After decent success last year with just sticking cuttings in a light potting mix (lots of perlite), I've decided to do it again this year.  Last year I put quite a few cuttings in a large 5 gallon container and it was a pain untangling them once they all started growing, so I'm now putting them in smaller 1 gallon containers to eliminate that need.  Unfortunately, those 1 gallon containers are quite a bit shorter and so more of the cutting sticks out.  Rather than shorten the cuttings, I've thought of simply wrapping the exposed portion of the cutting in parafilm to prevent it from drying out prior to rooting.  

I've seen Jon mention that he did this with a partially rooted sucker before.  

Has anyone done this during the rooting process?  What successes or drawbacks did you experience?  I'm curious to see if this might have less of a chance of producing mold than covering the exposed portion with plastic baggies.

I've not used Parafilm this way but do not see why it wouldn't work.  It makes sense that the Parafilm would reduce or eliminate mold growth on cut ends.  No different than those that dip cut ends in wax and definitely easier.

I've done it a few times with figs and pomegranates and it worked out well.  It takes a little bit of time but I'm guessing not more than a minute or two which is very little when considering how much more time one spends in taking care of the plants.  I think it maybe also slightly slows down shoots from emerging which I think is a good thing.  I don't know about Parafilm, but I remember reading a paper on a product that is no longer made (Nescofilm) that I use and the oxygen exchange rate through the film is pretty high but moisture is retained so I think it's better than something like wax.

Does anyone has an update on this topic?
Browsing web on propagating fig by cuttings, I saw a photograph with 4-5 cuttings vertically planted in a container with the soil.
Above the soil, cuttings were wrapped in something that appeared like a parafilm tape.
On the other occasion I read a post where person claimed success rate of cuttings increased since he/she started to wrap cuttings.
My questions are:
when exactly you do wprapping?
In my limited rooting experience, my cuttings tend to fail after transferring rooted cuttings from bag to a cup with perlite/pine bark mix.
I could not figure out the cause (too dry or too wet) only 2 cuttings out of 12 heavily rooted ones made it.
since then:
(I wrapped semi-woody cuttings prior to placing them in sphagmum moss; this promoted bark decay in two days),
(now I have wrapped rooted cuttings just transferred from bag to clear cup with perlite/peat moss mix, to substitute for using a dome.
Can someone elaborate more?

Damir

I bury my cuttings, leaving the top 1/4" or so out.  If you wrap in parafilm you'll damage any buds that try to sprout.  I use tall plastic water bottles or gas station cups or tall rotisserie chicken bags from costco.  For the rigid plastic sometimes I'll stack 2 if needed.

    I wrapped several cuttings with parafilm at the beginning of this season(April) just to see if there was any advantage to using this technique...both wrapped and unwrapped cuttings seem to progress at the same rate with no problems with mold or dieback...I used a single layer of the parafilm and just stretched it out until the cutting was covered(from the soil line up to 1/2" from the top)...I noticed that any buds trying to grow under the parafilm just burst right through and started to produce leaves...I may use it again next season, but only for grafting purposes, or to "splint" branches that may have been bent or snapped while shuffling the fig trees in and out.

I originally posted this question so I thought it'd be good to follow up.  I had excellent success with this method last year.  I didn't use any intermediate steps with my cuttings (ie - first placed in damp sphaghnum moss or baggies with a damp towel or any of that).  Here's my process:

1. Started with pencil-width sized cuttings or slightly larger seemed to be the best.  I didn't wash or otherwise sterilize my cuttings and I received them from a variety of sources (taken myself or shipped from Ebay).
2. Stuck the cuttings in a straight Promix BX mix in half gallon or gallon pots, sometimes small treepots (4x4x9"). Sometimes added perlite beforehand as an experiment but it didn't seem to produce better results so I won't go to the trouble this coming winter.  The exposed portion of the cutting varied from 1-4".
3. Thoroughly wet the mix to the point where water began to run out.  I wouldn't say it was sopping wet but it was pretty darn wet.  When wetting the mix I did it via a faucet and made sure I didn't flood the container, but rather trickled it over the mix so as to not, in my mind, compress the mix too much.
4. Once the exposed cutting top had dried from the watering (sometimes half an hour or so, sometimes I'd leave the pots in the sink with a cover over them overnight to allow the tops to dry a bit better (and because I ran out of time), not sure if that was necessary), I'd wrap the exposed portion with parafilm.  As was suggested to me, I made sure that only one layer of parafilm was over each bud so that it wouldn't struggle to break through.  I never really had any problems with the parafilm constructing bud emergence.
5. The potted and parafilmed pots were placed on the basement floor (around lows 60s in temperature) until bud emergence (5-6 weeks due mostly to the temperature).  I would add a bit of water to the pots if the pots started to get pretty light or the soil had lost its dampness in the top few inches.
6. At first sign of bud emergence I'd acclimate them to fluorescent lights over a period of days.  
7. I left the parafilm on until I placed the pots outside, figuring that it was still doing its job and preventing some moisture loss through the bark.

• Tree pots seemed to do very well and the first sign of bud emergence happened much earlier.  I used the ones by Stuewe that are approximately 4x4x9" and the cuttings came from Herman.  I don't really like the band pots because of the large openings at the bottom and the bigger mess they tended to make.  Perhaps the cutting source made more of a difference but I liked the tree pots so much (for compactness and success rate) that I'm going to probably use this type of pot solely from now on.  Perhaps the buried depth made a significant difference too.  The treepots allowed for 6+ inches to be buried with just an inch or two (one or two buds) exposed at the top.
• My success rate (anecdotally) is probably 60% or more.  The cuttings that tended to fail with this method seemed (also anecdotally) to be the long and skinny kind.
• I've read a bit more on taking cuttings that I will try out this year.  One of the piece of advice mentioned taking cuttings close to or on an actual bud at the bottom so as to not expose any pith which may lead to premature desiccation.  Another piece of advice was to take the cuttings in the late fall as opposed to spring.  This is almost a must in my climate as much of the cutting wood may be damaged by the spring.  Anyone have cuttings-taking advice?
• Using this method of growing out cuttings in my basement and then potting up in late May/June lead to very significant growth by fall (3-5' of strong growth).  I attribute a lot of that to my potted plants being on drips, the use of 5-1-1 potting mix and time-release fertilizer.

I've also used this method much more recently, especially on green cuttings.  I'm in an arid climate so I think it's more important here than in many areas to help prevent desiccation of the cutting.

I am mostly using 3" square x 9" tall pots now which have a large opening on the bottom because I picked up several thousand of them for free.

Yea, I imagine it would be much more critical to prevent desiccation in your climate.  I will say that we have a dehumidifier in our basement which does keep humidity levels pretty low, plus the furnace is located down there so it stays pretty dry in the winter.  With this method I haven't had problems with cuttings drying out.  I'm trying to adopt a very minimalist/low work/low cost/high return approach when it comes to starting cuttings so I'll continue to experiment this year to see if i can cut any more corners.

One step I'd like to avoid is having to keep them in the dark until they start to push out leaves.  Does anyone immediately stick their cuttings under lights?  I suppose those with a greenhouse don't have much of a choice other than to provide light to the cuttings unless shade cloth is used.  I don't know if there's much of a benefit to keeping the cuttings in the dark other than perhaps the theory that they'll put more energy into root growth?  I'm not sure that's true.

Nice information, thanks for sharing.

Best,
Tam