Hello my friends. This is my first try at rooting hibiscus, I don't know why I have never tried to in the past but that doesn't matter. I always figured tropical hibiscus must be really hard to root otherwise I would of been hearing more about it, well I proved myself so wrong on my 1st try.
Some friends of mine told me about a fairly new product called "Rapid Rooter's" that are simply cubes made for cuttings or seedlings. General Hydroponics makes them and describes them as a starter cube that has beneficial microbes found in nature already in these cubes. These tin lil "bugs" interact with the plants root system and together they create amino, humic and other essential acids plus some other interactions I don't quite understand well enough to describe. The long and short of this is I have 10 cuttings off of 2 tropical hibiscus plant's I kept over winter. One is a red bush and the other is a double bloom red tree. When I took the cuttings and placed them in the cubes, they have never looked like they were removed from the mother plant. No wilting or any signs of stress. This sunday will be exactly 3 weeks since removing these tiny 4 inch tall cuttings from the parent plants and I already have roots emerging from the cubes on 3/4ths of the cuttings! I've experimented with so many different methods of rooting so many different kinds of cuttings over many years with pretty good results. I have never had a 100% success rate with any method in the past. I bought 1 tray of 50 cubes and used a tall plastic humidity dome I already had from prior cuttings. I have 50 rooted cuttings on about 8 different kinds of plants and tree's. I even took cuttings from a verigated ficus tree that were just little tooth pic diameter branches that were growing of the lower trunk. Even 50% of those have roots showing about 1/2 inch long from the cubes. I put 3 different passiflora's in there too along with a few tiny brugmansia cuttings. Oh I also put 4 tiny pieces of a new coleus hybrid i found. Every plant in this tray is rooting and many are rooted well enough to be transplanted today. I bought 2 50 packs of refill plugs that they sell to use in the trays after your first cubes are used up. they are the exact size of the tiny little 6 pack trays that are about 1 by 1 inch squared at the top and about 3 inches deep. Here is a link to the cubes and a search to find your nearest dealer that sells them. I found only 1 store in the metro area that carried them and it is a hydroponics store.
http://www.genhydro.com/genhydro_US/rapidrooter2.html
I just had to share my excellent experience using these cubes as I've never had a 100% success rate on cuttings before. I can't wait to try them on all my other plants, this is going to make plant trading so much easier among all of us now. Give them a try if you ever want to root cuttings. I'm going to try using them for air layering now on a Japaneese maple that has a few long branches that need to be pruned. I'm hoping to turn the problem branches into new tree's now too. I'll keep you all posted as to how it goes.
Goodluck, JD
Rooting Hibiscus cuttings in 3 weeks! I'm happily amazed.
