Content
- Heather multiply - sowing, cuttings or sinkers?
- Sow heather
- Cutting cuttings in summer
- Increase heather by lowering
- Tips
Heather can be e.g. multiply over cuttings
Heather multiply - sowing, cuttings or sinkers?
Most heather plants - which include both the summer flowering broom heath and the winter flowering snow heath - prefer acid soils and sunny locations. You can multiply by lowering, but the cuttings propagation is the fastest and most effective method.
Sow heather
In particular, the broom heath can be propagated by sowing, but you need a lot of patience. Heather plants grow very slowly, which is why the seedlings take a few years to grow into pretty little plants. Sow the fine seeds in March / April on acid, sandy soil. Do not cover the seeds, because the broom heath is a light germ. Keep the substrate slightly damp.
Cutting cuttings in summer
Heather cuttings are not cut, but torn. In the process, a piece of bark tongue is left behind on the crack, which supports the rooting root due to the inherent high concentration of growth hormones. The best time for the cuttings propagation is July.
After about three weeks, the cuttings are rooted and you can remove the cover.
Increase heather by lowering
Easier yet, but more protracted, is the increase over sinkers. These are basically clones of the mother plant, whereby they do not cut like cuttings, but remain connected to rooting with the mother plant - almost like an "umbilical cord".
Once the rooting is done - you know this because the plant is forming new shoots - you can separate them from the mother plant and plant them separately.
Tips
In particular, do not water the young heather plants with calcareous tap water, but rather use stale tap water or rainwater.