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PLANT PROPAGATION TECHNIQUES Adrian Arias Biology 109 October 28, 2005

There are many ways to create new plants; they can be created by sexual or asexual techniques.

Sexual methods:

This involves using techniques in a natural way which is done by seeds or spores. There are many advantages of using sexual methods of propagation, it is often a cheaper way of producing a large quantity of plants in a field, also by using sexual methods we can create a new kind of species and new cultivars, which these new plants can have different types of colors, forms, and sizes.

In some cases there are many disadvantages of sexual methods of propagation. They can delete our cultivars by slow growing and by taking longer to reach maturity. This change in variation is not a good way to propagate because the theme (form) of the plant may be lost.

We all know that the best way to plant a plant is by inserting a seed into the ground and to wait for it to grow. The most common way of propagating plants is by seeds. Many plants produce many large amounts of seeds that can be used at the right time to grow a new plant.

Using spores is a very hard but very good way to propagate a plant, spores are located in the dark spots on the underside of fern fronds or leaves, they are very small and seed like, they can be collected from mature brown sporangia by shaking the frond over a piece of paper.

The cutting process is done by taking a piece of plant material and bonding it to a new plant and using it to develop new items and roots to make a different plant, this technique should be applied by only using a healthy plant. After using this method, the best thing to do is to keep it at the right temperature and make sure that it has good nutrition, many of these methods are used in green houses where they can control temperature, watering, and supervision.

Layering is an old technique where the plants develop roots on stems which are still attached to the parent plant. This is a good and easy way to remove the plant without ruining the layering and putting the plant somewhere else. This process is used in laboratories that need plants in a very short time and that need a useful size to be analyzed.

Tissue culture is a technique that was developed by scientific studies that requires very sterile conditions, specific media and sophisticated laboratory facilities. This involves using the whole plant or it can also use a single cell or very small pieces of plant tissue, the parts that are easy to remove from the plant, like tips, leaf pieces, root pieces, lateral buts and stem section.

After a brief explanation of the different techniques of plant propagation I would like to talk about the most important one for me and the one that I found most interesting which are the Budding and Grafting techniques. These are very useful ways to produce new kinds of citrus on the oranges cultivars. These two techniques of propagations are asexual propagations. They use two or more plants, so they grow as one, for example in the orange industry many farms would mix regular oranges with the big royal lemon resulting in a better quality in color and size.

Asexual techniques:

Grafting is basically used for changing the variety of an existing orchard, or also by changing the cultivars. Limbs of trees can be replaced by grafting as well. Grafting works by using a scion with plenty of dormant buds that will produce new stems and branches.

Budding is a form of grafting, but instead of using a scion with plenty of dormant buds, you only use a single bud as the scion. Benefits of budding would include: forming stronger unions, faster, and also is more useful when scion material is limited. All of these techniques are great ways to propagate plants; it is really interesting how it all relates together.

Information taken from: Andromeda Botanical Gardens official website http://andromeda.cavehill.uwi.edu/Plant%20Propagtion%201.htm#Advantages%20of%20using%20seeds: