Less than a week after I put the baggies full of 'burritos' into the basement, I began to get nervous. What if this didn't work? I would have wasted the best cuttings of the season, and I would be scrambling again (like I was last year) to root enough roses to have a decent crop to sell next year.
I admit it ... I caved. Last weekend, I sat in the pavilion with my little pots and I planted all of the cuttings and took them to the greenhouse. At least I THOUGHT I had planted all of the cuttings. It turns out that I forgot one packet. This packet was too long to fit into a gallon bag with the others, so I wrapped it in plastic wrap and set it aside ... and promptly forgot it. I found it this morning, and I was SUPER EXCITED to see what had happened inside the burrito during the past two weeks. The results are STUPENDOUS!!
The white, powdery stuff is rooting hormone.
There were 14 cuttings in the packet, 11 of them are shown above, and ALL 14 of them looked wonderful!
Every single one of them showed healthy callousing (the white, overgrown looking stuff that you can see very clearly in the photo above).
With callousing like this, real roots cannot be too far behind!
What rose is this, you ask?
It is 'Pink Pillar', a climber that was introduced in 1940. It was hybridized by Robert Brownell, who was a very imaginative amateur rosarian who worked in Rhode Island and introduced WONDERFUL roses.
I love Pink Pillar because of its sunset colors, its semi-double form, and the fact that no two flowers are ever truly identical.
I grow Pink Pillar, along with some other Brownell roses, on the pillars of The Arcade. It is super easy to spiral the canes of a climber like this around a post to create a great feature in your garden ... and it is an imaginative way to use a mannerly climber. (I have a photo of the Arcade in THIS post from last year.)
This was Pink Pillar last spring ... it's bigger now.
Anyway .... let's get back to the original subject of this post.
Now that the Burrito Method has shown such promise, you can be assured that I will try this on just about every rose in the garden.
I'm so excited, I can hardly contain myself!!
Edited to add: To date, I have had no success at all with this method of propagation. The promising callusing that happens while the cuttings are in the newspaper has not resulted in roots. I am quite disappointed by this, and I am returning to my tried-and-true methods to root my roses.
If you are looking for a method of propagation that has yielded good success, Click HERE to visit my web site, and click on the How To tab.