Gooseberries are just so easy to propogate. When you do your early autumn tidy up and prune, save some of the branches that are somewhere near the thickness of a pencil. Cut the bottom of it just below a bud and the top just above one giving you a stick about 12" long. Remove all leaves bar the top two or three and plunge the stick (the right way up mind) around a pot thats about a foot deep. About half a dozen will fit into a 6" pot. put the pot into your cold frame or somewhere sheltered, ensuring that it does not dry out and next by next spring the cuttings should start to shoot. When this happens, tip the pot out and repot them into individual pots or directly into the ground where you want them to grow.
This year I also tried layering a few low branches. This just involves pegging the branch to the soil with a hoop of stiff wire and them letting nature take over. When I removed the wire I found that all 6 branches had rooted, so were troweled up and potted on into 10" pots to overwinter. They are obviously much more advanced than the semi ripe cuttings and so this is the way I will propogate them in future.
No comments:
Post a Comment