Air Layering - Taking A Step In The Right Direction

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Having to deal with a progressive drought over the past few years has really taken its toll on everything on the farm including the mango orchard, and the result of that is that I will need to replace quite a few trees that has died out completely - the problem with planting new trees from seed is that your trees will take quite a few years before they are mature enough to bare fruit, however this is where propagation comes in handy.

And today I will be taking you through the process of air-layering a tree in order to clone the mother plant, and by doing it in this manner in stead of doing cuttings ensures the success of your new tree by means of maintaining the support of the mother plant up until the point where your new tree is ready to be separated and planted out into its new home.

This procedure will work on the majority of hardwood fruit trees, and it is a great way to replace trees in an orchard or extend an already existing orchard, so lets jump right into this!

In the video below I have shared some of my progress on one of my air-layered plants.

The first step is to take a plastic bag with a width of about 15cm at least, I find that plain butcher bags work quite well, but you can use whatever materials you have available. Once you have your bag you want to fill that up one third of the way with a good quality potting soil, this you can buy from a plant nursery or home depot, or alternatively - if you have the know-how you can mix your own. This will be the substrate that newly formed roots will feed from, the mixture needs to be rich and reasonable moist (not wet).

  

  

The next thing that you are going to have to do, is using your hands compact the the soil inside the bag as firmly as you can then tie the bag as close as possible to the soil ensuring that you push out any excess air before you do, you want to end up with almost a airless brick of potting soil inside the bag, or the closest you are able to get to that. And by going through the next step you might be wondering why it was necessary to push the air out because the next step requires you to cut the bag open from side to side on the bottom line. the reason why you needed to squeeze the air out was simply because you needed the soil to be compact (even after cutting open, and be able to maintain a tight fit for what you are about to do with it - but for now, you will be putting the bag one side.


Your next quest - should you choose to accept it.... is finding the tree that you would like to propagate, this should be a mature tree that has healthy branches that you can use, I would say at least one and a half inches in diameter with established leaved at the end, measure approximately a meter from the tip of the branch inwards on the bark to the hardwood section, then find a nice clean piece of bark to start working on. make a ring bark cut around the branch and then another about two inches down from that A ring-bark cut simply means that you cut through the bark all around the branch - remember you are only cutting through the bark and not into the stem itself. Next you want to remove the bark between the two cuts, this includes the hard bark on the exterior as well as the softer bark layer beneath that, leaving the white exposed trunk on the branch, as you can see in the pictures below:

  

  

Here you will need to get some rooting hormone, for this project I am using a rooting gel that I find works great, it is for soft and hardwood plants, and the gel I find easier to apply than the hormone powders that does the same job, but again, you can use whatever you can find or already have at hand.


So whether you are going to use hormone powder or rooting gel, you want to apply it generously around the exposed trunk, then you are carefully going to wrap your cut open bag around the prepared area so that the exposed section of branch settles in the middle of the bagged soil, carefully fold the soil around the branch until the ends of the plastic bag reaches each other and the branch is surrounded by soil. then tape the bag in place using masking tape - seal the bag and make sure that it is securely in place - you should be able to get an idea of what this will look like in my video below.

And there you have it - A new tree in the making! I wish you all the best of luck patience and success should you try this, it has worked for me, and I certainly hope that it works just as well for you!

I hope that you enjoyed the video and that you will be back to share your thoughts. Until then - Much Love!



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