cogitatio

Leaf propagation

I tried rooting a violet leaf in water, after it had been down in a leaf pot for a week it looked like it was under extreme stress in comparison with the other leaves that I had put down, so I took a risk and dug it up to find some rot creeping up the petiole quite merrily, eek. So I removed all of the rot, and placed the leaf in water, a method I had never used before and it rooted, and it only took 5 days, wow, after asking some other people what they do with these water rooted leaves, I decided to throw the leaf in question in soil, so that it could form actual soil and not water roots, hopefully it is good to go now, here is a pic of the rootlets forming just before I set it in soil, they were three times longer than 12 hours earlier, this leaf means business now...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sakerr/6241310340/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Also someone mentioned that you should remove the tips of the leaves so that they quit growing, and also because the injury releases hormones in the leaf for healing that aid in the callus formation. I took one of these leaf tips from frozen in time and wanted to see how much of a leaf you really need to root a plantlet.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sakerr/6241309130/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Since I already know that the mother leaf is rooted I decided to excavate this leaf tip to see if it was doing anything, because it certainly hasn't rotted or dried up and it has been in the soil since about the 25th of September, lo and behold it had roots, but it had also rotted up from the main vein in a semi-circle about half the size of my pinky finger nail, somehow the plant had combatted this rot and callused and rooted anyhow.

I wonder if many people out there have experienced this before with leaves starting to rot and yet rooting and providing plant lets anyways.

posted by Steve @ 10:46 AM