Hie all, I was given some cuttings by a very generous member on this site and never had success rooting fig cuttings before, i took a gamble and rooted them in coir. I have heard of numerous stories of cuttings just rotting in coir and few stories of success. Rooting in potting mix or dirt did not work for me so i tried coir. Judging by the images below, i would say its a success! With this method, i got a 100% success rate.




How i did it:

Equipment:

1. Rectangular container with lid. No holes at the bottom necessary.
2. Coco coir. 
3. A warm place e.g near a freezer exhaust vent.
5. Fig cuttings. i was given mature hardwood cuttings about 8 inches in length
6. rooting hormone. (Not necessary but increases chances of root development.)

Method:
1. Hydrate your Coir until it fully expands.
2. Using your hands squeeze the coir to remove excess water. Just a squeeze or two until no water drips.
3. put a 1 inch layer at the base of the container.
4. Like in the image below, expose some cambium layer (green) and dip in root hormone (rooting hormone not necessary). Make sure the cutting is cut just below a node at a 45 degree angle to increase surface area for root development.


Rooting hormone used is a Yates brand. Just dip in and tap off the excess powder.

    
5. Lay the cuttings horizontally in the container and add about 2 inches of coir. I left the top 2 inches of the cuttings exposed.


6. Close the container and leave it near a warm source of air. Room temperature is fine. The freezer is in the garage so i placed them near the vent. The freezer is elevated from the ground so the warm air from the exhaust port of the freezer flows over the top of the container.


7. Wait. I opened the container every 5 days to check for rotting and i was very impatient as well!


8. When the leaves emerged and turned green i hardened them off by opening the container a few minutes a day and taking them outside and then eventually left it open and outside in a shady spot. 

 


9. When roots are well grown, pot them up and watch them grow!

 
   
I will be slowly exposing them to the sun and "babying" them before i leave them alone to their own devices.
I hope this helps people having issues with rooting in coir. This was my experience :)

Looks great, thanks for sharing with step by step pictures. Many of my cuttings rotted and died in coir, probably due to excess water. I am now mixing with perlite to add air pockets and potting soil for nutrients.

That looks terrific! Well done. With any cuttings of plants I dust them with powdered cinnamon to prevent fungal growth.

Love the thorough description of your process Figcolt. Great job rooting!

Good work! !!! Thats the trick. Remove all water that you can. I been using this method for a while

Nice job..!! I have about 300 cuttings in coir 10 days now. I hope mine look like yours soon.

One point of order, the green you exposed by scraping isn't the cambium. It's the bark. You are scraping off the outer layer of bark and exposing the inner layer. With dormant fig cuttings trying to expose the cambium would ruin the cutting. Exposing the cambium is easy on a rapidly growing fig when the bark is slipping. If you strip off the bark at that point you will find it much thicker than what you scraped off. The cambium is between bark and wood and isn't green. It's a cream color.

I'm not being critical. Just educating anyone who wants to graft or bud figs where cambium contact is essential.

One question, were there more roots where you scraped than elsewhere? Just because it's not cambium doesn't mean the scraping can't help. Roots arise all the time from the bark. In fact that's normal because the true cambium is exposed only on the cut end.

Again very nice work..!!

Thank you all for your kind words. I owe it all to this forum and the experiences that others have shared. Surprisingly i had great sucess rooting a rare type of African Kale from cuttings i received. Can you believe it? (although i mixed it with a bit of potting mix as i was running low on coir)
 

Great job!  You're well on your way.

Awesome detailed thread. Thank you and well done FigColt. I shall refer to this in the future when my two figs are big enough to take cuttings. I had been thinking of using coir. So you never added water after the initial soaking and wringing of the coir?

Thanks very much for the clarification FigColt. Makes sense. I hope to put your method to good use. 

no worries :)

Good info--thanks very much for writing it up and sharing. I think it's also important to use the coarse material rather than the fine stuff, because it gives good air circulation. Maybe some people's past failures were due to using fine-ground coir.

I rooted about 300 cuttings in coir starting March 1. They were rooted in an upright position with most of the cutting in the coir. On nearly every one the only roots that developed were right at the bottom of the cutting. In the pictures above the cuttings appear to have been laying horizontal and rooted all along the cutting.

I wonder if upright vs horizontal affects the position of root development?

FigColt, I don't know whether your speculation about horizontal vs vertical is correct, but it seems reasonable to me. I just started some cuttings in vertical pots made from 2-liter soda bottles; maybe I'll block the coir so it doesn't fall out, and try laying the pots on their sides, just to see what happens. Can't hurt!

I reckon that would be a great experiment to lay some of the bottles on the side and compare! If you do let us know, im quite curious as well.

After reading this thread on coco coir for cuttings, I went out and bought a compressed brick, and some perlite and went for it...

Nine are coco coir with most of the moisture squeezed out, three are perlite and two are soil...

I wanted to try my black / purple Lebanese in all three to improve my chances of getting roots, so we will see What works best for these cuttings, most of the rest are cuttings from an unknown tree I'm still trying to identify, currently calling it green giant!

I scraped down to the green and applied rooting hormones on about half, to see if it helps... the last batch of cuttings I used it on didn't root at all, but the soil or spagnum peat moss was to heavy or over compressed and couldn't breathe, so that was probably the reason.

That sounds like a nice setup laeotis, i wish you the best and if you can post some results? i am interested in knowing how perlite stacks up against the coir!

After reading positive experiences rooting with coir, I decided to give it a shot.
It was the worst method for me this season. From 10 cuttings, only 2 rooted after 5 to 6 weeks and the rooks were not very strong. I moved those two cuttings to perlite along with 4 other cuttings that were still good and all of them in perlite rooted very strong.
Do you think that the quality of the coir has any to do with my results?
I see everyone here talks about how good is coir and for me, it was horrible.