"Franz Heymann" wrote in message ...
"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.

I was always put off trying it because I feared the anti-fungal agents
in the wallpaper paste might kill or weaken the roots, and because of
what Kay mentioned: surely this is just an extension of rooting in
water, with the usual attendant difficulties of transfer. You may get
some failures with the usual compost-sand mixture, but at least the
successful ones are easy to plant on. I certainly wouldn't even
consider old-fashioned flour-and-water paste, as that would be covered
with moulds in no time. You could make an agar gel out of Irish
(Carragheen) moss, but I couldn't be bothered.

I can't make up my mind about rooting hormones: there certainly are
some cuttings where they are said to do more harm than good, and with
others there doesn't seem to be much point. They do lose their
effectiveness in storage.

The fear (unbacked by any evidence at all) of anti-fungal ingredients
is also what put me off using wallpaper paste as an experimental fluid
sowing medium. We don't really need these aids anyhow.

Mike.