Has anyone ever tried to air layer a tissue culture tree? I have an ischia black tissue culture tree and since it grows so many suckers I tried air layering it but it does not want to grow roots. All my other air layers done the same way grew roots with no problem. Any one else ever had this problem?

Ryan,

I have tried a total of 9 air-layers on my Smith trees (not tissue cultured) over 2 years. Only one had some semblance of roots. These trees came from cuttings that were among the easiest and fastest to root when I received them and now they don't seem to want to propagate.

Are you sure they are suckers? The ischia blue I have was actually 4~5 separate
tiny plants in the pot. Of course, they are all clones, so genetically they'd be identical.
I think the tissue culture process makes it easy to accidentally plant more than one little clone
in a pot, especially if the worker is doing big numbers of plants on a production scale.

You might dig arround a little and see if the "sucker" is connected to the main plant, or
if it already has it's own separate roots that can be untangled. I separated one of the
two I bought into 3 separate plants. The other one I just clipped off the "suckers" at
ground level. They keep on coming back up, even a year later. They would be harder
to untangle the roots now that the main plant has grown quite a bit though.

Ischia blue is the only tissue culture I bought that did that multi plant "suckering". I
bought several of the other varieties and none of them did that. Maybe the nursery
worker in the ischia blue line has bad eyesight or fat fingers, lol.

I hope the "Ischia blue" ends up being synonomous with Ischia black, I think the jury still
out on that.

Your right, they probably aren't suckers, now that you say it they probably are separate plants growing together. Any ways I can't get them to grow roots in an air layer, usually my air layer take quick and grow well. I can't figure it out.

And that's funny, maybe he or she does have fat fingers, lol. I'm hoping the blue and black turn out to be the same. I have 2 tissue cultures from 2 sources, one is labeled blue and one is labeled black and the leaves look very similar.

It would be nice to know the source and identity of these tissue culture plants.
It has been suggested that Agristarts is the company actually propagating these
and their fig list does match what you see from several of the mail order nurseries
selling these. Agristarts doesn't list Hardy Chicago or Blue Ischia among their
fig clones though, and I have bought both those varieties as tc plants from Hirts.

I've been reading about home "kitchen" tissue culturing and think it would be a fun
thing to try. I have some experience making mushroom spawn, which is a similar
endeavour and not too difficult to do at home with some success. When it cools off
in the fall I think I'll try getting cultures of Black Madeira and CDDG isolated. I've also 
been reading about how viruii are eliminated from plant cultures, which would be an
interesting thing to try. 

I'm a little curious why Agristarts or some other commercial nursery with a tissue culture
lab hasn't seen the prices on EBay for some of the rarer varieties and bring those
into culture. It doesn't seem like a smart commercial venture to clone thousands of clean
brown turkeys when the same effort could make thousands of clean Maltese beauties, Black
madeiras, CDD's etc.

Hi quacklaster, hi James,
The key is bending the stems ( when the stem are young, it is easy). You have to slow the sap flow - with an upright stem it is harder to get it to root.
You could use something to keep the base of the stem (10-20 centimeters of length) buried under 10 centimeters of new dirt or (better) compost.
Build small walls with some wood to keep the dirt in that above ground frame full of dirt.
Sunday, I was attaching my "Goutte d'or" for some weight problem (Some call that brebas :) ) on the head of the stems, and there was a stem I had left bent like that. I took it to put it upright, but I felt some resistance... So it is rooted.
But, I will have to put a bottle around for the stem/ new tree to make roots that are not so close to the mother tree.