Rooting strategy questions?????

Hi everybody - would really appreciate some guidance here.

I have 3 plumerias that I have grown over the years to 6 foot trees, basically. As they had become too large to bring indoors any more in my Zone 7 location, I cut them off at the trunk base and then made several large cuttings as shown in the picture below. That cutting is 45" from the trunk base to the limb tips and 30 inches from the limb tips to the branching node.

Herer are my questions:

1. Should I further prune the branch down to the smaller 30" branches, effectively getting 3 smaller cutting from the 1 large one, or leave it as it is?
2. I guess I need to go ahead and start the rooting process - how to do that with suck large cuttings? Large buckets with perlite and water up to 3 or 4 inches on the trunks, then repot in soil after roots develop? Can I do that without sunlight as they are in my unlit but heated basement?

Thanks for the help - I have 5 or 6 of these large cuttings from my bigger plants last year.

Jimmy

w/o knowing when you made the initial cut, i would leave it as is. root it first, then take more cuttings from it.

i am not good at rooting. i refer you to a technique that i have started using to save myself from trouble. let me know if you have any questions. and yes, this will work on your large cutting. i have a similar one.

the idea behind this method is to let the cutting produce callus tissue while "on the shelf" and not in a growing medium. this took about three months for some aztec gold cuttings that i got back in october and kept in the house since then. then, i placed some soil in a baggy w/ no extra moisture added. all the moisture you need is already in the soil when you take from the bag. here is a cutting and Day 11 after being placed in the baggy.

this is only way way of rooting. i find this better because i would have driven myself crazy if i had potted up the cuttings in october and had to baby them until now. plus, there is a chance i could have rotted them or burned them up from the heat mat. LOL i'll try and lay out what i did. it is just a few simple steps.

1) i chose DRY vermiculite as the pre-rooting medium. notice that i did not wet the vermiculite. the pre-rooting medium was only used to hold the cuttings upright in a garbage can. the nice thing about the pre-rooting medium is that you can easily remove and re-insert the cutting w/o damaging the callus tissue as it forms. please note that you might experience some shriveling if your climate is drier than most. you can see some shriveling in the pic that i posted.

2) i waited until the cuttings had noticeable callus tissue formation before placing them in the bags. i scooped out some soil and put it in the bag. i did not add any extra moisture to the soil. all the moisture that is needed is right in the bag. then, i put the into the bag and pushed it into the soil. seal up the bag around the cutting so that it does not flop around. bag and cutting should move as a solid unit.

3) stand the bagged cutting up right on top of the pre-rooting medium. roots should appear very soon!

i hope this helps you all. remember, you will not get roots until the cutting has pushed out callus tissue. this method allows the cutting to callus "on the shelf" outside of moist soil to reduce the chance of rot.

let me know if there are questions.

once again, this pic shows what the roots looked like after on 11 days. woo hoo!

this is not my method. i learned it from mark terrill.

oh, one more thing! another beauty of this is that you can root tons of cuttings w/o wasting lots of soil. you can literally just put 2 heaping tbsp of soil in the bag to get roots.

Thumbnail by tucsonplumeriaz

Thanks so much!! So, no light needed while rooting?

hi jimmy - i don't store my plants in the dark, so i am not sure. even during winter storage i make sure that they have some kind of light. even if it is just a small wattage compact fluorescent light. the cuttings that sat in the pre-rooting mix were around to very bright CFL's for 16 hours a day in the bedroom. the temps were mostly above 70º.

you can see the pre-rooting box and the largest of the cuttings that i am letting callus. the lights are to the right.