They should be big enough to plant out. There is another way to propagate forsythia and crepe myrtle. For forsythia, you simply bend a branch down and place it in a narrow trench with the tip sticking out. Place a rock over the soil where the branch is under the soil--doesn't need to be very deep. In a year or two you will have a new plant that can be severed and moved. I have turned one forsythia into almost 3 dozen this way over the last 40 years. Crepe myrtles will root from cuttings, but you can also take a sharp shovel, plunge it into the ground a couple feet away from the trunk and wait for the plant to put up a root sprout from the injured root. Wait a year or two and transplant. I have transplanted both spring and fall.

Ok thanks I will try that too. Probably both methods and hopefully double the shrubs. New place and no existing landscaping so this will help a lot.

Jill, I do things the way Dorothy described, and I feel confident those methods will work well for you. They work better for me than cuttings do, and I have a greenhouse, though I haven't used it for cuttings.

With cuttings, I always assume some of them won't make it, and start out with a whole lot more cuttings than I need. That way, when some of them don't make it, I don't fret because I still have plenty left.

When you put your new plants from cuttings in the ground, just be sure the ground is moist and stays moist (but not sopping wet) because their root systems will be relatively young and small, and mulch well so that the ground doesn't get too cold or too dry during their first winter. At our house in southern OK, our winter months are usually even drier than our summer months, but they also are cooler so the soil holds the moisture longer.

It is hard to start over with a new place and to do the landscaping from scratch, but just think about how much fun you'll have making the landscape your own!

Dawn

Thanks to both of you for the reponses. With that in mind could I get some more advice? There was a crape myrtle here when we bought this place in Nov. of 2012, but unfortunately the owners had planted it way to close to the house. I transplated it and a large rose of sharon, also too close to house in December and waited to see what would happen. The rose of sharon made it fine this spring, greened and bloomed. The crape died. Anyway one of the left over bigger roots sent up stems this summer but they were 6 inches from foundation of house. I dug down and found the root and severed it a few inches from the stems and picked the whole thing up and planted it in a growers pot. I've kept it moist and in the shade this last month and the stems have not wilted or died. They are about 6 inches tall. So my question is what can I do with this pot this winter? Plant it out or leave it under the porch in a protected area and let it go dormant this winter and plant in spring?

I bought crepe myrtle on sale last fall and kept them in a hole in my garden covered with mulch. I had 8 or 10 sale pots and nothing died. Also I have big pots in my garden and sometimes crepe myrtle reseeds in them. These seedlings live through the winter. If you have a place prepared it might also be fine to just plant it this fall. Since crepe myrtle is late to sprout in spring and your plant is small you would have to make sure not to forget where you put it.

edit You may like to garden. Taking cuttings and moving little sprouts is real gardening But after frost gets the leaves, crepe myrtles look like dead sticks. I buy plants on sale in fall and before Lowe's gets their Christmas trees which may be November. It is an illness because I still have my sale plants from last year not planted yet. Sometimes I give plants to neighbors when I get pinks for 10 cents a six pack and crepe myrtles for $2.

This post was edited by helenh on Thu, Aug 8, 13 at 13:19

Helenh if it's an illness, then many of us are suffering from it, lol. I get marked down plants from Lowes too. I rehab, trim, feed and water and wait and see what happens...sometimes it is great and sometimes, not so much. What it is, in my opinion, is a love of plants and playing in the dirt.

Jill, Maybe it depends on how harsh your winters are, but I'd rather plant most things in fall than in spring. When you plant in fall, the root systems can settle in and grow (albeit slowly) in the cooler conditions of fall through spring. That puts the plants in better shape to handle next summer's heat as they'll have better root systems from a fall planting than if you hold them in a pot until spring. With the spring planting, it often gets pretty hot before they get a chance to put out very many new roots. Fall is my favorite time to plant trees and shrubs, and winter is my second favorite time. I'm in zone 7b but within a pretty cold microclimate (a low-lying creek hollow in an already low-lying river valley), and I have found most plants tolerate our winter weather just fine, even if I've only recently planted or transplanted them. The only year I've lost stuff to a freeze was when we stayed above freezing until mid-December, and then abruptly plunged from the 70s to around 15 or 16 degrees. I lost some zone 8 plants....but that was my fault for planting zone 8 plants in zone 7. (I wanted to see if they would grow here, and they did for several years, but the plunge from above-average to below-average temperatures in one day got them, and I haven't planted any zone 8 plants here since then, unless I am using them as annuals.)

It is hard to kill a crape myrtle. I have severed the sprouts from the roots of a mature crape myrtle and moved them in almost any month of the year and had them survive. As long as they had any root at all on them, they survived just fine. When I did it, though, we lived in zone 8 Fort Worth and the winter weather there rarely gets cold enough to hurt CMs. I turned one CM in our Fort Worth yard into lots and lots of crape myrtles. It might be a little trickier to do that in any month of the year in zone 7 or 6 where we have slightly colder winters. I don't plant a lot, except for annual veggies, flowers or herbs, in June through August, because the heat is so hard on them, but I plant a lot in the fall.

Helen, Every gardener I know finds it hard to resist adopting those garden bargains at the end of the season, even if they don't have room for those plants in their yards. : )

Dawn

When you get really brave, you can start taking rose cuttings :) Sharon took a few from some of my bushes this last spring. Last I heard they were still surviving.

I always buy from the dead and dying rack at Lowes too! I usually get some great stuff. This year I lost a lot of them for some reason, but usually they thrive under some extra TLC. Hmm, that might be my problem. I have a tendency to throw things in the ground and tell them, "only the fittest will survive." lol.

I didn't check your page, where do you live?

lisa_h live just south of Stillwater. For many years lived in Texas gulf area and Rio Grande Valley. The complexity of going from sand to sandy loam to heavy clay is about to drive me crazy, lol.