Plant Propagation

Plant propagation is an interesting and rewarding pursuit, allowing you to create large numbers of selected plants cheaply or genetically select plants best adapted to your site to ensure future resiliency.Becoming more familiar with propagating techniques is a great way to cheaply expand your plant stick. This is particularly helpful when wanting to establish large food forest plantings - which would have high costs if you brought all the plants.

Note: if you have propagated many fruit trees from seed their characteristics may differ markedly form the parent and will inevitably produce fruit with very different flavour and trees with different characteristics. This depends upon the extent to which the tree you collected seeds from is different from its wild type form. Edible apples, for example, a very different from the small tart fruit wild apple trees produce - and an apple tree grown form seed will also demonstrate traits more similar to the wild type form.

Other trees are commercially grown on dwarf rootstock (avocado, apple, pear) and if they are grown form seed they will also result in very large trees which would not be suited to a small garden. Care must therefore be taken to understand the best propagation method for the species you desire to produce.

In this module we explore some of the wide variety of propagation techniques and reflect upon the situations in which each is applied most usefully.