Azalea Seed
- Thread starter wlambeth
- Start date
bonsaidave
Shohin
Not sure about seeds but cuttings are an option. I got almost 100% cuttings rooted off my first and only satsuki.
Maybe buy a couple cheapish azaleas, take cuttings, grow for a year or two, then resell the parent plants?
Maybe buy a couple cheapish azaleas, take cuttings, grow for a year or two, then resell the parent plants?
theone420
Shohin
I bought some here( https://tophatter.com/lots/43290655 ) for $5 who knows if they are legit but ill give it a shot for $5
CWTurner
Omono
I've tried growing azalea from the seed from my garden plants, with no luck. There are a couple of nice varieties here that I really wanted to propagate, so last October, I took semi-hard cuttings (1"-3"), dipped them in rooting hormone, put them in a vermiculite mix, watered them, put a dome over them and almost all of them took. Super easy. I never had to water them after that first time, and didn't use bottom heat either.
I'll do more this year and suggest you do the same if the parent plant is available.
CW
I'll do more this year and suggest you do the same if the parent plant is available.
CW
0soyoung
Imperial Masterpiece
It is as simple as not dead heading (i.e., don't remove the spent flowers). The flower will fall off and you'll see the stamen and ovary left on the branch tip. Late fall or early winter or next spring, harvest the ovaries (seed inside).
"Breeders" seal the flowers in baggies to prevent accidental pollination. They gather pollen from the flowers of another plant (with a cotton swab, say) and then touch to the pollen to the stamen tip of each flower in the cluster. Then the bag is resealed around the flowers until the petals have dropped. Then off with the bag and wait to gather seed.
Azaleas are so easy to root (just hold a stem on the ground is all it takes) that nobody but breeders working to make new hybrids troubles with seed.
substratum
Shohin
Azaleas ground layer super easily, and naturally (to the point of being pesky). I've ground layered as many as 8 one-gallon pots at a time off of a three-gallon donor azalea using a technique that I found in a book or magazine, before the days of internet.
Imagine a configuration like a daisy, where the three-gallon is the center and the one-gallon pots are the petals. In the shade of pines, I broke each branch to be layered where it was half intact/half splintered and inserted it into an overfilled one-gallon pot, with the broken branch poised as upright as possible. Thoroughly filled the one-gallon pot with dirt (shoveled out of the surrounding ground), covered the dirt with pine straw to preserve moisture, set a brick on the branch in the one-gallon pot to hold it in place, and after initially watering, pretty much ignored it for a few months. Fertilized it a time or two, but other than that, almost no attention. From the spring to the fall, I was able to parlay 4 three-gallon azaleas about 25 lush landscape-worthy plants. The one-gallon pots were completely filled with roots, and some had grown through the bottom into the ground. Didn't use any hormones. My entire point is that they are crazy easy to ground layer.
Imagine a configuration like a daisy, where the three-gallon is the center and the one-gallon pots are the petals. In the shade of pines, I broke each branch to be layered where it was half intact/half splintered and inserted it into an overfilled one-gallon pot, with the broken branch poised as upright as possible. Thoroughly filled the one-gallon pot with dirt (shoveled out of the surrounding ground), covered the dirt with pine straw to preserve moisture, set a brick on the branch in the one-gallon pot to hold it in place, and after initially watering, pretty much ignored it for a few months. Fertilized it a time or two, but other than that, almost no attention. From the spring to the fall, I was able to parlay 4 three-gallon azaleas about 25 lush landscape-worthy plants. The one-gallon pots were completely filled with roots, and some had grown through the bottom into the ground. Didn't use any hormones. My entire point is that they are crazy easy to ground layer.
