Ordinary garden and room geraniums are rather unpretentious and do not require special care, which can not be said of the royal geranium, which has special requirements for propagation by cuttings and seeds, lighting, watering, air temperature, etc. All done correctly, you can count on a lush and abundant flowering of a variety of shapes and shades, from stripes and spots and ending with contrasting veins.
Breeding geranium with cuttings
Royal Pelargonium can be cut, starting from early spring and ending with the middle of summer, and the material can be obtained both during the first pruning in a given period of time, and during the formation of the bush throughout the year. To obtain cuttings, it is necessary to cut out shorter lengths from long shoots, 5-10 cm in length. At the same time, the lower cut is performed under the kidney, and the upper one above it, there is no need to remove the leaves. Reproduction of the royal geranium involves placing the cuttings in an opaque container with water poured to a height of 3-5 cm.
Once in 2-3 days it needs to be changed, and it is very important to provide access to sunlight for cuttings. In 5-15 days, roots will appear. If the mother plant was grown by the same method, then it will take less time than if it had grown out of the seeds. However, it is best to plant the material not in water or ground, but a light substrate or peat tablet. The latter is specially designed for planting geraniums with cuttings, and for this purpose the tips of shoots with several leaves will do.
Tablets should be filled with water, and as soon as they swell, in the center make a depression and insert into it a cutting, dried for a couple of hours and treated with charcoal. Under the condition of diffuse illumination and air temperature within 19-23 ° C, rooting takes place in 1-2 months and then the young geranium can be planted in a separate pot. Those who are interested in how to root geranium cuttings in autumn, should act in a similar way, cutting the shoots from a pre-fertilized uterine plant, drying them and dropping them into the soil, watered with a solution of potassium permanganate. Under the lamp at an air temperature of +24 ° C, the plant will take root within 30 days.