I have a beautiful begonia(from Ellis Pottery no id)I've had for about two years. It's forming babies on the sinus curl of a couple of the leaves again. I tried getting the babies to root last time by placing the leaf flat on a pot of potting mix and weighing it down...didn't work. Maybe I took the leaf off mother plant too soon? Do I wait for roots to show on back of leaf or will it actually make roots while still attached to plant?
P
babies growing on the leaves
I would love to see it.
Patience is a gardeners/plant lovers greatest ally. And with begonia high humidity for rooting. If you have the space you could try pegging the leaf down while still attached to the mother. I am going to try it with some of my begonia babies this summer. I have had terrible luck propagating.
I have been doing mine in straight perlite, placing the leaf kind of cupped and standing up into it and then covered with a plastic clear cup pushed down into the perlite to form a mini terraium effect. I just started with begonias and have 4-5 different leaves started this way a month ago and every one of them has rooted, not one loss. :-)
This Escargot is one that took right away.
Sue,
I knew
I should have asked you.
I will give your method a try
when the moon turns new.
I still would like to be able to make multiple babies by cutting across the leaf 'veins' to increase the numbers produced by the process. I am going to try the mini terraium, cutting across and leaving the leaf attached to the mother plant. Or maybe cut part way through the leaf stem to stress it some? I have a small garden shop that will take all the plants I can produce and it is the season for growing them fast.
Gosh darn no new begonia photos. How about some ferns...
Not my method though, I got it from Lali. I do other cuttings though, half perlite, half african violet mix and so far so good. And I water those with Eleanor's VF-11 with a bit of H202 to prevent problems with overwatering which causes so many to fail, they rot if too wet and the H202 adds ogygen to avoid that problem.
I do mine in perlite or a perlite mix. We use several different trays at the arboretum, some have 100% vermiculite (too wet for my style) and some have 100% perlite and some have a 50/50 mix. All are on heating mats so we get roots in 10 days to 2 weeks. I highly recommend the heat if you can. Speeds things up a lot. These get misted about every 30 minutes by overhead misters so they stay wet, warm and drain well.
Hope that helps.
Of course I've been known to just stick a cane in any old pot that's nearby too.
Here's a photo of the cutting bench where we start begonias (and impatiens too)
Sorry,been super busy in greenhouses.
I'm going to try the cup method but will have to use something a bit bigger since the leaf is bigger round than the 4" pot it's in. I have some frig.storage bowls(w/lids) that probably will do the trick.
P