"Dan L." wrote in message
Janet Baraclough wrote:
from "Dan L." contains these words:

For winter reading I just got this book. A very interesting book! So
Far!
"Creative Propagation 2ed by Peter Thompson" ISBN-10: 0881926817
This book is has my brown thumb getting a little sore. This book is
packed with information and is going to take me a while to absorb.

Expanding my garden horizon here. Learning to make new plants from
cuttings. I want lots of shrubs - cheap, time is not important. This
book has my brain cooking (bad). It talks about these Plant Cloning
Machines. I am hard pressed to find any negative information about
these
machines. Other machines are in the hundreds of dollars. I could buy
five "Daisy 8" machines over the "Power Cloner 45" or the "EZ Clone
Machine - 30". Are they worth getting?

I wouldn't bother. Many garden shrubs will root perfectly well if you
pull off a twig and stick it in the ground.

Slightly more demanding ones, will root perfectly well if you pull off
a twig and stick it in a small pot of compost.
A book will show you which bit of twig and tell you when. Do a dozen
cuttings of the same thing and probably at least one will grow. Or all
12.
It's so EASY, gardeners invariably end up with far more plants than
they can use and give them away or swap them.

Janet

See I am not home all the time.

We all lead busy lives and it'd be a very rare person (even a very
interested gardener) who is at home all the time. I agree with Janet - one
of these things is not necessary.

Do these cuttings need misting several times per day?
Will a heated frame with sand work just as well or is it over the top?

Depending on local conditions, a heated frame might help but I've never used
one. What I think is far more important is the right conditions for your
cuttings to take. By that I mean a sheltered area in the garden where they
won't freeze of bake. You can keep the moisture up to cuttings by putting a
cut down PET bottle over them or a plastic bag over the whole pot with 20 or
more cuttings in it.

These things are babies and if you can't raise babies the old fashioned way
then a state of the art pricey one won't be any better than the old
fashioned and cheap way and it sounds like you havent' raised cuttings yet
by any method so try the old way first - it may save you tiem and money in
the long run.

I have 12 acres to play with.

:-(( You have my sympathies as that is too big to have for a garden and too
small to run animals.