Propagating Lavender in Six Easy Steps
By Lynsey Ruml
Lavender is a resilient perennial that makes an impactful statement in your landscape when planted in hedges or large groups. Lavender is often expensive to buy and difficult to germinate from seed, but luckily, it’s unbelievably easy to propagate from cuttings. Once you learn how to propagate lavender, you’ll have an endless and inexpensive supply available!
Our directions are applicable to any lavender variety, but our absolute favorite is Goodwin Creek Grey. Its muted foliage and long, elegant flowers are beautiful in mass plantings, but interesting enough to stand alone. I like to pair our lavender plants with sage, butterfly bush and pin cushion flowers to create a water-wise and sustainable cottage garden for my harsh, high-desert climate. Lavender also makes a pretty and practical front border for roses by covering their sometimes bare lower stems.
How to Propagate Lavender
Here are the steps to successfully propagate lavender:
STEP 1 — Mix one tablespoon of ClimateGard into a gallon of potting soil. You can also make your own soil mix with one part finished compost, three parts well-draining medium (we recommend biochar, sawdust or pine needle) and three parts coconut coir, along with one tablespoon ClimateGard for every gallon of mix. Adding ClimateGard and compost to your soil mix allows more time before needing to transplant and reduces the risk of burning young newly rooted plants with uneven topical applications.
STEP 2 — Fill your pots with soil and water until the soil is thoroughly moist. Allow excess water to drain from drainage holes. Upcycled plastic food containers make excellent seed starting pots. Make sure the pot is at least seven inches deep to allow for adequate root growth.
STEP 3 — Choose a healthy lavender plant from your garden or buy a well-established plant (at least some woodiness on a couple stems) from your local nursery. Mail-order lavender becomes stressed from shipping and doesn’t propagate as well.
STEP 4 — Pick a couple non-flowering shoots from the side of your plant that are mature and well-formed, but still green on top. Using recently sharpened sewing scissors, a kitchen knife or pruning shears, cut stems off the plant at bottom, directly under a leaf joint (where leaf and stem meet, shown below on right stem). If the plant is well established you can also pull the stem away from the bottom of the plant, leaving part of the ‘heel’ attached (shown below on left stem). Remove the leaves along the bottom part of the stem, ensuring at least three inches of bare stem is available to insert into soil.
STEP 5 — Insert cuttings several inches deep into pots as shown. Keep soil slightly moist, but well drained until cutting is rooted (evidenced by new growth).
STEP 6 — Allow soil of rooted cuttings to dry completely before watering. Transplant into a large outdoor pot or directly into native soil amended with granular ClimateGard fertilizer.
Conclusion
Congratulations, you propagated lavender! After your cuttings show several inches of new growth transplant into native soil during your local climate’s optimum planting time. If you’d like to keep up with the progress of the cuttings, seedlings and container garden combinations created for our blog tutorials, check out our Instagram!
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Cutting-edge microbiology
No kill formula
Superior plant nutrition derived from the most ethical, sustainable sources available.
Produces the same results as conventional fertilizers without the negative environmental impacts.
Each ClimateGard pellet is infused with micronutrients, silicon, humic acid and a high-performance blend of living bacteria and fungi.
Delivered in an environmentally friendly organic cotton bag with a compostable inner liner.
Will continue to enrich your soil long after application.
$39.95 for 7.5 pound bag | $69.95 for 15 pound bag.