Beginner's Guide to Growing Geraniums from Cuttings

Learning to grow geraniums from cuttings can be a little tricky at first, but like everything else in gardening, the experience you pick up is priceless. When I first began cutting geraniums myself, to create new plants, I was addicted and started experimenting with every type of flower I could get my hands on. Growing geraniums from cuttings is still one of the easiest plants to use, and they are a great plant for a beginner to learn with.

Growing geranium plants from cuttings is a quick and easy way to duplicate the number of geranium plants you have, and it saves you a lot of money too. The basic concept involves cutting a parent plant, applying root hormone, planting the cutting and then nurturing it till it is ready to be replanted outside. The following are some tips to improve the survival rate of your plant cuttings and the best products to use.

The Basics
Start with a healthy geranium plant of any variety, be sure to check for bugs, mold and infected leaves because any of these can severely ruin any chances of your plant surviving. Using a sharp, clean pair of plant shears, cut an offshoot of the geranium off where the leaf meets the stem. If possible, place the geranium in a bowl or container of water and snip the stem off underwater.

Have a clean, flat seed tray filled with potting soil ready, as well as your container of rooting hormone. If cutting your geranium underwater, immediately remove clipping and dip the sheared end into your hormone powder. If you are cutting the plant out of water, dip the sheared end into water and then into the growth hormone.

Press the cutting into the bed of soil and press the soil firmly around the plant so that the leaf is supported till it begins to grow a new root system. Space the cuttings out about three inches to give them room to grow. Water the cuttings sparingly for the first week and then increase watering to keep soil moist.

Cutting Tips and Tricks
In addition to the basics, there are additional tips that can improve the rate of survival for your cuttings and reasons behind some of the instructions that I already shared. To start, I recommend doing the cutting with the plant submerged under room temperature water because it helps the plant continue to draw water into itself. If you cannot cut under water, dipping the stem into water before applying hormone also helps, and also guarantees that the hormone in in contact with the plant at all times.

Another tip a fellow gardener shared with me and I have since found works really well is to do all the cuttings in the evening, lay them flat on a paper lined tray and store them in the fridge overnight. In the morning, re-wet the stems and then dip them into the hormone before planting. This seems to encourage the cuttings to take up water and the hormone faster because they have been without for a few hours.

Always use a healthy, enriched seed starting mix, preferably one that contains liberal amounts of peat moss and vermiculite. Keep the plants in a sunny location for the first three weeks, but they do a lot better if they are in a hothouse type of environment so creating a tiny greenhouse for them will really improve the pace of growth during those first two to three weeks.

Preferred Products
I have had the most success with my geranium cuttings when I use Schultz Take Root Growing Hormone. Each small two ounce bottle is four dollars and there is enough hormone powder to cut enough geraniums for a large home garden. I have also used Rootone in the past, but I had about a seventy five percent success rate, versus almost ninety percent with Schultz. Whatever rooting hormone you decide to use, there will be cuttings that do not take in the beginning or that die halfway through the process for whatever reason.