On 17 Feb 2004 08:38:10 -0800, (Kevin) wrote:

hi there!

Writing from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I've sold my house and will be moving out this weekend. I want to take
some branches from fruit trees (apple, cherry, pear) and red roses
that are about 25 years old.

Is it possible to grow anything from these branches and how would I go
about it transporting them/cultivating them despite this cold weather.
We're in the middle of winter right now, but this week in particular
is going to be hovering ever closer to the + side.

I was thinking of doing some cuttings and then wrapping the cut ends
with soaked paper towels and putting them in a plastic bag. Then
transfer them to a pot with soil and cultivating them indoors (of
course).


Keep your cuttings cool and in a moist but not wet area.. like soak
them then wrap in wet newspapers and put them in a box and kept in a
cool, but not freezing location while you do some research.

Generally speaking, you don't start fruit trees from cuttings, at
least not from old wood.

However if your new location has some fruit trees of the proper
variety, you could try grafting buds or twigs onto the existing tree,
marking the resulting branch to know not to prune it off. If you get
them to "take" and grow" that will preserve them until you find a
proper rootstock onto which you could do bud grafting, which as others
have told you, most fruit trees are produced these days. There are
some which have grown from seeds, but that is not usual due to the
time involved. Also, some of our tree varieties resulted from a
"sport" on some tree where a branch or bud.. spontaneously "mutated"
in some way we find desirable, and as such, can only be vegetatively
reproduced..aka.. grafting.

There is The Grafter's Handbook you can look at to see how to line up
the cambium layers in your cutting, with the same layer in the host
plant, etc. There are many other books on the subject. Your local
library probably has *something* and book stores may have books you
and browse, particularly if you have a Borders or Barnes & Noble type
store where you can sit down and read the books.

You can start roses from cuttings, usually a stem that has bloomed,
that has at least 3 branches which have at least 5 leaves per branch,
snip off the blossom end so it won't try to make seed, try to include
some of the heel of the stem..where the cutting was connected to the
main stem, poke it down into a rooting medium.. I used dirt when
someone told me how it worked, and then took a mason jar, put water in
it and shook it up to wet the jar, then toss a couple handsful of dry
dirt in the jar, shake it, dump it. Some sticks to the inside of the
jar.. reducing the sun, like shade cloth would... and having put the
cutting in a bright but not overly sunny location I could just push
the jar into the dirt.. kept it watered and .. dang if it didn't root!
First and only time I tried it. There are better things to help now..
rooting hormones with fungicides in various strengths.

There are a bunch of propagation handbooks to help with starting
plants from cuttings, and they usually have charts saying which type
of cuttings and how to handle them for each type/age of cutting. I
was surprised by just how many trees *could* be started from cuttings,
but .. I didn't see too many fruit trees, but that's probably because
it's more efficient to graft them.

Good luck!!

Janice