Stool Layering - Easy Propagation Trick 

So glad you find us of value :)

That is great to hear!

This method works for Aronia? That’s great I’m going to try it out this year and see if I can get some new plants!

@3 Feather's Farmstead @Ed Scukas If you bought Aronia Viking, Nero or Aron, you could actually propagate them by seed. The seedlings are genetically identical.

@@edibleacres I have had great success with air layering by using large Starbucks plastic water cups, cutting them down the side with a hole at the bottom where it can be wrapped around a branch and inserted in, then I tape closed the cup and fill it with soil either in late fall or early spring and by late spring to early summer I can visibly see roots growing through the clear cup and the longer I give the plant the more it will be rooted so waiting till early to midsummer to cut off the cups will endure pretty good success with vigorous cuttings. I do this every year to great success with aronia, gooseberry, currant, jostaberry, figs, grapes and honey berry. I have many cuttings each season I don't need to wait longer than one season to have many different cuttings I love it

That's such a good idea. I love permaculture because I can design my own forgetfulness out of the equation!

This is a great method😁 I use it too, one added benefit in my case is it also somewhat helps with deer pressure

Great reminder. I've done this in the past, the only gotcha is if you forget long enough the roots run through the wire and then it is a fair bit of snipping, but that just shows how lloooong I can forget about an experiment!!!

@@edibleacres This is why I watch this channel- you're as forgetful as I am!

@@edibleacres Since lumber spiked due to COVID19, I've been using much more wire fencing/welded wire/chicken wire for everything. Quicker to go up with rebar/stakes, easier to shape & reuse/recycle.

That is awesome. I'm seeing that with goumi and Autumn Olive. one year will do it if you are in a place to give TLC to the transplant a bit, two years and they are ropey and robust and field ready. It is exciting to see how easy they are to replicate if the desire is there!

That is good to know! My goumi cuttings all failed. I will try this method of propagation next. Did you do the same as Sean - about two 5-gallon buckets worth of mulch?

Should work!!

Thanks kindly!

We'll take it any time we can!

Worked out well to demonstrate.

Wishing you great luck... If it doesn't work right away, give it another season and more mulch and it should take over time...

Seems worth trying! Very minimal risk for sure

Should work wonders with blueberry, may just take a bit longer, and you may want a nice mulch of something very moisture retentive as your final layer to help support the rooting.

Came for the same answer- great video.

We have hazelnuts we are rooting with this method.... VERY sllow but seems to be working.

Grapes are really easy to do from cuttings. You can literally get tens of new plants from a single grape plant when you do standard seasonal pruning (January/February). 👍

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4OLh_ZhfRVM.html In general, you can pop over to the video tab for our channel and search for topics and they should show up for you... Good luck!

Absolutely! 'Hard wood propagation' is a very wonderful method with a lot of different plants. Just more tools in the toolbox :)

Would love to hear how the blueberries go - I was thinking of doing this with some of mine too!

I think blueberries should work.. i roughly did it with one plant many years ago, and managed to split it into 3 plants without killing it. i dont quite remember, but i probably would have scraped a little bark off of each steam before adding the compost on top.

Raspberries are super easy since they sucker and run already!

Blueberry should work but they take their time, like 2 years sometimes.

@@edibleacres good to know. I've only been doing these since I planted them in the spring, so another year and a quarter. I guess it's time to add some more soil.

Sounds like you've worked out a good system for yourself, kudos!

Cool! Any idea if this can be done with softwood gooseberry..? I ask because I just took like 100 cuttings from dy1ng bushes that some moron had left with their roots in full sun for days... Had any success with softwood gosseberry, and if so, what did you do..? Cheers!

Bigger plants, quicker? When you layer, what will be the new plants are connected to the mother plant, so benefit from that larger root system and connections for nutrition. Plus, layering is quick and takes up no extra space.

Really reasonable question for sure... If you want a huge number of copies quickly and the plant is easy to root by cuttings then that is the path. If you wan to make a gesture in the garden that can give you the option of really nice sized and well rooted, ready to fruit copies later of hard to root plants, stooling is absolutely ideal.

Good reminder to make more videos on the ferments next summer. Sasha and I cracked into a pink currant wine that was like a fizzy champagne last night, quite nice, still sweet, lovely pink color still there. So much to experiment with!

This is my question too.

You are correct. The advice is usually to avoid mulch contact with your plants. This is mostly because we tend to over mulch and over time it causes problems. I am a horticulturalist and landscaper by trade. There is no master list of what plants work or not. I usually experiment with healthy shrubs and trees. I mix light sand and composted mulch together then place that on one side/half of the plant I want to try it out on. I find it drains well and it is light. You can run into problems if it's really dry after those roots grow because they will die and cause the plant stress. You just need to keep an eye on it. Some plants only need a season and others will need a couple. There are different layering methods. Some are better than others depending on the plant so it is a good idea to look up the different layering methods for plants then you can try them all out.

Trial and error and asking people with experience.

The advice to avoid this method is appropriate when you are working with single stemmed canopy trees for sure. When you have multi-stemmed and suckering shrub or cane layer woody perennials they tend to be adapted to areas that may periodically flood or have disturbance and lock into that new disturbance. That is what we are mimicking and leveraging here... Which plants work? I can't say I know some long list, but ask the question... are these lower, multi stemmed plants that can grow near waterways in the wild? If yes, they almost certainly are happy to stool.

As a rule of thumb, shrubs often work fine for stool layering, trees not so much

We hope to offer some in the spring. We renew inventory on March 1st generally...

Joel Salatin would be a good start. He is large scale tho. "The gardening channel with James Prigioni" has a food forest in his back yard with the method. Good luck.

permies.com has wonderful forums with very active and respectful folks. I love 'Edible Forest Gardens' by Dave Jacke and the original Permaculture book by Bill Mollison is pretty wonderful...

@@edibleacres Thank you so much! I’ll be asking for these for Christmas.

Reasonable to try on the saskatoon... you may even want to pin down a few branches with weights/bricks/stones and cover in soil a bit to see if that works. Give it time in your short growing season, perhaps a year or even two!

@@edibleacres Thanks, Sean

I want to do the same here in North mo in my front yard

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eXYA-cycdBs.html - Maybe this is helpful?

It seems it will do it, but it takes a WHILE, like at least a full year or ideally two...

You can plant late into fall and earlly winter, just plan to ideally get good mulch around each planting spot.

@@edibleacres ok. I’ll give it a try. I have plenty of leaf mulch out chickens have prepared, so with a god watering I should be good. However, if weather was not to cooperate and I had to store them, what method would you suggest? Thank you!

@@edibleacres well, I didn’t actually go through my order form and when I did I found out they won’t ship until April! LOL! Sorry for troubling you. Placed the order so I’m guaranteed to get them. It’s been many years since I plopped a ripe wild plum in my mouth! They’re so delicious!

@@jameswinnett4012 this made smile - my grandfather called rain 'god watering'

I am not saying it is best practice at all, but what I did was take a hazel and coppice it, then mounded aged wood chips around the new shoots as they emerged. 1 year later they looked pretty good to propagate from. Your method seems quite reasonable and perhaps the bebtter way to go if it works for you!

@@edibleacres I had an area of heeled in cuttings that ended up untouched for years . Among the original plants was an English walnut but it was surrounded and getting choked by, hazel hawthorn and mountain ash. I wanted to save the walnut, so I cut everything down to ground level and in a year from then, I had a mass if shoots coming off the large established root systems. I mounded up the whole lot and 2 years on I had around a hundred well rooted hazel and mountain ash plants and a few hawthorn as well. I have cut them three more times now and have been using these same stools as a donor bed, all under the protection of a now sizeable and productive walnut tree.

Might be the canopy influence above. Mature trees that aren't pruned will have less growth 'information' being expressed and interacting with soil life. If you do some radical trimming of canopy above, then this will restart the growth information originating from the trees in the area. This is the principle explored in syntropic agroforestry.

@@Sk0oBz Thank you, in the particular area i believe it would be easier to move the gooseberries than to prune the trees that are shading the gooseberries, I think I'll try moving some to experiment with different amounts of sunshine. If I move wild gooseberries within a few feet of a cultivated gooseberry variety what might happen between the wild and the cultivated variety ?

@@anthonyburdine1061 My understanding is cross polination will not affect the plants themselves, but will effect the progeny of crossed plants from seed. IOW your berries should be fine if the bushes survive being moved. If you use the seed from those berries to grow more gooseberry plants, the new plants may not be true to parent. Why bother doing that when you can easily tip layer gooseberries? In many cases, your plants need to be at minimum 300 hundred yards plus away from each other to prevent crossing if you are propagating from seed as a home plant breeder/seed saver.

@@flatsville1 Thank you very much for your helpful information !! 😊

It does very well

We have done that with some trees and it worked. I would say that Paw Paw would be the last tree I would leave in that context, however... That is in our situation, zone 5B where we can get some serious cold snaps. That can really hurt them. If you are more mild in the winter and have good mulch all around it seems reasonable, but if you are as cold as us I wouldn't (personally) do that...

That seems reasonable to try.

No to plastic... generally a universal sentiment in my mind... Either you let them find their way in and enjoy life in the fluff or you can cut with a sharp spade every year or two a line to keep them from entering much and their new feeder roots can break down and feed the soill from below... Thats what we do.

@@edibleacres so the initial ditch for the swale should probably cut some of these roots out? would cutting down pre-swale ditch about 12 inches with the king o' spades do the trick? would love to see a video on this at some point!

Not with grafted ones but some nice wild apples. I have cut old wild trees only to have many suckers come up. You can experiment that way. Air layering works on native apple too. Basically if you have fruit trees that have no grafting done then you can give it a go.

I don't know but I'd have my doubts. Would absolutely need to be on the north side of things.

You're most welcome

So great that you did that! In the future, freshly stuck cuttings do best to have flowers and young fruit pinched off so they focus on rooting, but if you have good weather and lots of moisture they root no matter what.

@@edibleacres Ok thank you for that piece of information. I am more incline towards seeing how it goes by itself first. If it would fail I will advised later. So far so good under our climate!

It has worked for me...as well as rosemary

Yes. Just be a bit careful you aren't using a super sopping wet media... I wouldn't use worm castings and compost, but rather sand and perlite and balanced garden soil for example. Should work welll within a year

Thank you all. On our site, with our soil, sand is almost our only option ;) Lavender has been recommended for our location. Having an easy low cost propagation method makes that easier ;)

Yay!

You have been dooing it all wrong. Ooof.

crappy technique ??

That could work, although you need to remember that if they are grafted trees you may be propagating root stock and not the main variety grafted on top.

@@edibleacres I had a plum tree that blew over and threw suckers from the base. I buried the base and stooled it up then left them to grow on to try and detemine if these were suckers or not. To my delight four out of six came true and fruited. I discarded the 'failures' and took two as cuttings, leaving two in place and benefitting from the old tree's root system. I do have to keep cutting back suckers, but for the lovely fruit it produces, it is well worth this minor hassle.

There are labels around here or there, sometimes I use this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-PPS5W_h_5jY.html For the most part I try to memorize as much as I can.

I make a map/rough sketch of where I plant what, the trick is remembering to write it down

@@tatekohmni I have a google sheets doc with everything plotted out,, but it’s a matter of putting it in there

Perhaps but they are very very easy to propagate through suckers that come up around them, that is the prefered way I like to propagate them

TIP LAYERING IS BETTER FOR SUCCESS

ON RASPBERRIES

Do you know these green 🌱 on soil?

centella asiatica it is a medicine.