Some herbs, especially the woodier perennials like Rosemary, can be expensive to buy as a plant, but dirt cheap to buy from the supermarket to use in cooking. This got me thinking, could I take cuttings from supermarket herbs and grow them on into fully fledged plants for a fraction of the cost of buying?
I got these packs of herbs for 50p each from my local Sainsbury's. After a quick Google search, a decent Rosemary plant seems to be around £8 at the moment, so a sizeable saving is on offer - especially if I get multiple successful cuttings from one pack. Now the question is, can I turn them into cuttings?
Here is the Rosemary straight out of the pack. Now I actually got quite a few stems here and they look like they will make really good cuttings.
The wood isn't too old and thick, which makes rooting tricky, but it also isn't too small, which might mean the plant dries out and dies before having a chance to root.
So to start, I am going to strip the leaves entirely off the bottom end of the cutting. The more leaves the more water the plant needs to survive, and since it has no roots right now, then that is going to be tough.
But we don't want to remove all of the leaves as the plant needs some so it can photosynthesize and turn light into energy to grow.
Now that we have our cutting, we are going to put a fresh bottom cut on it. This is because these were cut a while ago, and that cut mark has already scabbed over and dried up - we don't want that, we want a nice fresh cut.
I took my knife and cut just below a leaf node. This is a good idea because the nodes in all plants store lots of growth hormone, so you are more likely to get root development near a node.
Once we have our fresh bottom cut, it is time to dunk our cutting in some rooting hormone.
This hormone just helps to stimulate the growth of new roots in the cutting. You don't need to use rooting hormone, but it increases your chances of taking a successful cutting.
Now it's time to pot up our cutting. I am just using a seed mix that I have pre-moistened. I have made the mix very wet as our cutting is going to struggle to take up any moisture until its roots are beginning to grow, so the easier we can make water access the better.
This might have sparked the idea in your head to just root your rosemary cuttings in water, and this does work, and usually it is faster. But there are some downsides, which is why I like to root cuttings in soil if possible.
The major problem is damaging the roots of your cutting when moving it from water to soil. This is easily done and cuttings rooted in water tend to grow very long, delicate roots - making the issue worse.
I have prodded a hole in the soil with the bottom end of my marker pen before planting. This is a very small pro tip but it can make a big difference. If you push your cutting straight into the soil, you will often just rub off all of the rooting hormone you added to the end of your cutting. So make the hole first!
You can add a plastic bag or cover over your cutting to help retain the moisture in the air. This does help, but if I'm being perfectly honest, I very rarely do it unless I am trying to root something that is notoriously difficult.
A sandwich bag or even the packaging the plant came in originally can work well here.
I ended up with 8 cuttings in total from my 50p bag, so now we just have to wait and see how many will root. Remember to never let your cuttings dry out while they are in this rooting stage as that could kill them off before they get going!
Potential Downsides
At the moment this seems like an amazing idea, but what are the potential negatives? Well, there is only one major negative I can think of.
That is I have no idea what variety of Rosemary I will be growing here, and this might be a bigger problem than you think - let me explain.
Different varieties of crops have been bred to thrive in different conditions, depending on where they are being grown. And where was my Rosemary grown? Well, if we look at the packet, we can find out.
That's right - Kenya! Slightly different growing conditions to Lancashire, that's for sure!
This also might not be a huge issue in the end, some plants are very adaptable and don't have much difference between varieties, whereas with others the variety can make a massive difference on where the plant can grow. From looking at Rosemary - at least from my initial searches I don't think variety will play that much of a part, so we might get away with this one.
This is also why I don't advise people to grow tomatoes from seeds saved from a fruit they bought at a supermarket. It works, but you will often be growing a sub optimal variety, and when seeds are so cheap - why bother?
Sam says
Thanks for the great article!