So I have a lot of cuttings and have tried many methods with no luck.
Right now I have cuttings in baggies with moss and some in totes with moss and had some in cup with bottom layer perlite middle soil and top pearl light in covered tote. I'm noticing ones in cup had some fuzzy on it cleaned them and put in moss.
What the heck am I doing wrong ahhh.
To humid

I like to wrap the top of the cutting in Saran Wrap, and plant the cutting directly into a cup with slightly damp  ProMix HP.  I put all the cups on a seed starting mat, and let them root.

Hi James. 

I know first hand that the whole process of rooting from cuttings can be frustrating. I only recently started and had some real disappointments.  There may be as many rooting methods as there are members on this forum but every on seems to have some common elements. Not too wet. No direct sun etc.

A couple of questions:

How long has it been since you began the process?

What length and diameter of cuttings are you using?

How many nodes do you your cuttings have both in and out of the soil?

One thing that I've found is working really well for me is a technique normally used in air-layering. That is to carefully remove the bark from the cutting on about 2 to 3 cm at the bottom of the cutting. This seems to make it easier for the roots to break out and provide a larger area for them to do so.

If you can, perhaps post some pictures of what you're dealing with.

Any method where the cutting gets both air and moisture will work.  The only problem with moss is that if the roots start getting the microscopic hairs they'll stick to the moss. When you up pot the cuttings the moss will hold too much water and drown the roots.  

If you use a perlite method you have to rinse or winnow all of the dust out before you use it or the dust will fill the air spaces between the bigger chunks.  The dust will hold water and drown the cuttings.  If you get very moist air to a cutting in good condition it will usually root.

OK. This is a good place to start. While I've had some narrow cuttings do well, the thicker ones - while they took longer- did produce stronger in the long run.

I am curious - Who what do you mean By 4 days? What was 4 days?

I'm wondering how long from the time you put the cuttings in the soil until now?

Cuttings were cut the same day that I put some in the 3 layer cups some in water and some in moss 3 days later fuzzy showed up on the cups 3 days later on few in moss water ones have no fuzz yet.
I took all cuttings out and cleaned them and put all in moss today and covered this time I put few vent holes for air to escape

I root my cutting in moist coconut coir - you can look it up in the forum. Just made sure to completely squeeze out all the water you can before placing them in a lidded container. Then vent the container daily for an hour. AVOID too much moister, the cuttings only need a humid environment to root, once rooted they can be placed in 50% promix and 50% perlite (pre-wet mixture before potting up- not saturated) in a humidity bin which has its lid cracked from the start.

What I meant was, how long have you been waiting for roots to appear in total? While it can be just weeks, I have cuttings that are still very viable but have been waiting since early September and still haven't rooted. They're just slow. As for the fuzzies, you may want to darken the environment.

Warm will certainly Help growth. Keeping the medium (soil) dark will aid in keeping
the fuzzies and other moody stuff away but the exposed, upper cutting will need some
light. Your cuttings in the furnace room (if not under grow lights) should be in a
window.

What I'm doing now is the clear cup-in-cup method below. The clear cup with holes allows me to check for new roots. Keeping it dark within the second cup seems to prevent the growth of algae, mould or nastiness.

The medium is an off the shelf Fafard seedling mixed with another 50% peat moss to make it drain better. This is working for fairly well right now.

In my next batch I plan to try adding a clear cap to hold in the humidity.

 

LOL! I think I got the idea from something you wrote in another post a while back. I'd not seen this one with the complete instructions.

I think the 18 oz cup has a big advantage over my puny 8 oz cups. More of the cutting in the medium and definitely the clear humidity cap.

On this last batch I did half with - half without rooting hormone. (Wilson Root Stimulator gel) The ones with the hormone rooted just a bit faster, however the overall success rate was even. I'll probably move away from using it if the success keeps up.

Another thing I think the 18 oz cups will help me with is potting up. I started a lot of cuttings in the fall and continuing into winter. Many of the cuttings quickly outgrew the small cups. I found I had to pot them up to plastic peanut butter jars. (I just couldn't fit all the 1 gallon pots in my windows) I'm glad I'd been saving those. I drilled holes in them and pressed the lid on the bottom to catch any draining water. An 18 oz cup probably would hold me over until spring.