Hello Everyone,
Tonight I decided to propagate some tradescantia's by way of the clipping/cloning method.
Tradescantia's are considered to be one of the easiest plants to propagate due to their aggressive nature to root at nodes.
So all that really needs to be done is to cut the plant a few nodes down from the fresh growth and either put it in water or go directly in the soil.
Some may recommend using a razor blade, but it's really not necessary with these plants unless you're only working with one or two clippings and want to drastically minimize your chance of failure. The success rate of rooting is very high with these, even when cut with scissors.
Let's get to the photos.
This is the "mother pot", which started out as a few clippings when I first got the plant. I propagated a few times, and the pot also sprouted with new growth from the soil in many places.
During this process I will cut away areas where dead spots are present, allowing more light to the new undergrowth, and will chop some clippings for the new pot.
First I need to locate a healthy branch with fresh growth. I'll snip it way down at the base and cut away extra that is not needed.
Looks good! Now I'll chop away some of the vegetation with dead spots and shorten up the stem.
Even though it looks considerably smaller, it's pretty proper. The clipping will not be able to photosynthesize as efficiently without roots, and by trimming it down this will force signals to the stem to start rooting, as well as signals for new upper growth. It's important to maintain good soil moisture during the rooting.
Then I just stick it in the soil. As long as the soil is not ultra compact, it can be jammed right in without much worry of hurting the clipping.
I line the outside of the pots with clippings, but for the center I decided to add a couple of rooted clippings.
The reason for this is because I need to plant these anyway, and logically if I put the root systems in the center, this will promote new growth to emerge from the root systems. This is the hope anyway, and I've seen it happen before :)
The root systems are well developed after a few weeks in a paper cup. This shows how aggressive the rooting is with these plants.
The flower blossoms on these are very tiny and come out a beautiful white color. I'm currently clipping the blossoms away because the lights they are under are not powerful enough to make them bloom, at least not from the distance they currently are from the plants.
The blooming ends the life cycle of the tradescantia vegetative growth, so we do not want to promote flowering in these pots. They are currently flowering because of being in a 12 hour on/off light cycle in the flowering tent for a while.
I currently don't have any desire to bloom these and would rather keep them growing this beautiful purple vegetation.
I'm sure the reader might be curious what one of these little flowers looks like, so here is an old photo to show, because I don't have any flowers currently.
We can see the new pot here, and the nicely trimmed up pot in the other side of the tent.
I gave the already established pot a heavy watering and gave the new pot a good top soak but not full saturation.
Trimming up established tradescantias promotes new growth, so I'll be taking the extra effort to put them under high powered lights during the day, because I want to see these beauties take off, and the clippings will appreciate that extra light as well.
We can also see some healthy cannabis plants back there too, those cannabis plants always seem to make it into my posts one way or another :D
By this conveniently placed plant label, we can see some new growth emerging from the soil like I was talking about earlier in the post. Some people see this as an invasive plant, and this is the reason why right here.
The cannabis plants on the floor got a little jelly cause their little sisters were getting face time and they weren't, so I knelt down and snapped one. Look how happy they are :)
That will do it for this tradescantia propagation post.
What do you all think of this variegated Tradescantia Bubblegum?
I would love to read your thoughts in that comment section!
Thanks for stopping by!
