Hi friends, my name is Mark Govan. I'm the hose of Florida Gardening heard on 970 WLFA AM in Tampa Bay and today we're at the Willow Tree Nursery where we're going to tell you how to root day lilies from cuttings and from tissue culture. A couple things that you have to know about tissue culture is tissue culture is where a plant was grown in a test tube and basically those plants are exactly the same as the mother plant was. Unfortunately what has happened in the day lily market is even in tissue culture which is a sterilized environment, the tissue cultures, they've found mutations in the day lily plants that have actually come out of these tissue cultures and these are sterilized tissue cultures but they have been having mutations evolve from that. So be aware, number one when you purchase day lilies from tissue culture that you may not get the exact type that you have been wanting to use in the garden, but for the most of the plants that you're going to get, they're going to be exactly the same as the mother plant is. So today we're going to need a couple of things. We're going to need some day lily cuttings, obviously, because we want to go ahead and I'm going to show you how to root those. We're going to go ahead and need a little bit of Root Tone. I've got to have that Root Tone and Root Tone helps your plants to grow, helps them grow a little bit faster and you're going to need some potting soil and today we've got some Fafard potting soil, great potting mixture. Use this, it's a good sterilized mixture and we're going to need a couple of pots to put our new plants into and one gallon pots are the size I like to use to put all my new plants into. Now remember, when we're starting from tissue culture, we're usually getting smaller plants and today I've got a couple small plants that we're going to go ahead and use for our demonstration. We've got one here that just has the crown of the base. This is one we're going to need to use our rooting hormone on and of course, this one here which already has some roots on it and we're going to go ahead and plant both of these out today. Now remember, one of the things that you want to do when you're planting new day lilies is you want to make sure that you plant usually in the late Summer is when I really like to plant it or first thing in the Spring when the day lilies are actively growing. Now why do you want to plant at that time of year? Well when the day lilies are actively growing, what you get is you get a much hardier plant, quicker, when you actually put them in the ground. So two times a year, later in the Summer, early in the Spring, your plants are actually going to come back a lot faster for you. Well let's go ahead and get started. Now that we have our dirt poured out on the bench, we've got our pot ready to go, I'm going to start with the rooted cutting that we already have and you see we have a broken branch. We're going to go ahead and pull that right off the plant because we're not going to need that. So what we're going to need is we're going to put a little bit of dirt in the bottom of the pot. So I like to put at least about halfway full. When we put this into the pot we're going to want to make sure that we put the dirt covering the roots all the way up to about this level where my fingers are right here. So I'm going to place this into the pot and I kind of steady it with one hand and then I'm going to go ahead and add my dirt around the plant. And we steady it down. Now one thing I like to do when I'm planting any plant is I put the soil medium into the pot. I put it up to the level that I have already told you. Now to steady the plant in the pot I just tamp around the base of the plant just a little bit, you don't want to go too hard because you don't want to suffocate the roots. But then I like to make sure I steady it in the pot and I do that by pushing my fingers down the outside edge of the pot to remove any gaps that might be in the soil and that kind of steadies the plant and makes the plant stand upright. Now I will normally leave this in a shady area for up to a month or two until I definitely see more growth coming out of the plant but if you put it out in full sun right away you have the likelihood of burning your plants. So keep it in the shady area. Now let's go ahead and plant the little cutting here that does not have any roots, just a little bit of a root head right here coming out of the base. Normally when you buy these in the store they're already going to have some roots but when dividing your existing plants this is what you might end up with. So we're going to use a little bit of this rooting hormone and I'm going to pour a little bit in the top of the cap here and you can see it just looks like a little white powder and then what we're going to do is we're going to put this aside just for a second because we want to make sure that we have enough dirt in the pot to go ahead and put our new cutting in and we want to go ahead and dip this cutting into the rooting hormone, just like this. Once it's on the base what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and hold the plant right at the top of the soil just like this and then add my dirt around the cutting very lightly, let me get a little bit more dirt around it and I'm going to tamp this down a little bit, just enough to hold it in place and then I like to push again around the outside edge of the plant to keep it in its own place and what we want to do at this point is give it a little bit of water and then put it in the shade. Now this is going to take anywhere from one to two months to go ahead and set roots, keep it in a shade place and your plant will grow just fine for you. And that's as easy as it is to grow your day lilies from tissue culture or from cuttings. It's a very easy process and very rewarding, why? Because you're going to get more plants for your own garden. My name is Mark Govan, host of Florida Gardening on 970 WFLA right here at the Willow Tree Nursery, having a lot of fun and hope you are too.
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