That's a good experiment, York Rose. An alternative baggie method a friend showed me is to use the Jiffy peat pots. If you get the tomato refills, they quickly plump to about 4 inches tall and the netting keeps the soil together. I also tried peat pots, but they are kind of fragile when wet and then you need to stuff in the damp soil. Speaking of soil, a seed starter mix with perlite (not vermiculite which will bog the soil) seems to work really well, I found some by Ferry-Morse at Lowe's (they also now have the peat pots). Before I only used a fine mulch and I think that was a bad no-no. You can fit two 3" peat pots or four tomato refills into a gallon Ziplock bag. He also mentioned about acid water working much better than alkaline as a friend of his up in northern Ca can simply put the slips in a jar of water and get roots pretty quickly. Since we have water hard enough to stand up a spoon, I played around with some pH sticks and vinegar to figure out how much to use to simply buffer the water to get it to just under neutral. It didn't take much vinegar at all to buffer a gallon of water. In my limited experience with this method, I am having a lot of fun. Out of 100 or so slips that have been in for a month now, I've only lost one so far. One other thing to be careful with the bags is not to have the leaves touch the side of the bag cuz that moisture will make them soggy and rot. I wound up taking most of the leaves off of my slips. In order to keep the bags upright, I had the idea to use bamboo bbq skewers but these got moldy so not a good idea. If you have a bunch of the bags in a plastic container they seem to keep themselves upright. Now that I'm having so much fun, I want to get around to looking for some Sterlite bins that are tall enough to use the pots without the bag, otoh, if I do that, I'll have to be careful to label each one instead of the bag. Oh, temps? For this experiment I've simply had them in the garage which stays about 50-ish even at night when it's cold. It will be interesting to see if my luck changes for the worse when it gets warmer.

Received mine yesterday as well. I ordered them 9 months ago hoping to get everything this year that they ran out of last year. Overall they are really nice cuttings. On most of them I was sent 3 of each type with the 2 I really wanted.. they sent one of each. Some of the cuttings are small but fat and healthy, some of the others are nearly 16 inches long. Received a bunch of grape vines and other stuff as well. I cant wait to go play in the greenhouse tomorrow!!

It's too late for this year. The deadline for UC Davis cuttings is December 1. Get your order in NOW for next year. You need a Fed EX number (free), but you need a credit card to link it to, so UC Davis can ship your cuttings at no cost to them. It's a bargain! You pay for shipping, but sticks don't weigh too much. I guess it depends on how many varieties you order. They sent me 3-5 of each, except for the one I was dying to have (Violet de Bordeaux). They only sent one sorry little cutting of that, but I cut it in 3 parts, and 2 are now showing leaves. They honored my entire order of 13 varieties of grape vines, 2 of olives, 2 of pomegranates, and 3 of figs aka Ficus Carica. They go to a lot of effort to send you these FREE cuttings. They cut nice straight cuttings, then they bundle them, label them, put them in plastic with damp paper towels, put them in a shipping box, print out the label, and send them to YOU! They do all that hard work for nothing. I am happy to pay for shipping! No complaints!! My big fear is that they will catch on, and start charging us :-( I'm not a fig tree collector (just a fig eater), so 3 varieties was plenty for me. I picked the 3 best tasting according to an article on their site, and I suppose that's the reason I only got one of sweet little Violet de Bordeaux! Demand!! I have already started my order for next year. My vineyard has most of my attention, so my order is just wine grape vines this year, and mostly root stock at that. I won't compete with you for figs! Suzi

There is no phone number. I submitted the order to Bernie Prins, as the instructions below the order form download page. In the body of the email, I simply stated, "Please find and confirm attached request for plant material", along with a "thanks for everything you do!" (because I seriously appreciate it!!). About 3 weeks later, I got a confirmation email from someone at UCD along with my order # and a thanks for footing the bill on shipping - NOTE: your spam filter on your email may catch the confirmation email as spam - you never know. I have the fortune of running my own mailserver, and use methods other than spam filtering to prevent getting spam email. This is something to think about though, or, if possible, set your spam filter to allow delivery of all emails from anyone "@ars.usda.gov" When I found that they had Verino and I totally missed it, I'm sure it is a burden for them, but I emailed the person who confirmed my order and requested "please please please add Vernino to my order, I'm a blockhead and forgot it." They were kind enough to oblige. Very gracious. I'll never make that mistake again, and would recommend that everyone else double-check, triple-check your order before sending it off! One other thing to note is to see on the page where you download the order form, it specifically says to email to "Bernie Prins", and this is what I did. I see some people in posts above talking about how there is a lot of "any questions? email Howard Garrison" at the bottom of several pages. Howard is not the person you're supposed to email your order to.