Hormone rooting powders, do they work for you?

I don't bother with them any more. Haven't noticed any difference with or without HRP.

I used to use it, don't any more. Mind you I don't try and take cuttings of anything really difficult.

Just put the cuttings in a glass of water & plant up when you see roots. Saves on cost............

I've done rooting-in-water but I have then found it difficult to transition plants from Water to Soil and lost too many, so now I root in something more akin to the compost they will grow on in. Folk with more time available than me may have no trouble with the transition though?

I take the view that it can't hurt (and thus I've never done a half-an-half comparison), so better to use hormone rooting "powder". However, I reckon that a pot lasts a decade or two, and there is no way that the hormone efficaciousness will last that long - plus who's to know how long the pot has been sitting on the shelf before I bought it?

I now only use Clonex Rooting Gel



CLONEX® | Growth Technology

it has a Best Before date on the bottle, so I know it hasn't been hanging around before I get it; Best Before date is about 12 months, so I treat myself to a new one each year, and buy it from the biggest online Hydroponics store I can find, to be sure they have a high turnover and I get one that is fresh

I tip a little gel into a tall narrow glass (an old Shot Glass, the pair of which dropped & broke many years ago), and then dip cuttings into that, i.e. I never dip cuttings direct into the pot. You are supposed to do that with Powder too, but I never did ... seemed too tempting to just dip into the huge opening in the pot instead!

I have seen, periodically, a Red or Purple version, for semi-hardwood cuttings, but never actually found a suitable source to buy from

ON a slight tangent: I have used Gel2Root in the past. Its a sort of yoghurt pot containing rooting gel (rather like the Agar used in micro-propagation) with a tinfoil lid. Poke the cutting through the tinfoil and That's It. I used it for harder-to-propagate things with success, but its become hard to find in the local garden centres, and I haven't been bothered to buy it online ... I do still have a few lying around in the drawer, which I would use if I had something tricky / precious that I wanted to propagate. For folk new to cuttings they might be worth a try.



I treated myself to a mist propagation bench a few years ago (why are they so expensive? ) and that has revolutionised my strike rate

I tried using the water method with something last year, changed the water every day but the cutting became slimy..... I dunno if this is normal as Ive never took cuttings before so I binned it.

This year Ive took cuttings from my blueberry plant and from my aunty's Rhododendrons (they havent got rooting powder on) oh and I took a cutting from an elderberry tree dunno if that will take but its worth a go

IME Water doesn't work well for many things, but there are something that root easily in water (but I think its probably fair to say that anything that roots easily in water will just plain "root easily"

I've put a few tree cuttings and some raspberry cuttings in two buckets of water.

Didn't get around to potting them up. Good thing really as the ones I put in the ground are totally dead and the ones in a bucket of water are going great guns.


No rooting powder or honey involved.

Also, I was wondering is it normal for all the leaves to drop off the cutting after a few weeks?

I tried to root hydrangea in water and didn't see roots 3 weeks in so I recut the cuttings and tried powder and they just rotted. I'm assuming this is because of the water issue I had.
I'm currently rooting 4 Rose cuttings using powder and they are still alive. I know they won't produce
Many roots until spring but they are shooting out from the leaf nodes which must be a good sign?

Depends, but in general I would see that as a bad sign (but in Autumn it could be "normal"). Are the leaves drying out at all? I would cover with a plastic bag over the shoots and secure with an elastic band around the pot. Put a few short sticks in the pot to keep the bag out of direct contact with the leaves. Or mist them several times a day.

Rooting powders work, some plants they are not strictly necessary but can help.

In a rooting powder or gel the active ingredient is usually one of 2 chemicals, Indole Butyric Acid or Napthalene Acetic Acid, there are others , the rest of the powder is usually mainly something used as a bulking agent such as fullers earth, but also often contains a fungicide such as Captan , this will stop the cuttings rotting

The problem with rooting hormones is that they need to be used at the correct levels, too much or too little and it wont work correctly, this is why the powders are so dilute to make it easy to use the correct level.

Certain plants work better with certain hormones some at very high levels and some at low levels , so the stuff in the garden centres will not always work best on every plant....but it will help!

Some plants don't need them due to the level of hormones in the plant.

Its easy to understand how they work if you do a search on the internet for micro propagation ( also called tissue culture ) , there are videos explaining it, the principal is the same ( apart from they also use other things to give roots and branches, most of it can be used on cuttings.....micropropagation is in reality just tiny cuttings )

Cells when they form have not decided what to do ( at certain points on the stem like leaf nodes and buds ) , adding various hormones can trigger them to form roots, shoots or stems , the added rooting hormone such as IBA or NAA triggers them to form into roots adding a chemical such as kinetin or cytokinin will form shoots

A lot of plants will root without anything though, all these chemicals or similar are in the plant already....not necessarily in the right place in high enough quantity to root a plant before it dies though.

It means they are still alive ... but that's all, sadly.

I only been experimenting with Mint, Rosemary and a Blueberry branch that broke.

No luck with the Rosemary and Blueberry yet(probably wrong time of the year too).

Mint is easy to root so probably don't need any rooting powder. I plant the cuttings in plastic bottles to keep the humidity, Mint roots form above the soil line for me as well in the soil(humidity perhaps?).

I used to plant one cutting per plastic bottle but had trouble finding if the cutting rooted without taking it out so ended planting several at the edge of the bottle.

My latest experiment is planting in used baton ice lolly(similar to tip tops but stiffer plastic). They about the same width as a test tube and I considered they be good root trainers for whatever cuttings I take.

You should probably remove 99% of all leaves off cuttings.
They will lose a lot of water through leaves so it's worth taking most off. I leave a small one at the top usually.