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6 articles
A November windowsill experiment with Christmas cactus cuttings asks whether a two-joint section really roots more reliably than a single segment. The answer depends on how warm, bright and patient your sill is.
A ripe banana on the windowsill is the usual suspect when cuttings sulk. I put identical cuttings beside fruit and away from it to see whether ethylene deserves its reputation, or whether we are blaming the wrong thing.
Cutting just below a leaf joint is the most repeated rule in propagation. A small blind trial on a cool conservatory shelf tested nodal and internodal cuttings across three forgiving species. The node helped, but not for the reason many gardeners think.
Can a single leaf really become a new houseplant on a dim UK windowsill? This league table sorts the reliable from the wishful, with honest odds for African violet, begonia, snake plant, ZZ plant, pothos and peperomia.
A month-by-month UK cutting calendar built around day length, sap movement, wood ripeness and soil temperature rather than folklore. Use the dates as prompts, then let the plant veto them.
November is the cheapest month in the propagation calendar: no heat, no mist, no fuss, just dormant stems and a gritty pot. Seven reliable shrubs to take hardwood cuttings from now, plus a simple upright-versus-inverted test that shows exactly how much a cutting cares which way up it is.