Unless trees are looked after properly, with attention paid to the treatment of wounds which have been made by nature or by man, they may become infected with one of a few dozen fungus diseases and become a risk to life and limb.
This is especially true in a tropical climate such as Guyana’s. It is occasionally true that they become infected without anyone knowing a thing about it, but that is uncommon. Normally it is the result of careless use of the cutlass (a favourite pruning implement in Guyana) or of the chainsaw, and in nearly all cases a failure to treat wounds of any kind and of any size with a tar based paint or any kind of paint.
Cuttings
Most plants are not too difficult to propagate until you start to think about it. A newcomer might well ask what grafting is, or budding, or layering. What are softwood, semi-hardwood and hardwood cuttings? What is a sucker, or a saddle graft? It’s all a bit like a foreign language, isn’t it? A kind of minefield where extreme caution has to be used before doing anything. Some aspects of gardening are like studying sub-atomic particle physics. The kind of thing that gives you the screaming heebie-jeebies.When I started developing an interest in plants these are exactly the questions I used to ask. Most people do. In time I leant that most things became understandable, and with practice fairly easy. After all it’s a matter of what your old grandmother used to talk. Plain common sense – but with a little good fortune added to the mixture.
So back to propagation. There is something challenging about taking a piece of a plant and getting roots to form on it. Cuttings are of three kinds: Softwood, semi-hardwood, and hardwood. Softwood cuttings cause us most problems because they are taken from the very tip of shoots and are, as the name implies very soft. They have little or no reserve of food in them, and if they are allowed to dry out they wilt quickly. This kind of cutting needs to be rooted in a very humid atmosphere to reduce their water loss. This is done by covering them with a glass jar or plastic bag immediately they are inserted into a rooting medium (I have in the past used well-drained sand).
Semi-hardwood cuttings are soft wood cuttings with a small piece of older stem attached to the base. This hardwood base is trimmed to remove any jagged edges, and is the part which produces roots. The leaves at the top are retained just as in soft cuttings, and they too need to be rooted in a close and humid atmosphere to prevent them losing water from their leaves.
Hardwood cuttings are taken from the oldest part of the shrub, are normally thicker than softwood cuttings and, because they have a reserve of food in their thicker stems are better able to survive the separation from the parent plant. Furthermore, they don’t need covering with plastic or glass to get them to root. They may be stuck straight into the ground or into pure sand in a propagating case (try half a 40-gallon drum cut in half lengthwise).
Until next week may your God go with you wherever you may be.
