ou arehave some Time to work on your trees. I know it is cold, but that is the nature of this work, it must be done in the middle of Winter. I hope most of your hybrid poplar trees are over 10 ft. tall. Make sure all the leaves are off the trees before you start. Here in Pennsylvania that happens on the second week in November. First thing you do is to trim the side branches from all your trees and leave only the main stem. If your trees are over 10 ft, tall some of those tall ones will have branches also way up. They can be bent without breaking them to remove those branches.
Pick up your branches, even up the bottoms, turn them upside down and look at them. If they are brown, discard them, they are dead. All live branches should have some green.
All these branches should have buds spaced about 1.5″ apart. You can make cuttings by cutting them so they have 2 buds each, 3 if they are too short. One bud cuttings will not grow. You may have from 100 to 300 cuttings from each tree. If you cut all your 16 trees, you will have on average about 2400 cuttings and you can do whatever you want to do with them, but the first thing you do it to keep them cold and in sealed plastic bags and out of the sun to prevent dehydration.
Please keep in mind that these cuttings you just made are from a 1 year old tree and in order to get another large quantity of cuttings you must have 1-year- old-trees again. The only way to do that is to cut the main stem also but this time leave about a 12″ long stump in the ground.. This is done with a purpose. When the tree start growing again in April, it will make probably 2 or 3 branches in each instead or only one. (This is called coppicing) Yes, you can do this every year, in fact, I have been doing it for the last 11 years and every year my trees grow larger and larger. Some years they will grow 20 ft.
Back to the cuttings. Since you have so many, and probably do not know what to do with them other than giving them to your family and neighbors, you could send me some of your cuttings so I can use them to send to other people like you for them to again do what you did. This is “Pay forward” . My name again is Frank Gomez and I am at 12 Brook circle in Glenmoore PA 19343. Please put the cuttings in a sealed plastic bag and keep them cool.
Now your main stems…. Yes you can plant them, about 8″ deep and scratch the bottom 6″ of the cutting and dust some hormodin to that area of the cutting before they go in the ground. Make sure you support them so they do not sway with the wind. Those trees will need that support for about 3 months after they start growing..
Do you want to have many more trees much faster and easier? Here is your answer. This is what I did 3 years ago. I made a trench with my tiller about 50 ft. long and 5 inches deep. It was East-West so the trees get the same amount of sunshine. Then I harvested the long cuttings, 14-20 ft long. I scratched the entire surface of those long cuttings with a dull knife (one side is enough but don’t mess with the buds) as you scratched the surface of the cutting it turn green then Tan. If tan, you know you are digging too deep.
dust some hormodin along the entire length of the scratched surface and proceed to put that cutting in the trench previously tilled. Continue adding cuttings end to end in the trench. When all the cuttings were in the trench, cover them completely with soil.
There is only one thing left to do. water the entire area and made sure they never get completely dry until there is a good snow storm, then you don’t not have to bother with them any more.
In April, they start to sprout, very close together in some cases. and further apart in others. Just remember the buds are 1.5 inches apart. Potentially you would have 4 per foot or 40 on a 10 ft. cutting, but that will never happen. Still, you will have many many trees coming up at the same time and these you can not dig out, you can continue cutting them year after year and make many millions of trees….