When we make cuttings of our Monstera Variegata motherplants, we sometimes sell wetstick packages for people who would like to grow their own Monstera Variegata from a cutting.
How do we propagate in our nursery?
The variegation in the Monstera Variegata is a recessive trait, which means that even seeds from a highly variegated plant might not produce a variegated seed.
So don’t buy so called “variegated seeds”, they are a hoax.
Contrary to the Monstera Thai Constellation, nobody cracked the code to produce the Monstera Variegata through tissue culture so far.
Which leaves us with one solution to make Monstera Variegata babies: taking cuttings from our motherplants.
Where do we cut?
There are 2 types of cuttings Stem cuttings and top cuttings.
Stem cuttings are taken from a stem of the parent plant, while top cuttings are taken from the top of the plant, usually including a few leaves.
How do we propagate from cuttings?
We root all our cuttings straight into soil, and right away we put them in the pot they will be sold in. This means that they will take their sweet time to fill up the pot with roots, but this also means that when you buy a plant form us, it’s a strong and very well rooted plant.
Once the top cuttings established roots they keep on growing further the way they were.
With stem cuttings it’s a little different. Some have aerial roots, some don’t.
When they don’t have aerial roots it’s harder to root them straight in soil, so we normally don’t use these cuttings ourselves. It is however perfectly possible to root them in water, this can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to up to a year. You can imagine it’s hard to predict production output that way!
The most important thing about a stem cutting, is that it contains a viable node. From this node a completely new plant will grow, with the cute baby leaves to start with.
Wetsticks
Since we don’t want to toss away all the gorgeous cuttings we are not using ourselves, we sell them in our webshop. We make sure there is a viable node that contains variegation and is placed far enough from the cutting edges. We sell them as “wetsticks”, but leave on the original cutting leaf, so you have an idea of the amount of variegation your plant is probably going to have.
When the node is in a whiter part of the stem you will get a higher variegated new plant. If the node on the cutting contains only green or white, we do toss it, as nobody wants an all green or all white plant when buying a monstera variegate cutting.
To ensure that cuttings from our motherplants will produce variegated plants, we only select marbled plants as motherplants, since the variegation is nicely distributed in the stem, hereby avoiding the all green or all white babies.
When you purchase a wetstick package, we recommend you root the cuttings in water until they grow roots of about 5 cm, after that you can pot them in our Premium Mix soil.