This experiment has been pretty successful so far! Isn’t it amazing what you can learn about on the internet? I had no idea how to do this until I started reading blog posts and watching youtube videos about it.
Continuing the progress of the start of the project from the first post on Oct. 23rd propagating-figs-with-cuttings, here are the next steps to propagating these baby figs.
On October 29th, after the fig twigs had been wrapped in damp paper towels and stored in the Rubbermaid container for a few days, I layered them in this plastic shoe box with peat moss and vermiculite. I’d say it was about a 70% peat, 30% vermiculite mix. The twigs had some little bumps on them, maybe 1 or 2 had a little beginning of a root in the corners… I made sure the peat was damp, then I went away on vacation to Disney for a week! Bye bye, figgies! Survive, please!
On November 15th, I unearthed the twigs from the shoe box and gave them each their own little plastic 18oz plastic cup. I used a metal steak knife and made the tip hot over a lit stove. I melted tiny drainage holes in the bottom of each plastic cup, filled it with the same peat/vermiculte mix around each cutting. I placed these in a big, plastic container and used a large piece of glass to cover the top so the light from the grow light would shine through.
There’s a grow light on top of the container and a seedling heat mat plugged in underneath, wrapped in a towel so things don’t get TOO hot. I used inflated plastic packing from an Amazon shipment to fill in the holes between the glass lid and the container to cut down on evaporation – I wanted to keep the cuttings moist so the container stayed warm and steamy.
And NOW look at them today! These babies made it through a MOVE! There have been a few leaves that have fallen off and some have yellowing so I probably need to fertilize them. I may have a couple of failures in there, but I wouldn’t count them out until I pot them up and see how the root systems are doing. Maintaining the right level of moisture seems to be the hardest part.