How to Take Hardwood Cuttings: Free Plants This Winter
A hardwood cutting is a pencil-thick length of this year's wood, cut while the plant is dormant and pushed two-thirds deep into soil, where it quietly grows roots over the following year. It is the oldest, laziest and most reliable propagation method there is, it needs no equipment at all, and the season for it runs from November to March. One healthy blackcurrant bush, treated this way, becomes a row of bushes for the cost of ten minutes with the secateurs. Here is how it works and exactly how to do it.
Short on time? The best propagation investment is one vigorous mother plant. Our blackcurrant bushes are grown at the Earthling Plants nursery in Co. Wicklow, and a single bush will supply cuttings for years.
Why Winter Cuttings Are the Easy Ones
Summer cuttings are a race: soft green shoots lose water faster than their missing roots can replace it, so they need misting, humidity and attention, and they still die out of spite. A hardwood cutting runs the same project in winter, when the wood is dormant, loaded with stored energy, and losing almost no water because there are no leaves. Nothing is in a hurry, including you.
Underground, the cutting spends late winter forming callus at its base, then roots as the soil warms, and by the following autumn it is a small rooted plant. The success rate for the easy species is remarkable, and the total labour is one cut, one push, and a year of ignoring it.
What Roots This Way (and What Honestly Doesn't)
The great candidates are the soft fruit bushes and their relatives: blackcurrants root almost every time, with red and white currants and gooseberries close behind. Elder roots readily, figs strike well against a warm wall, and willow is so eager it roots upside down, which is why a willow windbreak is planted as a bundle of sticks. Blackberries and their hybrids prefer a different free trick: tip layering, where a cane end pinned to the soil roots on its own.
Now the honest list. Hazel roots poorly from cuttings, which is why it is layered or grown from nuts instead. And apples, pears, plums and the other tree fruit will not come true or perform from cuttings at all in any useful way: a named apple variety only exists as grafted wood on a chosen rootstock, which controls its size and vigour. Grafting is a craft of its own, and it is the actual reason nurseries exist. Propagate your bushes for free, and buy your trees grafted; that is the honest division of labour.
Hardwood Cutting Quick Facts
Season: November to March, while plants are leafless and dormant
Material: this year's growth, pencil thick, straight and healthy
Length: 20 to 30 cm, with the bottom cut just below a bud
Depth: two-thirds of the cutting underground
Where: a trench in a spare corner, or deep pots in a sheltered spot
Time to roots: through spring; lift and move the following autumn or winter
Success rate: high for currants, gooseberries, elder, fig and willow
Step 1: Choose and Cut the Wood
After leaf fall, find straight, healthy shoots that grew this year: smooth young bark, pencil thickness, no flower buds swelling at the tip. Cut lengths of 20 to 30 cm with sharp secateurs. The classic trick for remembering which way is up: a flat cut at the base, just below a bud, and a sloping cut at the top, just above one. Planted upside down, a cutting fails, and after a winter in a trench they all look the same.
Step 2: Plant Them Two-Thirds Deep
Open a narrow slit trench in a spare, well-drained corner, push each cutting in so two-thirds is buried with one or two buds above ground, 15 cm apart, and firm the soil back. In heavy ground, a little sand in the slit keeps the bases from sitting wet. No greenhouse, no rooting hormone required, though a dab does no harm on the trickier species. Deep pots of gritty compost against a sheltered wall work exactly as well if trench space is short.
Step 3: Do Almost Nothing for a Year
This is the step people fail. The cuttings need the soil kept moist in dry spells, weeds kept off, and otherwise to be left completely alone until the following autumn; leaves in spring mean the top is alive, not that roots are finished, and a hopeful tug in May undoes months of work. Mark the row, walk away, and let the calendar do the propagation.
Step 4: Lift and Plant Out
A year on, in the next dormant season, fork the cuttings up gently. The successes will have a fist of roots; pot or plant them where they are to live, exactly as you would any young bush, and compost the failures without grief, since they cost nothing. From here they are ordinary young plants: a season or two more and the currants and gooseberries among them begin to fruit.
What One Bush Can Become
Run the maths on a single healthy blackcurrant: ten cuttings a winter, most of them rooting, means a full fruiting hedge within three years, plus spares for friends and the plant swap. This is also how to be sentimental on a budget, because a cutting from a parent's or grandparent's garden carries the actual plant, not a lookalike, into your own. Gardeners have passed good bushes along this way for centuries; the method in this post is unchanged from theirs.
Troubleshooting Hardwood Cuttings
Cuttings dried and shrivelled: the bed dried out, or the wood waited too long between cutting and planting; plant the same day you cut
Leafed out then collapsed in summer: the top ran ahead of the roots; keep the bed moister next time and take more cuttings per plant wanted
Rotted bases: waterlogged ground; use a sand-lined slit or pots next time
Nothing happened at all: check the species was a realistic candidate, and that the cuttings went in the right way up
FAQ: Hardwood Cuttings
When is the best time to take hardwood cuttings? Any time the plant is fully dormant, from leaf fall in November to just before buds move in March. Many gardeners take them with the winter prune, which turns one job into two: the prunings you were composting are the cuttings.
Which fruit bushes root most easily from cuttings? Blackcurrants are the famous beginner's cutting, rooting almost every time, followed by red and white currants, gooseberries, elder and fig. Willow roots so freely it is planted as unrooted rods. Tree fruit like apples and plums are the exception: those are grafted, not rooted.
How long do hardwood cuttings take to root? The whole following growing season. They callus in late winter, root through spring and summer, and are ready to lift and transplant the next autumn or winter, roughly a year after cutting. The method trades speed for near-zero effort.
Do I need rooting hormone? Not for the easy species: currants, gooseberries, elder and willow root happily without it. A rooting powder can nudge the odds on borderline subjects, but the bigger levers by far are healthy young wood, the right depth and a bed that never dries out.
Start With a Bush Worth Copying
Propagation rewards good source material, so begin with a vigorous, healthy, heavy-cropping plant and every copy inherits the same. Our guides to growing currants and gooseberries cover the mother plants' care, and the fig guide includes the fig's own cutting quirks.
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