Difficulty layering Quince

Dkozi

In response to your queiry about ground layering as I have read and experimented with on a limited basis in and out of the class room, ground layering can be effectively done in several methods but naturally results will very with each method depending on the stock you begin with and the technique you use.

Ground layering is most commonly used in the nursery trades in propagating shrubs. It can be done with single-stemmed or multi-stemmed examples.

With single stems the object is to look all along the trunk of the single stem and pick branches that will become the future trees you want to come up with. It is very similar to creating a raft style bonsai in that it involves taking and laying it on it's side in a trench dug into the ground. Remove all the branches facing down and removing the bark around the bottom side of the branches you want to become you new trees. Bury the tree in the trench several inches and water and wait. After several growing season each point along the stem should have developed it's own viable root system where it can then be seperated into individual trees, each tree containing both it's individual root system and a portion of the parent stock from which it came from. At this point the smaller individual trees are taken an planted else where so they can mature to a sellable size.

The second method is taking a clump styled shrub and staking down the outer braches and mounding soil in towards the center of the clump and then staking down more stems and covering the inward portion of those braches until what your left with is a shrub that has a mound of soil in where much of the interior of the shrub once was. Again waiting is a key factor here because it takes time for the shrubs to under go all those changes of transforming what once was bark or stems into a new root zone. Only after a couple of years are these shrubs then dug back up, uncovered almost completely, and then seperated into seperate plants with new self-sustaning roots on each stem. Then the nurseries take these new plants and put them into the ground somewhere else to develope into a whole new shrub over several years to sellable size.

You see the patern developing, the idea behind ground layering is taking your original full grown shrub or small tree and after 3-5 years of these types of propogation techniques having more sellable shrubs without having to wait for seed germination and all that stuff. It is meant to be a mass production event taking much longer than a single season or two. But with a greater deal of control over specific cultivars and a greater percentage of sellable plants in a relatively short period of time.

Might I suggest you setting your aim a little further down the road, say a year or two or four or five further. Let the plants develope stronger roots and do what they do and then set your sight's on refining the better plants from those ground layers for an additional year or two or three in the ground after seperating them from their parent stock. I believe the experience will be far more rewarding for you and what you will be left with in the long term.

This also follows a similar belief found in bonsai circles that say that 90 percent of a bonsai is developed while it is in the ground first so that very little refining is left to be done once it's pulled out of the ground and placed into a pot. Because developing bonsai in pots is a very slow process but while your trees are in the ground they grow at thier natural pace and shrink the wait time of enjoying your artistically trained tree to a minimum.

So in actuality you may not have it in a pot quicker but what you will have in a pot after ground growing your bonsai first will be much more moving to look at and appreciate. Good luck to you on you journey. -D