PROPAGATING Plants, lessons from local green thumbs

Last week I had the privilege of spending way too much time in Allen Sterling & Lothrop, a falmouth greenhouse and boutique. Being a lifelong Skillens super fan i had always noticed this shop while driving down main street but never stopped in – and I’m SO glad that I did on this day!

We needed a couple of plants with pretty specific elements. One needed to be low, i.e. growing outward rather than upward and also could withstand tons of direct sunlight. One that would grow in a draping fashion that was also good with low light and easy to propagate, and a couple other specific requests. While I felt a little silly rattling all of this off, the folks at at Allen Sterling & Lothrop didn’t flinch. There was no judgement for my wonky rambling, just eager support. They were calling coworkers on the phone, walking me through every plant in the green house and cracking jokes. It was honestly a wonderful experience. So that’s it there’s my cheerleading….. 10/10 recommend this spot!

Now – on to propagating! some of these tips are information sourced from my friends at Allen Sterling & Lothrop and some of them are directly from the book The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual. We needed to propagate some ivy and string of pearls for a couple of our clients and the folks at Allen sterling & Lothrop explained that propagating string of pearls is super super easy! Just trim the piece of healthy plant off, get it wet and pot in fresh soil. You can use plant push pins to hold the stem down while it takes root also.

For Ivy it’s a bit trickier. You need to trim off a segment, clear the lower portion of the stem of leaves and then soak it. Once wet, you need to dip the stem into rooting hormone before planting it in soil. If you do not have rooting hormone there are other options. One of them being pure cinnamon, which I used while propagating these plants.

This time around I wanted to have some fun experimenting so I followed instructions for propagating into soil, but I also added some clipping to water to see if they take root faster! We shall see!