Kathryn Allen
3/12/18
SOS Food and Agriculture
Asexual Perennial Propagation
Asexual propagation of perennial plants occurs by either taking a cutting or dividing a plant’s crown. This action creates a clone of the mother plant, allowing the grower to multiply the crop as much as they need to. In order to propagate through a cutting, you need to cut one of the mother plant’s lateral meristem. Then, you cut off the apical bud and cut a straight line two buds down just below a bud. Dip the newly cut piece into willow tea and stick the stem in vermiculite and water. Leave one leaf so that the plant may photosynthesize. In order to propagate through crown division, you quite literally pull off part of the plant at the crown and stick it in dirt.
This form of perennial propagation provides an easy way to get more plants for free. It is particularly useful in cases of rare or expensive breeds and can be helpful if there is one that contains properties that prove to be beneficial to your purposes. This practice creates a very predictable crop which can be extremely useful to crop planning and marketing.
There are, however, some setbacks to this form of propagating. For one, it is a pretty time consuming process when you factor in the high mortality rate. It’s hard to predict just how many plants that your efforts are going to yield because its more difficult to know which ones are going to take.