January Cultural Notes

January Cultural Notes

Get Ready for Next Year’s Cuttings:

• Outdoor Care: Keep your stools outside but protected from the cold, wind, rain, and slugs. Let them chill and stay dry until 2-4 weeks before you take cuttings.
• Chilling: This chilling period helps produce stronger cuttings. Plants can handle 1-2 nights of freezing down to 28°F, but 3+ nights may be harmful.
• Cold Snap Protection: Use a garage, greenhouse, shed, or tarp to protect plants during severe cold snaps. During extreme cold placing Christmas lights under the covering may protect plants from freezing.
• Pre-Cutting Prep: 2-4 weeks before you want to take cuttings, move stools to a warm area (around 60°F) and feed with high nitrogen fertilizer (like Miracle-Gro) to stimulate new growth. For example, heat the stools by mid-December if starting new cuttings in mid to late January.

Clean and Refill Your Cutting Beds:

• Regular Maintenance: Every 3-4 years, clean out old cutting beds, spray with fungicide, and refill with fresh sand.  The sand in the cutting beds helps to distribute the heating pad heat.

Basic Cutting Bed Setup:

• Heat: Use heat cables or pads to keep the temperature between 65-69°F. Rigid foam insulation underneath helps retain heat.
• Depth: Cutting media should be about 3″ deep.
• Size: Choose a size that fits standard trays (11”x22”). Mats usually match tray sizes.
• Lighting: Use an overhead fluorescent light (a 2-bulb, 4ft shop light works well). Regular white light bulbs are effective and cheaper than special grow bulbs.

NOTE: If you are interested in getting help designing or setting up your cutting bed, reach out to club members to walk you through process. Cutting beds come in all sizes, shapes and configurations.

 Inventory your propagation supplies

• • Plant tags
  •  2 1/2 inch plastic pots or peat trays
  •  Starting medium – club members can purchase M&R mix from the club
    •  Sunshine #4 available at Home depot is an excellent alternative starting medium. Sold in 1 CU foot bales
  •  Early season fertilizer – club members can purchase 9-45-15, or 12-45-10

Make a start date and pinch date plan

• • Lay out your annual growing plan- what classifications, varieties and how many you plan to grow.
  • Use your growing plan determine when you need to take cuttings

5. Starting/ cutting  dates:

• By keeping good records of your plant start dates, potting dates, pinch dates and bloom results you will be able to hone in on the time frames that work best for you.
• Different varietals require different starting dates to get the best flowering bloom before the end of the growing season.
• A basic tenant for pot grown plants is that the plants seldom bud out until they become root bound.  So for most of the year we focus primarily on root development
• In order to have sufficient time to develop a strong, fully developed root system by mid August plants need to be in their final pots (8″ or 9″ pots) between June 1st and 15th

RECOMMENDED START DATES:

• Late Dec & early to mid-January,

Mount Rainer, Elsie Prosser James Bryant, Keith Luxford, All Fairweathers,

Most Fantasies (Spiders, quills and spoons). King George,

plus anything you plan to grow for specimen plants (10 or more blooms).

• Late Jan.

Connie Mathew, Seychelles, Dukes, Jessie Habgood

• – February,

Lundys, Harry Gees (all), Jane Sharpe, Ralph Lamberts, Athabasca,

• -Late Feb. to early march,

Lots of #4s & #5s plus garden varieties.

Taking cuttings:

Three methods –

• • 1. utilize a cutting bed where cuttings are placed in a row in the starting medium – advantage: produce more roots per cutting
    2. utilize 2 1/2 inch starting cubes placing the cuttings directly into the cube
    3. utilize 72 count earth pot trays.  Insert cuttings directly into each module. – advantage: a denser starting flat

options 2 and 3 do not require a cutting bed but you still need to provide controlled heat, overhead lighting, tray covers and overhead misting

7. Use of B-Nine to control plant Height.

• • first application when you pot up to 4 inch pots.
  • Do not use B9 ton any cultivars that tend to have short stems including – Fairweathers, Alexis, West Bromwich and King George.