ROTTERDAM How does your garden grow? A snip at a time Club gets lesson in plant propagation from cooperative extension horticulturist BY MICHAEL GOOT Gazette Reporter
Horticulturist Laura Milak held up a plant called baby’s tears and asked the Schalmont Middle School students to rip it apart slowly into two smaller pieces. “You’re going to hear ‘crunch, crunch crunch.’ That’s the roots tearing, but it’s going to recover just fine,” she told about 20 members of the school’s Environmental Club during one of its afterschool sessions. Students then planted the two plants into a small plastic garden tray. Dividing is one method of plant propagation — a fancy word for reproduction. “It’s kind of funny — to multiply a plant, you divide it,” she said. Milak works for Cornell Cooperative Extension and is one of the people responsible for growing the greenhouse plants in Schenectady’s Central Park. She said they grow more than 100,000 plants annually, so that is why they need to use the best techniques to make more. Other methods of reproduction are cutting off a section of the plant or using seeds. To demonstrate, she also had students take a jelly bean plant and use one of the fallen leaves to make a new plant. Then she had the students plant some seeds in small plastic trays, cautioning them not to plant them too deep because the seed will run out of food by the time the plant reaches the surface — much like a human would not have the energy to climb a steep mountain after only eating a roll of Life Savers. While seeds are the cheapest method of creating more plants, Milak said they have their drawbacks. “You know generally what you’re going to get, but it’s not the same,” she said. However, cutting or splitting off parts of plants, when done correctly, can produce many more: “It’s going to give you a plant identical” to the original, too. Milak has been coming to the school two or three times a year for the past three years to show the students plant life. Club adviser Joanne Lasky, a reading teacher at the school, said the students enjoy learning about the environment. They participate in their own projects, such as recycling office paper to send to a company called Green Fiber, building bird houses and....................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar01403
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