One of the biggest barriers to gardening is the price tag. Unless you live in some sort of gardening utopia where fruiting plants of all sizes and shapes grow wild for the taking – or you have great gardening neighbors, a green-thumb family, or a house where the previous owner was a dirt-loving fanatic – you are going to need to spend some money if you want to grow fruit.
One of my hacks to try to make every penny stretch as far as possible is to get really good at propagating plants. This post covers one of the most basic and dependable propagation methods for soft fruits – propagating by layering.
What is Layering?
Layering is a form of plant propagation, and is a super easy and super effective way to rapidly increase the number of plants you have in your fruit garden. To put it in a highly un-scientific fashion, the concept is to take existing leaf buds or “nodes” on the plant stems, and convert them from a leafing node into a rooting node. What is the environmental trigger that catalyzes the conversion those nodes? Being buried in dirt! If you’ve covered those nodes with dirt at the right stage of their lifecycle, the plant will realize that its surroundings have changed, and instead of growing leaves it will start spitting out roots from those submerged buds. Once the roots are strongly established, you can snip that branch off of the mother plant, and presto – you have a new mini-plant ready to expand your fruit garden.
(I know the science behind the layering process is more complicated than that… but in my world, that’s what my goal in layering is. If you’re looking for a more correct way to explain the layering process, check out this awesome guide on Layering Propagation for the Home Gardener from Oklahoma State University Extension.)
Types of Layering Propagation Methods
Propagating by layering is incredibly easy. You need zero equipment (and therefore zero expense!) and practically zero experience. The biggest investment you will need is time; you have to be patient, and wait for the roots to establish the plant before trimming it loose. If you dig up and replant too early, you will lose the little guy because its roots can’t support life yet.
There are a few different ways to layer, but all of them involve burying at least a segment of a stem or branch of the main plant, waiting for roots to develop, and then cutting off the original stem to free the plant from the “mother.”
- Tip Layering: For some trailing-type plants, particularly trailing brambles and vines, you can insert the very tip of the plant cane or stem into the soil and let it root. Eventually, after roots form from the buried tip, a new stem will poke up out of the dirt.
- Simple & Compound Layering: This is done by taking a stem and burying a single section of it (simple layering) or multiple sections (compound layering), but leaving the very tip unburied. I’ve done a modified version of this with raspberry canes; once I get a nice, healthy red raspberry cane established, I’ve sometimes dug a trench along its base, tipped over the cane to make it lie in the trench, and buried the entire length of it except for the very tip. After enough time, I end up with a whole row of new raspberry plants growing up from that buried cane, and I can chop up and move around as needed.
- Mound Layering: This is a little more drastic. Basically, you “hill” the plant just like you would a hill of potatoes. The idea is that instead of a single stem with multiple branches, you end up with a pile of dirt with branches poking out. Eventually, the branches develop enough roots that you can cut them out as individual plants. I’ve always preferred to go with a single stem rather than burying the whole plant, so don’t ask me how well mound layering works…
- Air Layering: Ah, the YouTube sensation. You can buy little air-layering pods to cup dirt around a stem in a neat little package until that stem has enough roots to be snipped free of the mother plant; however, sizing can be a pain, and it’s often better to go with a home-rigged plastic wrap and twist-tie or twine version.
Five Berry Plants You Can Propagate by Layering
There are a lot of different plants that respond very well to layering, so don’t consider this to be an exhaustive list! This list includes my top favorite “candidate” berry plants to propagate by layering… basically, the fool-proof, never-fail types.
- Black Raspberries: Trailing black raspberry brambles are my number-one, all-time favorite berry plant for layering. When the types of those long purple-green canes sway over in graceful arches, the tender tip will often “plant” itself into the dirt, naturally tip-layering to create a brand new, rooted plant. When this happens, you can wait for the new plant to establish itself before snipping it free of the mother plant and digging up to replant. Alternatively, what I typically do is bring out a pot of dirt, deliberately poke that trailing bramble-tip into my pot instead of the ground, and let it root itself in the container to avoid disturbing the plant too much when I replant later on.
- Grape Vines: One of my earliest successes in propagating by layering was with seeded Concord grapes that grew wild across our property, and I’ve used the technique ever since with pretty dependable success. There are several ways to layer a grape vine, and the easiest is probably to just dig a small trench and layer a section of the vine underground. However, because I’m lazy and I don’t want to deal with digging up the newly rooted vine, what I do is thread the tip of a young-ish vine end up through the bottom drainage hole of a plastic pot, and up through the top of the pot (you may have to enlarge the holes to make it fit, which is why I go with flimsy plastic pots whenever possible). Then I fill the pot with dirt and set it aside to let it do its thing. As long as there is a node buried within the pot, I’ve had pretty reasonable results, and in time can snip off the stem from the bottom of the pot and replant a healthy new grapevine with an extensive root system.
- Gooseberries: These plants are wildly adaptable, and rooting is a breeze. Mound layering is recommended by most of the gardening books I’ve read, but I would prefer layering a single branch… mostly because I’m really good at killing my fruit plants, and I’d rather lose a single branch than the entire plant. The drawback of skipping mound layering is that it takes so much longer to create that many plants, so you’ll have to decide what works best for you and fits your gardening skill level.
- Currants: Like gooseberries, currants are quick to form roots and respond very well to layering propagation. Mound layering or simple/compound layering are great options, with air layering also in the mix. If you are propagating from a friend’s plant, make sure you know the local ordinances about what types of plants are allowed in your home neighborhood. Currants are often on the banned-plant list, so be careful before you bring home something illegal!
- Strawberries: This one is so obvious it’s almost ridiculous to include it on the list, but in case you didn’t know, layering is totally the way to go if you want to expand your strawberry beds. When the plants send out runners, you can either mark and dig up the spots where they’ve rooted, or you can direct those runners into your own pots and containers. I’ve even used styrofoam plates piled with dirt to give new runners a place to set down roots while keeping a barrier between those new roots and the soil where you DON’T want them to grow.
If you’ve ever considered building your propagation skills, I highly recommend starting with layering. Growing from seed is of course a great option – but since so many fruit plants don’t “breed true,” home gardeners need an alternative propagation method that is reliable, inexpensive, and productive. On all counts, layering is the way to go. With minimal effort and essentially no investment, you can end up with a clone of the mother plant, and in just a few years your fruit garden’s growth will be exponential.