NISHIKI GAWA CUTTINGS

Before

After

I recently acquired this pine bark Japanese maple (Acer Palmatum’Nishiki Gawa’) from Owen Reich.  It has superb genetics, as the internodes are short, leaf shape is perfect, and it has an excellent skeleton to work with.  Thus, it is the perfect candidate for cutting propagation.  After about two hours of work, I ended up with around one hundred cuttings.

Watered akadama in cedar grow box

I used my rain barrel water with Rhizotonic by CANNA to dampen the akadama soil while removing any excess dust from the medium.  The wet akadama will compress around the cutting better than if it was dry, and I won’t have to water it for a bit after cuttings are placed (this is important on the gel hormone as watering might wash away some of the gel).

Cutting candidates are kept in a pile while thinning ensues

Finished cutting

Cuttings were taken with 4-6 leaves remaining (2-3 pairs).  The end of the shoot was removed, and the shoot cut just below a node.  Something to consider for cuttings is the internode length.  Weaker shoots with smaller internodes will generally make better bonsai, but have a much higher failure percentage.  I took several short and long internode cuttings to see which ones rooted the best.

Prepared cuttings

Cuttings placed about 1″ apart.

I am doing a bit of an experiment with these cuttings.  I want to see if Wood’s rooting hormone (alcohol based) will work better than Dyna-Gro rooting gel.  I had had good success with the rooting gel for air layers, but I just recently obtained woods rooting hormone and wanted to test it out.   I used a 1:10 ratio of woods rooting hormone for these cuttings.

Dyna-Gro (green cup) and Wood’s Rooting Hormone (plastic measuring cup – 1:10 Woods to water ratio.

Finished cuttings

Now for the hardest part… wait and find out if they will root and grow!