Multiplication and Division: How to Reproduce your Garden Plants for Free
Most people are now aware that eating lots of vegetables, especially leafy greens, is beneficial to our health. Unfortunately, buying enough vegetables for good health can be too expensive for many low income families. Growing vegetables in home kitchen gardens is often promoted as a solution. This strategy hasn't always lived up to its promise. Most of these efforts focus on a handful of well-known vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, lettuce, peppers, and carrots.
A serious obstacle for tropical gardeners is that seed for these crops usually needs to be bought each year. This can be too expensive for many low-income families. This is especially true for hybrid, organic, and genetically modified seed. In addition to being expensive, the availability of locally adapted seed varieties is very limited in much of the tropics and browsing through mail order seed catalogs is rarely an option. Another problem is that seeds can quickly loose viability in hot and humid environments.
This presentation will show some techniques for growing bumper crops of high nutrition leafy vegetables in small home gardens, all while keeping the cost of buying seed to a minimum.
Four of the best ways to get leafy vegetable plants for free or nearly free are:
- Saving your own seed
- Transplanting volunteer plants
- Making stem cuttings of perennial plants
- Dividing roots of perennial plants
Saving Seeds
Commercial vegetable seed production is a complex art, especially if you are trying to develop plant varieties with particular traits. Fortunately, many plants with nutritious leaves produce abundant seed that can be easily saved with little concern for maintaining genetic purity.
These include hyacinth or lablab beans and winged beans, Seminole pumpkin and luffa gourds, amaranth and quail grass. Most seeds are easiest to save on a clear dry day when the seed pods are fully mature but before they have opened or are showing any signs of mold. You can make sure your seeds are dry enough to store for next season by putting some of them in a sealed jar with a teaspoon of salt. If the seeds are not dry enough some salt will cling to the side of the jar and to the seeds. If the seeds are adequately dry the salt will just sit in the bottom of the jar.
Welcoming Volunteers
In gardening, volunteers are useful plants that grow on their own without being intentionally planted. If they are not useful they are usually called weeds. The most common source of these garden volunteers is probably annual plants from the past season dropping their seed into fertile soil. Another good source is when new plants sprout up around the edge of compost piles from last season's discarded plants.
Almost without fail I get plenty of these free sets from vine spinach, quail grass, Hopi amaranth, cleome, jute, luffa and several other vegetable crops every spring. Not only are volunteers free, but they have already figured out when to sprout in your location.
The crowded young plants can then be can be carefully dug up and transplanted where they have enough room to grow. As with these luffa gourd volunteers on the edge of our compost pile. We usually will water the transplants well, then mulch around them, and provide them with shade for at least a few days until they can become rooted into their new home. Just these two luffa volunteers grew this wall of foliage and yielded about 2 dozen gourds.
Starting New Plants from Stem Cuttings
One of my favorite ways to get new leafy vegetable plants with no cost is to make stem cuttings from perennials. This is very easy to do with a big variety of perennials that have high nutrition leaves. Aibika, Chaya, Katuk, Longevity spinach, and Moringa are five of the easiest plants to reproduce from stem cuttings.
Before you start getting cutting it is a good idea to dip your tools in a 10% solution of household bleach. This greatly reduces the chance of transmitting plant diseases.
For most of these plants we take a cutting about 8-10 inches long from a healthy, actively growing stem. We then trim off most of the leaves. A few left at the top are OK. Make sure you plant your stem cutting with the growing tip facing up. Being planted upside down is very confusing for a new plant.
We often start new stem cutting in large plastic cups. Make sure they have good drainage in the bottom and fill them with potting soil. Push the cutting in as far as it will go and press the soil firmly around it. Then water well.
Moringa can be easily started from either seeds or stem cuttings. We usually take stem cutting about 3 feet (or 1 meter) long and plant them directly in the soil with about 1/3 of their length below ground.
Here is a tray of stem cuttings ready to go and the leaves that were stripped off ready to go to the kitchen. We usually will let these stem cuttings root and grow in the cups for a couple of months before they are planted out in the garden or field.
Root Division: You Divide; They Multiply
Another way to get free perennial plants is by root division. Some plants with edible leaves, like garlic chives or malanga, will grow until they are overcrowded. You can alleviate this overcrowding by digging them up, carefully separating the roots and replanting them with more room to grow. They will benefit from a good drink of water and some shade until they can form new roots in their new location.
One of the most enjoyable and most rewarding aspects of gardening can be sharing the bounty of your garden with friends and neighbors. This is especially true with sharing the seeds, volunteers, stem cuttings, and root divisions that can get an abundant garden growing while bypassing the cost of expensive seeds.
Thanks for watching.
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