Roses from Cuttings

For Valentines Day last month, Nate (my husband) almost got me a bouquet of roses, but he changed his mind, remembering that I had I told him that I wanted a rose garden. I'm no dummy, and I used to work in a flower shop- as lovely as they are, those token v-day bouquets are short lived and overpriced. I want to look at and smell roses for months on end! Luckily for me, my hubby is not afraid to get dirty.
Since Nate is just starting a new position on the development team of with a local youth center and his income there is support based, things are a little tight in the financial department, so we wanted an affordable option. I had found an add on Craigslist of a woman who was trimming her rose bushes and giving away the cuttings; she had 10 varieties. Nate picked them up and made a quick stop at home depot to get the potting soil, mulch mix, and growth minerals. We ordered the rooting hormone from amazon.We already had a few small plastic planters to work with and used some glass jars for the rest.
We looked at several online tutorials and read some product reviews. I like what we came up with. We have 4 sprouts from each type of rose. The lady who gave us the cuttings also included seed pods for several of the varieties that she had better luck sprouting from seed, so I also have a few containers that are set aside for seeds. The whole process was pretty simple (note: simple does not necessarily mean mess free). We mixed the potting soil, mulch mix, and growth minerals, hydrated the soil, filled the planters and jars and hollowed out the holes where the stems were going to go. Then we cut the healthiest looking stems off the larger branches measuring 6-9 inches from the tips of the branches, removed the lower growth from each stem we cut, and made sure we had made clean 45 degree angle cuts. Next we dipped the cut ends into 2 inches of water, shook off the extra drips, dipped them into the rooting hormone, set them into the holes, careful not so scrape off the hormone on the way into the hole, and covered them with the extra soil from the holes. I used popsicle sticks to label them.
Pretty simple really. We are keeping them inside for now on a bakers rack right in front of a window, we keep the soil pretty moist and water them once a day with a super growth mixture. If all of them take off, I'll have 44 plants this spring to put in our currently barren yard. Although, I'd be happy if we got 50% of them to sprout considering we've never done this before. My next project is to prepare the soil outside.

Here are the pics of my rose garden project.