A while ago I blogged about trying to make sage cuttings from fresh sage left over from a recipe. The short answer is that it worked! As originally mentioned, I placed two cuttings in plain tap water, and another two cutting in tap water after applying rooting powder to them. One of the cuttings with no rooting powder did root, while both those that had the powder applied rooted. The cuttings with the root powder also had much further developed roots at the time that I planted them out. I planted one in my dry-herb container, and planted the other two in 7.5cm pots to give away.
Notice the new leaf growth in the centres of the cuttings shown below. The 7.5cm size of the pot should give you an idea of the scale.
Rooted sage in a 7.5cm pot
Rooted sage in my dry herb container
It took quite a while (about 1 month) for them to root. In fact, as luck would have it, I had just given up and bought sage seeds earlier the day that I saw the first roots forming. Poetic justice? In any case, if you’d like a packet of sage seeds do ask :)
Well, tonight I cooked with Sage for the first time. A Beef Casserole from “Huisgenoot Wenresepte 1”, I’ll write more about that later, Now I want to write about “stealing” plants from supermarket fresh produce isles! I did this before with store bought bell pepper seeds. Have not picked any fruit from them yet, but the plants have actually recently flowered and are starting to bear what looks like bell peppers. But if this works, the bell peppers will seem pedestrian :)
As it turned out, the only sage in the shop was fresh. Not only this, the producers of said sage seem to have been quite lazy about removing leaves from the stems. Hence, complete woody stems that almost seem like the could become cuttings were in the packet. I could not resist. I placed two stems in a bit of water only in one glass, and another with rooting-powder applied. I also removed most of the large leaves; someone once told me that maintaining leaves are expensive and that cuttings have better chances with fewer. In any case, I placed both glasses on a sunny sill, and now we wait!
Edit 21-08-2010
I forgot to mention that the rooting powder I used is “Dynaroot 2” which is distributed by Effekto. The active ingredient is 4-indole-3-butyric acid at a concentration of 3g/kg.