Quote:
Originally Posted by TexasTycoon
My Gram has a few prolific rosemary bushes (both the bushy variety and the crawling variety) that I would like to start in my own pots from cuttings. I tried once this past spring, with a few cuttings from each plant dipped in rooting hormone and stuck into some peat, but the peat just got moldy and the cuttings died. ...
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Avoid peat! That's the (ahem) root of the problem. Rosemary needs good drainage, and peat does the exact opposite.
I've had good luck rooting rosemary cuttings in garden soil or compost in 1 gallon pots. Strip the foliage from the bottom half of a 6-12 inch cutting and place 4-6 cuttings in a pot. No rooting hormone needed.
Just be sure to keep the cuttings upright (don't lay them horizontally) at all times. As soon as the cutting is made, the hormones that facilitate rooting travel downward (gravity), so to get the max amount of hormones where you want them, you need to have a container ready before you make the cuttings. I went to a talk last year where a greenhouse grower at a university said they were having little luck with a particular plant until they discovered this tip. They had been taking cuttings, laying them on a tray, and then walking across the greenhouse to pot them up. They discovered that if they kept the cuttings upright at all times, instead of laying them on a tray -- even just to walk across the greenhouse -- they had dramatically better success!