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x coccinea cutting

timbudtwo

Shoopdawoop
There is a cutting of x coccinea in small plastic cup w/ rooting hormone and superthrive and its in sphagnum and vermiculite. Is there a way to speed up the process in rooting cuttings?
 
Heat from the bottom if I'm not mistaken...
 
Hello,
 I'm also growing a Coccinea from cutting:  Here's what I did:
I cut it, and cut all leaves down to half size.
Then I put it in a cup with rooting hormone.
After a while, roots began to form out of the base of the cutting.
After the roots formed, I mixed up a pot of loose material (peat, orchid bark, and perlite) and put it in there.
I made sure to water it, and kept it in a terrarium with high humidity.

One bit of advice:  The roots will form wherever the "inside" of the plant is exposed to the water.  When I did my cutting, I only did a straight cut.  I now wish I had done a diagonal cut, and perhaps done some slits up the sides.  This would mean a greater surface area for roots to form, and allow for more water absorption.

It appears to be doing well, and actually is doing something unexpected:

I assumed it would start creating shoots out from the base of the leaves.  This is what appeared to happen in the cutting instructions I saw.  What mine did, is take root, then continue growing out of the "top" the way it was before.  Is this common?  I thought the growing leaves would suffer too much trauma to continue growing.

As it stands now, it has only made a couples leaves, it is still slow going for this cutting.  I keep it in a very warm and very humid terrarium, but it is still slowly gowing.  Oh well, it is a pretty large cutting, so this is to be expected I suppose.


---Lane
 
The cutting from the top of the plant will normally just root and then start growing again. Cuttings from lower down that don't have an actively growing point will make a new shoot usually from the leaf axil closest to the top of the cutting. Nepenthes exhibit a strong appical dominance.

Tony
 
I have way too many cuttings right now! But yeah, I agree the ones which have the diagonal cut with some slices up the sides do seem to root better and faster. Infact a few of the ones I did not do that to turned black and never rooted at all. Even when kept in the same conditions.

Bottom heat does seem to help for lowlanders (esp. alata) but I must confess I don't see any difference for my ventrocosa or maxima cuttings wheher they're rooting in highland or lowland tanks, they're just real slow it seems. Does anyone think bottom heat is ueful for rooting highland cuttings?
 
I have not done any controlled experiments or anything but it has been my experience that a little bottom heat will help. Keeping the cuttings around 75-80. Some species just take longer than others.
Tony
 
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