When I moved to Florida 20 years ago I had never heard of a croton plant. My neighbor had one and I just thought ho hum and never got interested in them. It wasn’t until my daughter started a landscaping business that I began toying around with the idea of beginning a hobby of raising some plants. Together we have observed and learned what people are using in their landscapes and I began to experiment with several plants. It is then that I began to get interested in the croton. Although it is not native to Southwest Florida I decided to go with it because it is not invasive and does very well in this climate and is quite hardy to the weather extremes.
I began to visit my neighbors with my garden clippers and over this past summer have gathered about 100 cuttings from various species of the croton plants that are doing well in this neighborhood. I have about 80 growing croton plants in my inventory and have some more coming on from some fresh cuttings.
I have experimented enough with cuttings from the croton plant that I have a very specific procedure in producing the rooted plants. I will go into more detail later on the specifics but will mention that the first few I trimmed the excess leaves so that they wouldn‘t take up much room in my plant rooting box. Then I did a batch of cuttings where I only removed the lower leaves and left all the top leaves whole. They take up more room but the results were startlingly different. The untrimmed ones are doing much better and are exceeding the growth of the trimmed ones. However it is a little more work for the first month because of the cuttings having no roots you must mist the leaves so that they will survive the heat and absorb moisture and survive and grow roots. Here in Florida we have an advantage over the snowbirds in the north because we have a much longer growing season and with care can get double the growth over the north’s shorter growing season.
I began to visit my neighbors with my garden clippers and over this past summer have gathered about 100 cuttings from various species of the croton plants that are doing well in this neighborhood. I have about 80 growing croton plants in my inventory and have some more coming on from some fresh cuttings.
I have experimented enough with cuttings from the croton plant that I have a very specific procedure in producing the rooted plants. I will go into more detail later on the specifics but will mention that the first few I trimmed the excess leaves so that they wouldn‘t take up much room in my plant rooting box. Then I did a batch of cuttings where I only removed the lower leaves and left all the top leaves whole. They take up more room but the results were startlingly different. The untrimmed ones are doing much better and are exceeding the growth of the trimmed ones. However it is a little more work for the first month because of the cuttings having no roots you must mist the leaves so that they will survive the heat and absorb moisture and survive and grow roots. Here in Florida we have an advantage over the snowbirds in the north because we have a much longer growing season and with care can get double the growth over the north’s shorter growing season.
Skype: bradley:vigansky
Phone: 941-343-3184
Tomorrows Home Business
Contact Us
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment