I do it wrong.
I take cuttings from willows, sometimes 3-4 feet long, usually in the spring. I either put them in mud, or put them in water until they root well. Then plant them.

they'll keep leaves for a couple weeks. Or grow leaves if I cut them right before they should put out leaves. But within 2-3 weeks, the leaves die and fall off. They look dead for a while until the roots start growing. Then leaves come back.

In 2020 I did some I started in a bucket.


I planted them late June, right before Kansas went to 100 F temps. But I burried a 1 gallon jug with each one, and ran a 1/4" tube from the sprinkler system to each jug. So when i watered the lawn, a burried jug filled with water beside each tree. Even newly planted, they were very happy in the 100 degree weather.



1 year later:


2 years later:


tonight:

If your gonna plant right into dirt, get some rooting hormone.

Do you mix it with water?

I bought some rooting hormone at the local farm store.

Auxin is the most common roofing hormone. If it's a powder, you dip the freshly cut and scored cuttings in it and then put them in soil, usually after poking a hole wit something else, so you don't knock the powder off. If it's a jel, you dip and plant the same way. I've only worked with the powdered Auxin.

Keith

The cuttings I planted last year appear to have failed. It wasn't for lack of rain. Maybe I planted at the wrong time of year.

What did you try cloning?

I have around 3000 cuttings growing now. I need to do some more still.

Keith

Red osier dogwood, basswood, maple, aspen & willow.

I've only ever did some willow, was pruning some branches and stuck a 3/8" branch in the dirt and forgot about it, darn thing took off....dug it out to move, lost most of the roots and replanted it, took off again, wife didn't like where I put it, (imagine that), re planted it, about 2" thick then, off it goes and is now 15'.....all that to say this, I don't think you can kill a willow, lol,

I don't have willow & am not sure I want willow, but I'd like to try other cuttings again, despite complete failure the 1st time around. Maybe I just need to get them in the ground instead of 1st putting them in a vase under a grow light. I maybe tried the wrong time of year. I tried numerous species.

With ground thawing, I suppose some of you are starting to think about planting cuttings, such as red osier dogwood

I stuck some Elderberry cuttings in the Fall from Remembrance and will stick many hundreds more in March along with button bush, black raspberry, American bittersweet, kousa dogwood, pussi willow, hybrid willow, and several types of grapes. I should receive a box, that the Post Office lost, from Beaverpeeler containing 5 types of elderberry, 3 types of grapes and an Italian plum tomorrow, which I'll immediately plant.

In the next couple of weeks, I am going to put many hundreds of cuttings from apple rootstock, varieties of apples, 2 types of pears, Montmorency cherry trees and 5 varieties of hazelnuts in medium in IBC totes, on heat mats, after treating with very high levels of Auxin. I'm hoping for at least a 30% rooting take.

I'm going to do softwood cuttings in June of hazelnut and some other nut trees.

I'm going to try grafting named varieties of black walnut, English walnut, butternut, heartnut and buartnut on black walnut rootstock this Spring.

I am cold striating Osage orange to graft che onto.

I should have a huge number of new black walnut, hazelnut, apricot and heartnut seedlings if all goes well. I've got lots of persimmon, apricot, buckeye and cold hardy almond seedlings from last year and a fair amount of Northern pecan, shellbark hickory, redbud, serviceberry, Haskap and raspberries.

Keith

Hundreds of thousands. Grew up on a wholesale nursery. We had 15 acres of hoop greenhouses where we grew and sold " liners" - what the wholesale nursery trade called one year old rooted cuttings. We would take cuttings from a hundred varieties of trees and grow them until they were ready to be planted in the field and ship them to commercial nurseries around the country.

Every variety gets done a little difetently: leave 2 leaves or three, cut leaves in half or don't, cut rooting end square or at an angle, make a small wound on the side of rooting end or don't, propagate in sand beds or peatmoss dip in rooting hormone or dont.