Hello:

So, I've had good luck getting most of the twigs rooted and transferred from Sphagnum moss bags to soil and pots.   Some of them had green sprouts off the twigs right away and are growing well.   However, some of them that only had green buds have stalled.  They are rooted and just not popping their buds and some of the buds just dry up.   I've checked the root ball and the roots still look ok.  Not white, but light brown.  Fig roots are usually this color though and they look healthy.

Is this normal?   What do I do?  Just wait? Put them back in a warm storage tote.

Oh, & this is why I still claim the "Newbie Title" by the way.

I would take roots over green growth at a cutting level any day of the week. i have some cuttings with sprouts and no roots and some as you say with healthy roots and no sprouts. as long as the roots are alive you will get sprouts in due time. some just may take awhile.

My Maltese Falcon stalled like this since about end of november and it's finally slowly sprouting, I just left it and kept watering it, I don't know if it will keep growing but I just left it out in the light with the rest of the figs.  If you scratch the side of the cutting slight with your finger nail then you can see if it's still green, which I bet it is and if those buds never beak there should be some dormant buds that will come out.

I agree with Martin, leave it alone and stop smothering the poor thing silly :-)

Great job by the way. And for what it is worth, you got the basics down. I am happy for you

Jennifer

did i mention my Socorro Black cutting didn't put out leaves till 4 months later? i'm surprised it's still alive. it was one of two tiny cuttings that i had so i didn't give up. i'll be pumping fertilizer this year and hope to get some figs off of it by next year. 

Dan, Looking at the pics everything looks fine, just need a lttle patience. The only thing that I don't like is that you left way to much of the cutting above the soil line. I can see where you started the roots in spag. moss, then you didn't use all of them. They just died off above the soil line.  You really need to bury the cutting to the top node. Sometimes I even have the last node half under the soil. You don't get a bigger tree by having more cutting sticking out of the cup. I not saying you can't grow a cutting like you have it, just saying, give yourself better odds. You really need to find taller cups or container. The baggy's are cheap enough. I have some bags that I could send you if you want to try them, just let me know by pm or email.

luke

By the way, it's not to late to bury more of the cutting.

I did scratch testing today on some cuttings I started in first week of September, still green, no leaves, don't know about roots, crazy, cuttings taken off the same limb, with same everything are 8" tall with 4-5 leaves!  LSU figs are really crazy sometimes, some are great and some are really slow, no rhyme or reason to them.

Patience is the key

this one is Conadria Paradise Nursery. it's been in the bin for.. i don't remember. but i have 3 out of 36 cups that i moved that's not doing anything. i noticed it today while airing the bin. 

give it time. 

I agree with the posts suggesting not to worry about the (no-) shoots if there are plenty of roots as is the case with your cutting.
I had the same situation with a number of cuttings. The roots were increasing but the bud at the top node did swell a bit in the first week but then stopped at that size for many weeks. I had no concern knowing that apical dominance does not work at this stage so some other bud at a node inside the rooting medium must have taken over and growing. After a few weeks I saw the rooting medium bulging upward at two different locations and then saw two shoots emerging from the soil while the main cutting stayed as it was with the top bud still alive but almost dormant. 

ifferant cuttings root and shoot at differant times, even cuttings from the same tree. i have some sals c and sals g cuttings that some are rooted and leafy and some dont even have roots but bursting buds. others have roots and no top growth.

i found my  problem at first with rooting cuttings was wanting to know what was going on. i assumed if it was growing on top its growing on bottem. i have killed many cuttings in my day looking to see if they had roots starting. (baggie method never worked for me) so i always plant right in a pot. now i am using 16 oz clear cups from walmart. i have lost 5 out of 200 and thats only because i scored to deep. see my post on score rooting in perlte. now that i can look in and see roots without disterbing them my root rate has jumped dramaticly.

5 in 200? that is fabulous... good for you!

It looks fine, and the roots look good, IMO.
Leave it alone and let it grow in its own time.

   Question for Luke (lukeott).  I'm new at this, so this question is not a challenge, but I'm just trying to clarify things in my own head.  In your reply #9 you said that it's still not too late to burry the cutting deeper.  I've always been told that when you transplant that you should never bury deeper than the original soil line, that it will damage or kill the plant.  Does that problem only apply to more mature trees and not to cuttings?  I have wanted to go deeper with some of my cuttings when transplanting from 32oz. deli cups to 1gal. pots.  But I always hesitated to do so because of what I thought was the rule of thumb about soil line.  Maybe Luke or some other members could help me out with this one.  Thanks.

Just read all the response.   Thanks for the advice.   If there is one thing I've learned with figs, it's you have to have patience.  They take their sweet time doing everything, but patience is not always a virtue I have.

I'm dealing with 5" pots along with 8-10" cuttings.   I had one cutting die because the cutting was touching the bottom of the container.   It wilted similar to a post I saw last night.   When I popped it out the stem had rotted.   Too much water was also a combination of the problem there.   Long story, but I try to put at least 1/2" of soil in the bottom of the pot first when planting.

I shall just wait I guess.

Here's an update.

Most of the figs that have went south are White(woody) Genoa from an Ebay seller.  Out of 10, I may get 1 good plant.  I'm not really worried on missing out on this variety, but it's the principle of the whole thing.  I don't like failure. The wood is black and the sprouts shrivel and die.  Roots turn brown and the plant just seems to run out of gas and die.

Today was a frustrating and dissapointing day.   On the ones that are not doing anything, I decided to pop the cuttings out of their pots and look for roots.  Several are rooted fine, but still just sitting there.   However, I did find rotting:  1  Maltese Falcon (my only one), 2 Black Mission, several White (Woody) genoa.  You could say too wet, but I haven't done anything different that what I did with other varieties that are doing fine.   Due to storage of energy in the cuttings or variability beyond my control? 

Attached are pictures of the Black Mission.   This one came from a friend, and while Black Mission is not that unique of a fig, I was so looking forward to having success with it.

the two photos are a month apart. 

Cut it in half get rid of the rot put it back in the moss and let it root again and way more roots then in the first photo you just posted like 10 times that amount bigger then a golf ball worth of moss stuck to the cutting and then pot it up into perlite soil mix with the moss stuck to it ...It looks way to wet for my IMO.

You might try adding more perlite to your mix once it roots.  What is your ratio now?

Get Physan 20 and water with that for the mold, I do agree that with most everyone that leaving it and watering very very careful is a good way to go, but I also like your idea of putting it into a warmer location to see if that doesn't wake it up. Oh and it is very likely that you do have shoots under the soil that are advancing faster than the visible stagnent shoot 

I like to snip off the sprouts (and even the terminal bud) until roots form so the plant puts all of it's energy into roots rather than trying to develop leaves.  If you do this though make sure you cover the spots you cut with grafting wax, otherwise it will commit energy to sealing the wound.

Dan,

Too much water might have been your culprit. But it also may have been soil and temperature. I have been using Perlite/MG Seed Starting mix with my cuttings in a 70/30 or 80/20 proportion. Potting soil and mixes are not sterile and are usually inoculated with mold and fungus spores unless they are sterilized. Once cupped, temperatures should be maintained about 75 deg F for fast root growth, at least for the first few weeks. I usually water the mix and let it drain, before potting the cutting and never "water in" just tap lightly on bottom of cup. Too much moisture will always cause root rot, until the roots are established.

The picture of the rooted cutting shows a well rooted and callused cutting, which should have grown nicely once placed in the cup. Did you use rooting hormone on the cutting?

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The pictures of your rooting and growing procedures look good.

From my initial rooting experiments last May, I found that temperature and moisture are the two factors that affect rooting the most. The cuttings will rot if they are too wet and or too warm. Being cold 50-60 degrees will only slow down rooting if the mix is not too wet (though it may increase chances of mold)

Measure the actual temperatures at the cuttings, you may be surprised.

It is hard, but I try not to mess with it until I'm really sure it's ready to transplant.  Popping it in and out of the pot every day to check the roots when it's still young could break roots, weaken the cutting, and encourage rot. 

Vince, When your starting cuttings the first thing you hope for is roots, because that's what feeds the plant. Doesn't always work that way, but you want to have the most possible chance for roots to grow. If you look closely at one of Dan's first pictures, he had roots growing near the top of the cutting. But when planted in short cup, the roots just died, instead of feeding the plant. You ask about planting and what is normal for other trees or bushes. Fig cutting are not the same. They do not have an established root ball that form into it's desire depth or a trunk. Once the cutting has taken enough to transplant into a larger container or ground, you can plant all of cutting if so desired, just leaving your new growth above soil level. If you look back in past post, you will see how some members do not like the shape from a single branch growing sideways. So when they transplanted, they buried it on it's side, so the branch is sticking straight up. I'm not very good at explaining with words, so hopefully I made sense.


luke