Yes, I had a very high rate take root. I have been busy, so I decided to wait until the fall to plant them out. Interestingly enough, I have a cutting that has unripe berries on it (still). I just ran out and snapped this photo (sorry for the poor quality). I’m a little surprised because we are in July and these are still ripening. I thought that they would be done in June.
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Photo quality not the point…if you have one plant that has mutated and produces berries a month late, that could be worth even getting a patent on it.
Glad to hear of your successes. One of 15 for me, and it may yet die. But I’ll try again and perhaps cover in plastic or glass to keep in humidity.
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That’s great suggestion, thanks! I’ll be sure to keep my eye on it for the next couple of seasons. 
Also, I meant to mention that I found a newly broken honeyberry shoot last week. It was a combination of hardwood and soft wood. I didn’t have anything to loose, so I stuck it in the prop bed. I’m not going to baby it, as a matter of fact, I haven’t even looked at it since I stuck it. I’ll try to remember to check on it in a few weeks. If it’s not dead, I’ll assume that it’s taken root. I really don’t expect that it will, but it’s fun to try new things that don’t cost money or very much time.
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I’m running a batch of haskaps on the aeroponic box. As a control group I’m also doing a batch of Tundra haskaps on coconut coir, irrigated twice a day. No dome on either, both are on my porch getting a few hours of direct sunlight a day. I’m actually surprised that the one on coir is still hanging on pretty good:
I cheat a bit… If the success rate is 50% by sticking two per cup there is only a 25% chance that both die, but there is also a 25% chance that both live so those I get to divide. The cutting success rate may still be 50% but that gives me on a per cup count a 100% success rate.
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My attempts at fall cuttings in a vase of water failed. Dormant cuttings in the ground in spring failed. I hope to put some dormant cuttings in the ground this fall. It worked with currants and gooseberries. Not that I need any more honeyberries. I just try it because I can.
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Love this idea, my bushes are sprawling all over the ground and many of the berries are wasted sitting on the black plastic too long and not ripening evenly, (well certain varieties mostly are doing this)…but this is so tidy…You have inspired me to train my bushes.
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seetting up mist propagation area, for those with experience, what frequency and run time have you used? I’m thinking more frequent with shorter run time would be better.
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What pressure and mist heads are you using? When I made my aeroponic boxes I used the basic “misting” nozzle you find everywhere. except that this is not a misting head, it is a sprayer.
Somebody said that it was because I was using a 400 GPH pump and that with more pressure it would mist. Well I got a 1,000 GPH pump and it is still a sprayer. Worse, the spray is not forceful enough to create leaking issues with the aeroponic box lid.
I did 10 seconds every 10 minutes in my greenhouse this year. I was planning to fine tune or write some software to incorporate a drying time formula but didn’t get to it, and it ended up working fine. I’m using these netafim misters which are nice because they have built in check valves and you can change the four sides on/off:
https://www.dripdepot.com/product/netafim-coolnet-pro-fogger-w-check-valve
edit - I think you’re right that more frequent shorter time is better, ten seconds was the minimum I could achieve with my setup I assume based on water pressure, valves, supply length, check valve. my solenoid valve is only on for a couple seconds and the rest is it running till the pressure falls
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Nice looking set up. It will be interesting to see if those Wowza take.
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I like doing things the wrong way on purpose just so I can see first hand what happens. I took cuttings from haskaps while the berries were still green, non-lignified wood, some terminal buds, some further down. I ran a batch on my aeroponic setup, I ran another batch on just coconut coir, watered to saturation twice a day. No cover, no humidity dome, and because I was exposing the aeroponic box to half a day of sunlight (Alaska half a day, in summer it can be as many hours as a full day elsewhere) the coconut coir batch was also left to suffer in the sun. Or so I thought. Honestly I was expecting at least half the cuttings on coconut coir to give up the ghost. Lo and behold a month later 0 casualties so far. I just took this picture:
From this batch most have well developed calluses with small roots forming. Here’s the over achiever of the group (not representative, well ahead of the rest):
And it was not limited to haskaps. Here are Rovada currants, chopped, stuck on coir, no cover, left in the sun:
You see the one in the bottom left corner? I specifically left a ton of foliage on that one. No wilting, currently as happy as the rest just getting water twice a day.
My crude observation is that the need for shade and high humidity air is not the universal rule we have come to believe in: Coconut coir provides adequate level of both water and oxygenation to the root system of these species. Because the plants get soaked in sunlight, photosynthesis then kicks in and forces them to do something with all that energy, namely build roots to actually put it in.
There are several experiments I am running next year. For starters I want to run two aeroponic boxes, one in shade the other exposed to 8 hours of direct sun. I suspect that babying our plants by keeping them in the shade (crucial for other plants, unnecessary for these) actually retards their root development, which keeps them on a more fragile state for longer than necessary. Do keep in mind that my 8 hours of sun in the early summer is in 60f weather, so that’s a factor here.
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cool temps probably help you with no protection. once you see callus, i think they will benefit from some fertilizing, id try giving them 50% recommended rate once a week like recommended in pic i shared above. i know cherry will callus and stall there until they start getting nutrients, haskap are better about forming roots with less but probably would finish more uniformly with some boost.
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That makes sense from a theoretical standpoint. I mean there is probably some hormonal signaling taking place in the line of “excess nutrients, stash away. No place to stash them, build it”.
I add Clonex liquid nutrients for the aeroponics box but Miracle Gro would probably work just as well. The biggest difference is that Clonex had rooting hormones and some antifungal/anti bacterial stuff, not as critical for easy to root plants.
Cherries are a whole different ballgame, green cuttings are just too fragile. I started playing with the aeroponic box for hard to root plants like cherries, just to find out half way through how much easier it is to get root cuttings going. For something like 20 plants there’s just little to be gained over using root cuttings.
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What is humidity during the day around cuttings? Obviously it’s enough in your experiment, but how much is it?
What do you do when you get one of the cuttings to root? When do you transfer it to soil or something more permanent?
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It depends…
My observation with green haskap cuttings is that it can put a good amount of root before anything happens on top. Not always, but most of the time this seems to be the case. Check out this late June cutting, absolutely nothing at all happening on top, look at the roots:
As you can see green cutting will push root, and after a good amount of those they will have a small amount of green growth, and then get “stuck” again while it works on more roots. My opinion is that it could go on the ground after it finish that initial growth but it is still a tender plant, one that is easier to keep watered and not stepped on while on a pot. At this point I move them to 1 gallon trade pots (5/8th of a real gallon) so they have room to spread their roots. After the second growth spur of foliage I would call them good, which in the case of this guy it will be next spring.
Check this next one, started at the end of April from dormant hardwood cuttings. It put out the first set of branches, no more growth on the top for two months while it buit more roots, and then it had a second grow spur that you can see in the shape of the three branches going up. I pinched two and forgot to pinch the third:
As you can see after the second green grow spur (which could be the same year for spring hardwood cuttings, or the next for green cuttings) it should stand a good chance at living a happy life in the soil. I think the larger bushes we see at more nurseries are more a factor of marketing pricing larger bushes.
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What are your plans for overwintering? Take them inside? Or do you think they will survive outside of you put them in the ground?
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