I was looking on youtube about growing roses and found several posts where the grower dipped cuttings in honey and said they were easy to grow this way.
has anyone here used this technique for rooting cuttings.
I assume the honey seals the cut and helps prevent moisture loss.
Hi Bill,
Sounds like a tasty idea! I’ll have to try it out.
Jim Sproul
hi Jim
there are a lot of different ideas on youtube for growing roses and a lot of them are helpful to me. It’s good to have pictures of what they are talking about. Seems I understand better when there is a picture or video to go along with what they are talking about since I’m so new at rose growing. I’ve learned a lot from them. I found some how and why videos that answered a lot of questions that I was going to post here.
happy gardening
Bill
Youtube is amazing - I wonder if RHA could have a presence there??
Jim Sproul
This is a really interesting question.
Honey has a number of minerals and vitamins commonly included in plant tissue culture media.
However, the sugars in honey are different than you would usually use. For sugars, honey has primarily glucose, fructose and maltose with only a bit of sucrose (about 1%).
Sucrose is normally the sugar used in culture medium but the phloem of plants in the rosacea family is actually sorbitol, an alcohol of sucrose.
The question is, then, whether rose cuttings can substitute the sugars in honey for the sorbitol normally found in phloem to promote callus formation and rooting.
About six or seven years ago Katherine Kamo developed a medium for rose tissue culture that used 3% sucrose. Based on that I would guess that honey should work really well for rooting.
You might try mixing in a bit of rooting hormone, particularly the potassium salt of IBA if you can find some.
Don when you look at nector when collected from flowers by bees , it quite watery,when stored in the beehive its dehydrated to the consistency as we know is honey. Compared with a strong saline solution it would have similar osmotic abilities, therefore having an effect on micro organisms as an antiseptic. Also the sugars may contribute some energy source as well.
Honey is a natural antiseptic that could maybe keep the cuttings from rotting.
since the honey comes from flowers to begin with perhaps there is something in it that gets the seeds off to a good start after pollination is complete. If so then it seems it would help the roots also. I don’t know this to be true it’s just a thought.
Bill