Taking Geranium cuttings

Last year I bought a couple of Geranium plants from my local garden centre. When I got them they were already mature plants, with several flowers open, and to be honest I chose the plants more than anything else by the colour of thier blooms. I wasn't particularly interested in what variety they were - I just wanted a bit of quick colour in my otherwise fairly drab veg plot. I bought one red and one pink.

Both plants did well, but the pink one was spectacular. At one stage I counted 20 blooms on it simultaneously

When it came to Autumn I decided to keep this top-performing plant and not discard it as I might otherwise have done. So I trimmed off a lot of the mature growth and got it ready for Winter. The trouble is I don't have anywhere that is really good for over-wintering plants. The only place I have that is OK-ish is the garage (which is part of the main structure of my house, so remains at a decent temperature all the time, and never gets frosted). The garage has a side window which lets in a bit of light, but not a lot, because it is screened by the brick wall which separates my property from the road. Anyway, it's the best I've got so I have positioned an old bedroom cabinet next to the window and on this I keep a few frost-tender plants that I'm trying to protect - including the geranium.

Being kept in these conditions the pink geranium has obviously not had enough light. Although it has produced a lot of new leaves, they are mostly very pale indeed, and some of them are almost what you might call "variegated" - with some dark bits and some light bits.

Today I decided I would take some cuttings and try to re-propagate the plant.

I saw that amongst the jumble of pale new leaves the plant had a number of quite long healthy-looking shoots

Using sharp secateurs I cut off four of these shoots, about  15cm / 6" long. I removed almost all the leaves and trimmed the ends of the shoots neatly, just below a leaf-joint (this is apparently where most of the relevant root hormones or whatever lurk).

Sometimes when rooting cuttings like this I dip them in proprietary hormone rooting powder and then push them into some moist compost in a small pot. This time I have decided to try to root them simply in a jam-jar of water. They will probably start putting out roots within a week or 10 days. When / if they do, I will then transfer them to individual pots filled with compost.

These are now living on the kitchen windowsill. I'll let you know how they do... perhaps by the Summer I will have four more star perfomers.