Saturday, August 25, 2012

Transplanted my Basil Plants Today

For the first time ever, I rooted Basil cuttings. My interest in rooting basil was peaked after I stumbled upon some online drama. Apparently, some guy claimed that his cutting rooted in one day. I had to find out for myself if that was possible.

This is what my basil looked like
 after a couple weeks
The rooting process is fairly simple.

1. cut off some fresh basil stems from your plant
2. put them in a cup of water
3. change the water once a week

i used two clear, empty jars of baby food to root my basil. After about two and one half weeks my cuttings finally started to root. This morning I planted them in nice, warm soil with the mother plant. This got me to thinking, how many plants are propagated by rooting, using this same process?



There are many YouTube Videos that explain how to root basil. But, is there any comprehensive video discussing the concept of Plant Rooting?

One of my favorite V-loggers of all time is Ray a.k.a Praxxus. Click HERE to a link to his channel.Click HERE for a link to his Facebook Page.

I have been subscribed to Ray for a couple of years now. He was the first person to teach me how to make compost tea, and many, many, many other garden related activities. While living in Mexico I exchanged a few e-mails with him. Since then, his subscriber base has shot up to over 18,000 so I do not think he has time for little ole me anymore. I would recommend any of my viewers on this blog, if you are into gardening, subscribe to his channel. He is knowledgeable, replies to comments, interacts with people and is a genuine nice guy. 

Ray, if you are reading this blog, I would like to know if you would ever be willing to make a video detailing  garden vegetables that can be propagated by rooting, and contrasting it with garden vegetables that should only be grown from seed? I am interested in finding something that discusses the basic concept of Vegetable Plant Rooting. What are the advantages and disadvantages of both?

Please go to the Amazon Store Below. It contains my personal selection of gardening books. Thanks for visiting!


2 comments:

  1. You can grow just about any plant from a cutting. The main motivation for doing this in my mind is to clone the mother plant. The cutting you take will be an exact genetic replica of the plant it came from. So say, for example, you have a tomato plant that was just amazing. It survived horrible conditions, and still grew the most amazing tomatoes you've ever had. Of course you would want to save plenty of seed from this plant; but those seeds will only produce offspring. They will carry many traits of the original plant, but still not quite be the same. Your cutting/clone will, quite literally, be the same plant. It should perform EXACTLY the same as the mother plant had. You can, in theory, keep this cloning process going indefinitely. If you dig around a little bit, you'll fine tales of plants that have been continuously cloned over many many generations, purportedly coming from an original mother from tens, or even hundreds of years ago. Very neat stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Another thought about cloning; it's possible to get a plant into it's productive stage much faster via cloning, so you could possibly use the technique to jumpstart your growing ventures.

    ReplyDelete