The growth on this tomato (left) was evident four days after I put the stem in plain water out on the porch.
To the right is another tomato cutting. It is
Dirt gardeners we've known love to snap off a twig of something, stick it back in the soil and wait for nature to make a new plant. We used to do that ourselves back when we had dirt.
Now we live in upstairs condos in a sleepy desert town where the "commons" are lush with palm trees, Spanish Dagger, Mexican Bird of paradise, Cat Claw, and Bougainvillea.
We do most of our own gardening indoors, however, or on an enclosed porch.
For the kinds of cuttings that do not readily root just from popping them into a glass of water, we find Gel2Root, shown above, a great convenience. All you have to do is poke a hole in the foil cover, push the stem through, put it in bright, but indirect light and wait. Soon you will see the roots right through the translucent container, which, incidentally is reusable.
When I was a young whippersnapper, sharing cuttings was just a way of life, but now I am finding that more and more people are completely unaware that one can easily "clone" many plants just by cutting a 3 or 4 inch stem off, snipping several of the bottom leaves, and putting the pruned stem in a glass of water on the window sill. I used filtered water because the plants don't like chlorine.
No need to get technical, but for the curious, the place where the stem of a leaf meets the stem of a plant is called a node, and you want a stem with several nodes if you want it to root. After cutting the bottom leaves off, leaving a little bit of each leaf stem on to prevent the node from getting soggy, just put it in a glass enough water in it to cover the pruned node. I usually put three or for cuttings in each glass. They seem to like company.
When taking cuttings, it is best to take them in the morning, and to select healthy stems without any buds or flowers.
Some plants (such as tomatoes, basil, or mint) will root in about four days and need nothing more than plain water. Others appreciate a little rooting hormone, such as Schultz's Root Tone which can be found at almost any hardware store or garden shop, or the more expensive rooting gels such as Olivia's, Clonex, or EZ-Clone, available from hydroponics dealers.
When the roots are well developed, the new plant is ready to be moved into a hydroponic planter (or put out in the garden if you have one or in a pot of dirt if that is your choice.)
I prefer passive ebb and flow containers that I make out of recycled household products, like the Tide laundry soap container I blogged about in connection with our pepper plant. I fill them with hydroton grow rocks and feed them General Hydroponics Flora series nutrients. I'm not trying to win prizes for the most perfect plant, so I don't worry too much about getting the exact right formula. I inject the concentrated nutes directly into our AeroGarden bowls using a syringe. More on that soon. But for my ebb and flow containers I premix the nutes, using 1, 2, or 3 ml of concentrate, depending on the stage of growth. When flowering plants such as the tomatoes and peppers are just starting to bud, I inject 2 ml of each of the Flora series nutrients into a clean 2 Liter soda bottle, half full of filtered water, shaking it a bit to mix after each injection, since we do not want the nutrients to mix with each other in their concentrated form because that could lock out some of the minerals and spoil the solution.
The same "formula" works for new plants, too, but for those I fill the planters half way and top off with plain water. Seedlings need very little food, so those I fill a quarter of the way up and top off with water.
When the plants are well-established, but have not begun to bud, I use 3 ml of the Gro, 2 ml of the Micro, and 1 ml of the Bloom. When they are in full bloom and fruiting I use just the opposite: 1 ml Gro, 2 ml Micro, and 3 ml Bloom.
These pictures, taken today, show several plants coming off what GH calls the "Transition to Bloom phase" and going into the "Blooming and Ripening phase."