A moment of silence, please.
No pictures this time, just a news update. The rose cutting is officially dead. Since all the branches had browned and dried, I pulled it out of its pot to see if it had even thought about making roots, and it had not. Instead I found tiny maggot-like worms. Ew.
The dirt was tossed into the yard (waste not) into a non-garden spot, and the pot will be rinsed out before I stick anything else in it.
Some important lessons were learned.
Diagnosis of what probably went wrong (in no particular order of significance):
1. The cutting was from old wood rather than green wood, and it was very short.
2. No rooting hormone, which might have helped my chances a little.
3. I might have left too many leaves on.
4. I uncovered the rose too soon; should have left the plastic baggie on much longer than I did.
5. Becoming overly ambitious at the sight of new leaf growth, I moved the cutting into a spot with partial sun instead of mostly shade and bright light. Oopse.
I found a great link, here which does an excellent job at teaching you how to do rose cuttings. For me, the most important information this article had to offer that was not readily available in all my previous Googling:
1. Wounding the stem is good; taking all the bark off is bad. I should have wounded the stem in strips, one or two strips, down the cutting rather than stripping the bark all the way off. As the growth hormones are essentially in this top layer, I crippled my cutting without knowing it.
2. The cutting needs to remain covered for the whole time it's rooting, at least until the second set of leaves.
3. It's the second set of leaves you want to watch out for; any initial leaf growth, according to this article, will be as a result of energy already stored in the cutting. Secondary leaf growth, however, will be as a result of successful root production.
It was a very fun project to try, and now that my own roses are growing by leaps and bounds, I will probably begin experimentation to perfect my methods.
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