How to: take cuttings of Sedum

I had a call the other day from a past student, wanting to know how to take cuttings of Sedum:  and this is one of the easiest plants from which to take cuttings, so here is the illustrated guide, and I hope that you will all have a go at this, for yourselves.

Firstly, take your chosen Sedum.... so what's a Sedum, before we start?

Sedums don't seem to have a good common name, I think that Stonecrop is the commonest, or possibly Ice Plant.

They range from tiny little alpine things, to great big knee-high free-standing clumps, and they are what is known as "succulents" which means, as you would suppose, that the stems and leaves are fleshy.

This makes them very drought-tolerant, hence their popularity with gardeners: the small ones are usually found in rockeries, the larger ones tend to fill out the borders.

 There are hundreds of cultivars, ranging from pale green foliage, through darker green, into purple (which is my particular favourite). The flowers are not massively showy, but are very attractive to bees and other pollinating insects, so most gardens will have a Sedum or two, somewhere.

To make some new plants, all you do is take a couple of stems: just cut them off at the base.

Generally, try to pick good solid, firm ones. It doesn't matter if they are flowering, because we are going to cut off the flowers: and the longer the better, because then you can get multiple cuttings from each stem.

First things first - prepare the pot. Here, I'm using what is called a half-pot: designed so that you don't need to use as much compost. As soon as the cuttings have rooted, they will be "potted on" into their own pots, so there's no point wasting a full-depth pot.

Take your compost/potting mix, half-fill the pot, firm it down gently with the back of your hand: then top it up, firm it again, top it up, firm it again.

I use the back of the hand, because you get a more even pressure. And the point of doing it in layers is to prevent that situation where it's all compressed on top, but soft underneath.

Having compressed the compost, take something like a pencil - you can get official "dibbers" for this task, but frankly, an old pencil works just as well - and push it down, vertically, into the compost, to make a hole.

If, when you withdraw the pencil, the hole immediately fills in, then your compost is too dry! Check out this post about how to get your compost to the correct texture....

Now pick up your piece of Sedum. 

Look at the way the leaves spring out, in pairs: the point from which they originate is called a "node". 

"I wondered, lonely as a cloud..." no, that's "an ode", not "a node". Do pay attention.

Your first cut is going to be just exactly below the bottom-most node.

Like that.

I have snipped off the piece of stem below the node. 

This is because nodes are growing points: they put out leaves, but when you bury them in compost, they put out roots instead. If you didn't trim off the piece of stem below the node, it wouldn't grow, it would simply rot, which might spoil your cutting.

Look at the placement of those leaves:

Then gently cut off the lowest pair, and the pair above.

With a fleshy plant like Sedum, you might well be able to pinch off the leaves with your thumbnail: but if in doubt, use secateurs or gardening scissors (which are exactly the same as kitchen scissors, or any other type of scissor, but which have been relegated to the garden) and snip them off, as close to the stem as you can reasonably manage.

I have taken pains to keep my hand in exactly the same position, to help you see what I am doing.

(Memo to self: must get that Go-pro so that I can do videos...)

Now look at the pair of leaves just above where I am holding it. 

Those are going to be the "top" leaves, which we retain:

So now you snip off the stem immediately above that top pair of leaves.

This gives us our complete cutting: one pair of leaves remains, for photosynthesising, all the others have been removed because they are going to be under soil level, and if we left them on the stem, they would rot. 

Which would be bad.

Take the finished cutting, and pop it into the hole which you made in the compost.

You can, if you wish, dip the base of the cutting into hormone rooting powder before inserting it into the soil.

Personally, I've given up bothering, as cuttings seem to root just as well without it: and if you put too much rooting powder onto a cutting, it can cause the cutting to die, because the hormones stimulate the cells into rapid growth - which is what you want, if you want it to root - but too much causes the base of the cutting to form a callus, where the cells have grown too fast. A callus is waterproof, so the cutting can't take up water any more, and therefore dies.

And how much rooting powder is "too much"?  No-one knows for certain, it's one of those things you get a feel for, when you take a lot of cuttings: it's called experience. So if you don't have much experience, it's probably better to do without the rooting powder. Trust your Sedums! They will root quite happily, all on their own.

Firm the compost down, around the base of the stem: you can (just) see that I use two fingers, one each side of the stem. 

This helps me to avoid knocking the cutting over sideways, as I am trying to get it firmed in place.

How firmly? Think of tucking up a small child in bed: firmly enough that they can't get their arms out, but not so firmly that they can't breathe.

Repeat these steps with the remainder of the Sedum stems, you should be able to get two or three cuttings from each length:

Position them around the edge of the pot, like this - left - and you should be able to get five or six cuttings into each pot.

Why put them round the edges? I'm still not sure exactly why, some books say that it helps them to root faster: certainly, when it comes time to pot on your rooted cuttings, it is easier to get them apart when they are all spaced out round the edges of the pot.

Having finished with the cuttings, water them gently, trying not to splash them: and if, by any chance, any of the cuttings falls over sideways (which means that you didn't follow the instructions about pre-wetting your compost), wait until the water has drained through, then gently firm them in again, making sure that each one is upright and not touching any of the others.

Now put the pot outside somewhere, and check it every day, to see if it needs watering. Lift the pot up, to test the weight: or dab a dry finger onto the surface, and look to see if tiny crumbs of soil/compost are sticking to your finger. If they are, all is well. If your finger comes up perfectly clean, then the compost needs watering.

After a couple of weeks, you won't need to check every single day, a couple of times a week will probably be enough, but it's good to get in the habit of checking your cuttings daily, at first.

Now, you just leave them to get on with it for a couple of months!!

 

 

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