised that, to root cuttings, you don't need
gel or rooting hormones or anything else. All you need to do is do it at
the right time in plain ordinary soil - well compost and sand if you
want to be really finickity!!!!!!

Many years ago I did a trial run, rooting Lithospermum cuttings in a gel,
cutting compost, sharp sand and garden soil. The samples were not large
enough to make a quantitative comparison, but for what it is worth, the gel
came out best and the garden soil was worst. What I found most attractive
about the gel was that the cuttings needed no attention at all other than
looking to see if they had rooted. Moreover, this inspection could be done
without disturbing the cuttings in any way.

It occurred to me that one ought to try and replace the commercial gel with
a thick wallpaper paste, made up with water plus a few drops of Benlate
sterilising agent and a drop or two of liquid rooting hormone. Somehow,
there were always something else to do, and this experiment was never done.
Perhaps one of our readers is sufficiently experimentally minded to give it
a try.

Franz