The Easiest Fruit Plants to Propagate

Figs, grapes, hazels, and gooseberries are among the easiest fruit plants to propagate using cuttings, layering, or just by digging up suckers.

If you love fruit like I do, you’ll soon realize that you could break the bank buying enough plants to fill your belly.  Luckily, many fruiting trees and bushes are very simple to propagate using no equipment except some potting soil and a heating pad (or even just a garden row).  In fact, if you follow the techniques below, you can get a handful of cuttings for free from a friend during pruning season and end up with a whole homemade orchard.

Grapes are the first easy species on my list because they will grow in most parts of the U.S. and are a breeze to root from hardwood cuttings.  (Hardwood cuttings are pieces of one-year-old wood taken in the late winter before the buds start to swell.)  You can read my easy rooting method here, or, if you want to put in a little more effort and get even higher success rates, you can use the fig technique listed next.

Figs are just as easy to root as grapes, but I put them second on my list because northerners will have a hard time keeping the plants alive.  (If you live partway north, you can grow figs as long as you choose a cold-hardy variety.)  My method of rooting figs from hardwood cuttings is nearly as simple as the one I use for grapes, but I use a heating pad for figs to jump-start the process.

Gooseberries are simple because they just about root themselves.  If you allow (or force) one branch to trail along the ground, then cover part of the branch with mulch, roots will grow on the submerged portion.  Cut the stem free next year and you’ll have one or more gooseberry plants to set out elsewhere.  In case you’re curious, this technique is called tip layering.