Planting annual flowers can be a frustrating experience: you spend a lot of money (either on seeds or starts) and invest all that time in planting them, only to see them die at the end of the season. That’s why you have to propagate new plants every year by cuttings.
Stop throwing money away on new plants every year || Overwintering annuals
There are two good reasons to learn how to propagate from cuttings, and the first is efficiency. It is quicker and cheaper to grow your own duplicate plants from another plant of yours, whether you grew it yourself or paid for it. Yes, you could grow more from seed, but there is a high risk of failed germination, and also the time it takes. Propagation is quicker, by many weeks.
The second reason is selectivity. Choose the plants that you really like and that do well and propagate them. You choose to make duplicates of the plants that are best suited to your garden. Not for nothing, but you can do this at the end of the season, bring those cuttings inside for the winter and pamper them so that in the spring you have a plant that is ready to go. At that point you can take cuttings from this new mother plant and within a few weeks you have plants ready for the garden. This is actually how commercial gardeners keep mother plants in their greenhouses all winter for propagation.
It’s so simple that it’s actually silly that we don’t all do it. The first step is to choose the right plant. You want one that does well and that you really like. At that point, you’ll want to take a 3-4 inch cutting. A few notes: You’ll want to use clean scissors or pruning shears. Spray them down with vinegar, Lysol, or a bleach solution beforehand. Once you have the cutting, strip all the leaves off the bottom half of the cutting.
