"Mike Lyle" wrote in message
om...
"Franz Heymann" wrote in message
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"Jane Ransom" wrote in message
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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 assure you that it is easier to transplant the gel-grown cuttings safely
than it is to transplant compost-grown cuttings. I have elaborated on this
in another post to this thread.

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.

The agar would also be mould ridden if it did not contain a disinfecting (if
that is the word I want) agent. The commercial gel and a commercial
wallpaper paste like polycel both contain an anti-mould agent

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.

Thanks for that info. I have always wondered if I was squandering my
savings by religiously buying a new supply each season.

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.

I don't agree with that last sentiment. I have not done it yet, but I would
be surprised if it did not turn out to be more convenient and safer to prick
out seedlings germinated in a gel than all that rough handling involved in
the use of a seed compost..

Franz