Blue honeysuckle

The honeyberry is extremely hardy and needs no winter protection at all in the bed: no mulch, no fleece, just leave it standing. Straight after harvest, thin out the oldest, barky shoots close to the ground; only container plants you move to a sheltered house wall or indoors, cool and bright, because the root ball can otherwise freeze through.

The most reliable method is propagation by cuttings, which also gives you true-to-type young plants. In early summer, best straight after harvest in June, cut out shoots of this year about 20 to 30 cm long that have not yet fully hardened. Each cutting should have at least three to four nodes. Remove the leaves in the lower third and shorten the remaining leaves by half, so that the plant loses less water through evaporation. Insert the shoots into nutrient-poor, loose substrate and keep it constantly moist. Even moisture is crucial for rooting. Alternatively, flowerless softwood cuttings (shoots without flower buds) also work very well in spring. You can overwinter the rooted cuttings cool, bright and frost-free; the following spring you then plant them in the bed.

Layering is even easier: in spring, bend a flexible branch growing close to the ground down to the soil, fix it with a hook and cover the middle of the shoot with soil. Leave the shoot tip standing upright. After a few months the buried section has formed its own roots; then you separate it from the mother plant and transplant it.

Sowing is possible if you crush berries from a ripe plant, free the seeds from the pulp and either sow them directly outdoors in autumn or, after a cold period in the fridge (seeds mixed with moist sand, kept cool for a few weeks), put them in the soil in spring. But allow several years until the first harvest and expect seedlings not to be identical to the mother plant.