Farm Power & Machinery

Plant propagation

• Most plants reproduce more of their kind through production of seed. This is Sexual reproduction and it involves the exchange of genetic material between tow parent plants. Many ornamental plants do come “true” from seed.
• To increase the numbers of these plants, gardeners and horticulturists use Asexual propagation. In asexual propagation, the new plants are genetically exact copies or clones of a single parent plant. The methods used in asexual propagation range from taking leaf cutting of African violets to grafting apple cuttings onto root stocks.
• Techniques for vegetative propagation : There are different techniques for vegetative propagation such as Air or ground layering, Division, Grafting and bud grafting which is widely used in fruit tree propagation, Micro propagation, Stolen or runners, Storage organs such as bulbs, corms tubers and rhizomes, Striking or cuttings and Twin-scaling.
• Fruit tree propagation is usually carried out through asexual reproduction by grafting or budding the desired variety onto a suitable rootstock.