Question

Some crop plants can be grown from a seed as well as vegetatively from stem cuttings. List any four advantages of vegetative propagation in such cases.

Answer 1

Plant propagation is the process of increasing the number of plants of a particular species or cultivar. Asexual plant propagation or vegetative propagation methods produce new plants from vegetative parts of the original plant, such as the leaves, stems and roots. A plant cutting is a piece of a plant that is used in horticulture for vegetative (asexual) propagation wherein a piece of the stem or root of the source plant is placed in a suitable medium such as moist soil.

Advantages of vegetative propagation:

• The main advantage of vegetative propagation methods is that the new plants contain the genetic material of only one parent, so they are essentially clones of the parent plant.
  
• It helps to maintain consistent quality and taste in products made from plants or crops.
• With vegetative propagation, plants bypass the immature seedling phase and therefore reach the mature phase sooner.
  
• Vegetative propagation saves a lot of time and money for commercial plant production.