Starting new chrysanthemum plants from mother stock is specifically one of the many gardening arts that fascinate growers with this plant. Its ease of rooting from simple shoots gives eve the most novice of gardeners a strong advantage to success. Being a plant that is quick to root, it can easily be assumed there isn't much to learn beyond the basics of mum propagation but that couldn't be further from the truth.

What is the best size cutting for propagation?

For beginners, a 2-3+ inch shoot will provide an adequate cutting to propagate. And while that size is always our recommnedation to those trying this method at home with their own small gardens, we are producting thousands of propagations - so we wanted to find the ideal size for our scale of production. We began to take our cutting much smaller- closer to the 1/2 - 1 inch length from terminal shoots. The size of cuttings continued to be something we perfected and we discovered something else in the process.

What we learned when we started taking smaller cuttings:

Using such small cuttings lessened the stress stretch response in the cuttings, providing us with much sturdier stem growth and abundantly more root development. While this method did mean we had to adjust how long these plants were on the bench for growth (on average this added 2 weeks to the final plug size), we realized that the root system and plant structures were much more robust than their stuck cutting counterparts. 

Is there another advantage to taking smaller shoots from the mother plant?

The cleanest DNA of your mother plant resides in the terminal tips of the shoot at micropscopic levels. While we aren't propagating in laboratories we can still improve the purity of the plants we replicate by using a smaller cutting method for propagation. 

We found that all the varieties had their own unique propagation patterns.

However, this method did present some challenges for some varieties over others where root development seemed to almost stall. Annie Girl and Evening Glower were two varieties that had a hard time setting roots at this level. But varieties like Amber Harry Gee, Brilliant, and Feeling Green created impressively better plants.

These small discoveries along the way continue to help us improve our methods and build a more enlightened community of mum growers. We have found that a lot of this information on specific varieties doesn't exist online, or in books. While we don't have all the answers, (in fact, we don't have many answers at all) the more we work with these incredibly rare and unique varieties, the more we find we have a passion for capturing this data so that we can share it with all of you!

Help support The Mum Project by growing these mums along with us! To learn more about our largest project to date, read all about The Mum Project here.