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Vegetative plant propagation

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Plant propagation is the process of increasing the number of plants of a particular species or cultivar. Propagation can be via sexual or asexualmeans. Over the years, horticulturalists have developed asexual propagation methods that use vegetative plant parts. This allows plants to be created in ways that nature cannot duplicate.

Propagating tea plants using cuttings

At Zealong, they propagate new tea plants using cuttings to ensure genetic consistency and consistency in taste and quality. It takes 3–4 years from taking the cutting until the plant is mature enough for the first harvest.

Asexual or vegetative plant propagation

Asexual plant propagation methods produce new plants from vegetative parts of the original plant, such as the leaves, stems and roots. These methods are generally referred to as vegetative propagation. Many plants can reproduce this way naturally, but vegetative propagation can also be artificially induced.

Advantages of vegetative propagation

The main advantage of vegetative propagation methods is that the new plants contain the genetic material of only one parent, so they are essentially clones of the parent plant. This means that, once you have a plant with desirable traits, you can reproduce the same traits indefinitely, as long as the growing conditions remain similar. This is especially important for commercial growers who want to reproduce the highest-quality plants and ensure consistency of a variety of plant or crop for sale. This can also help to maintain consistent quality and taste in products made from plants or crops. For example, in Zealong’s tea plantation, they propagate new tea plants using cuttings to ensure consistency in the taste and quality of their tea.

With vegetative propagation, plants also bypass the immature seedling phase and therefore reach the mature phase sooner. This can save a lot of time and money for commercial plant production. For example, it takes 3–4 years for a tea plant to grow big enough (from a cutting) to be ready for harvesting and processing into tea. Growing from seedwould take even longer.


Disadvantages of vegetative propagation

The main disadvantage is the potential to impact on biodiversity of a species. Also, if a particular plant clone is susceptible to certain diseases, there is potential to lose entire crops, such as the impact of kiwifruit disease Psa. One way to protect against these problems is to establish a genetic bank of seeds or plants (a germplasm collection), which is common practice in various cropral sectors.

Propagation refers to increasing the no. of plants of a particular spieces and in vegetative propagation we can see that a no. of plants are obtained from fragments of a Singal parent plant which lead increase in productivity