wrote:
Alright, faced with lack of seeds and even when I have say thirty
seeds of rock-elm, only 1 or 2 manages to
sprout. So faced with this circumstance, I must try root-cuttings and
grafting. Honestly, I hate grafting
because I always feel the tree is weak and will revert to its
rootstock. So many of the grafted trees of
mine, with the slightest of stress, have died off, with the rootstock
eventually coming to life. So you
spend all that time and energy on a graft and eventually the rootstock
growing.

So today I prepared a mist-room with a flat to hold 30 cuttings. I
bathed them in a hormone acid
solution and put them in a peat moss bed.

I am going to try another batch of 30 in a sand bed.

I understand elm is difficult to root cuttings and will be happy if 1
or 2 makes it.

My greatest problem is the consistency of the mist spray, for the air
can be very dry here.

Also, the other problem of too moist of a surroundings and the fungus
and bacteria. So maybe the
sand bed would be better than the peat moss.

If 1 or 2 out of 30, or 2 or 4 out of 60 manage to form roots, I would
consider it a success.

Unlike willow, elm is difficult.


There are 5 of the Ulmus thomasii with new growth of leaf buds coming
out. So I am gleeful
and excited. The above post was 16 July and today is 26 July, so in
ten days was the time
it took to show new buds of growth. Now I expect there to be roots on
those, but maybe mistaken.
I am not going to jiggle them to find out, but simply let them grow
more.

I like root-cuttings more than grafting because of the tendency of
grafts to revert to their rootstock,
so the time spent with grafts can be a considerable loss of time. But
sometimes a graft is about
the best for a given situation. So I still need to learn how to graft
proficiently, something I have
not done.

And apparently a stem of a certain diameter is a preferred cutting.
Perhaps it has something to
do with the amount of energy in the cambium layer. Smaller stem
diameter and not enough energy
to make roots.

And I want to report that on July 24, I made 50 cuttings of Laurel
Willow. I am not going to count them
or detail them because they are easy to generate roots. I expect a 90
percent success rate on willow
and did not even bother to use the acid-hormone treatment to promote
root growth. I think it was the acid
treatment that gave me the 5 elm successes. But it is still too early
to tell of the elm story, perhaps
I may end up with more than 5.

Next time I want to try sand as the propagation medium because I feel
the potting soil (Shultz in bag)
has a tendency to turn algal or fungal with all the moisture whereas
the sand alleviates that extra
growth. Another thing about sand is that it tends to keep the cuttings
firmer in place. Movement of
a cutting can easily kill it since its new roots are so very fragile.
Almost impossible to have success
where there are wind drafts.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies