Growing Rosemary from Cuttings

Do you recall how I rescued part of my rosemary plant a couple of months ago? Since they aren’t hardy enough to grow outdoors year-round, I ordinarily will dig them up, pot them and move them indoors. Well, I got busy and completely forgot about it, not to mention the fact that the plant was huge so not easily dug up. Fortunately, it’s easy growing rosemary from cuttings so that’s what I ended up doing.

I dashed indoors, grabbed some scissors and proceeded to snip off several cuttings that averaged 8″ in length. Once back indoors, I plunged them into a glass of water and waited for roots to develop.

It took a few weeks for that to happen, but I didn’t give up hope! I just kept changing the water once a week and, all of a sudden, ROOTS! Hooray!

Once each cutting had a respectable amount of roots on them, I decided it was time to pot them up. But there was one problem: the potting soil was in an outbuilding where it’s very cold.

If I had just brought in the soil and potted them up in it, I’m pretty sure that would’ve done in the cuttings right then and there because the potting soil was probably about 35 degrees! Instead, I kept it in our kitchen for about 24 hours first so it could come to room temperature.

I potted each one up today and was even tickled to note that a few of them are blooming. You’ll notice that I placed a coffee filter in the bottom of each pot, just to keep the soil from coming out the bottoms.

Now the pots are in a sunny location and I’ll keep an eye on the soil to make sure it doesn’t dry out. I’m going to wait a few weeks before giving them a weak solution of fish fertilizer.

So, what will I do 9 rosemary plants? Well, 1 of them can go back into my herb garden to replace the one that has probably frozen to death out there this winter (sorry, guy) and the rest will be donated to the Spokane County Master Gardener sale this spring.

And the really cool thing about growing rosemary from cuttings is that I should be able to take even more cuttings from the plants as they grow, get them to root and pot them up in time for the plant sale! Such a deal.