Rooting lapins cuttings

I’m pruning a few branches of my lapis cherry tree, see if I can encourage to grow sideways a bit instead of straight up. I figure I would try to root them. This is Alaska so it just started putting flowers about a week ago, leaves are not 100% grown.

For the tender last year branches I guess hormone, stick it in coconut coir, put a cover, then hope and pray? Is there anything else I should try?

if never tried rooting cherry scions. I’d expect them to take a while to root.

Coco coir does not rot easily. But if you have cuttings in a closed box for months… I’d probably wrap the scions in parafilm. And root them in an open box or pot filled with high quality (coarser longer strands) coco coir. or a mixture of coco and perlite (large grain ~6mm). You could even weigh the box occasionally to determine if it needs some water replenished.

These are leafing out so is more like green cuttings than scion wood.

in that case id either brake of the buds starting to leaf out. To give it time before the dormant buds start growing to form roots. (and stil wrap in parafilm)

Or id mist it and place it in semi shade preferably with some bottom heat if the temp is not already around 20C.

Here is a method for rooting green cuttings.

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that guide is for softwood cuttings. Since his tree is just flowering and leafing out. i doubt he has 4-6 inches of new (softwood) growth.

His current pruning’s are hardwood.

If you want more trees it might be worthwhile to try air layering a couple branches and trim later when roots are formed.

Isn’t it the wrong season for hardwood cuttings? Don’t you usually take them in the Fall when the tree is going dormant? He will have to wait a bit to get some growth he can cut but the method works. It also is a bag it and forget it method pretty much which makes it easy.

ideally you take hardwood cuttings from dormant plants yea.

However if you remove buds and force the cutting to sprout from “latent” buds. You can “fake” dormancy for a while. And buy yourself some more time for roots to form before the leaves form and start to evaporate.

You could also treat the hardwood cuttings as softwood cuttings. However in my experience they usually take longer to root than softwood. And also have a little bit more rot/fungus problems in damp circumstances. And thus treating them like softwood is a bit risky.

Could be a cool experiment to try both and see what if any works.

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