yucca baccata

This plant grows all over the place on and around my property, and they're said to produce quite good fruit. But I'm not going to get any fruit "naturally" because the deer eat every single flower. So I decided to try propagating them in a spot where I can more easily protect them.

My first internet search led me to multiple sources that claimed propagating this species is "easy" and could even be done from leaf cuttings. I figured that's easy enough to test, and gathered a single leaf from a dozen plants that looked like they could easily handle it. Stuck them in the ground in some damp, lightly-amended native soil with some leaf litter and bark for mulch. Based on what I had read, I didn't water them at all, then after a couple weeks there were two huge rainstorms about a week apart so they got thoroughly watered. The leaves just steadily dried out during that whole period, with the rain seeming to make no difference, so I'm pretty sure none of them have rooted at all.

So I went back and looked for more info, and found some slightly more authoritative-seeming sources which more specifically said that stem and rhizome cuttings can be propagated, but didn't mention leaf cuttings. I'm not sure quite how to locate stems or rhizomes on this plant; the whole area near the soil surface tends to be a confusing mess of dead material, and when pulling off layers it's not quite clear at what point it even starts being alive, or where the leaf bases stop and the stem/rhizome starts. But I did find one small sucker (not sure if that's the scientifically correct term but the little guy growing off the side) on a large healthy plant, which I could cleanly cut off with some confidence I knew what I was doing. Based on something I read somewhere, I dried the wound on my cutting with wood ash before planting. Then I planted it in some very rich soil collected from under a nearby pinyon/juniper cluster.

I also saw two small plants growing in a really bad spot, likely to get washed away within another couple years' worth of floods. So I carefully dug out as much of their roots as I could, and transplanted them in the same spot as the failed leaf propagation experiment.

All of that was over the course of June, more or less. By now it's even more clear that the leaf propagation did not work. Over the past couple weeks I've started occasionally watering the transplants lightly, and I've given the sucker propagation a splash or two (that one has a good chunk of rhizome with it, which I bet still holds plenty of moisture; the transplants are pretty much all leaves and roots so I started watering them sooner). I figure they're native plants so I probably don't want to water them too much, but it's hot out and they don't look all that happy to me. They're all in afternoon shade but with plenty of morning/midday sun, a situation I've seen wild ones doing quite well in.

I'm definitely not giving up on these three little guys yet, but I'm not sure what else to do at this point besides keep watering them for the rest of the summer and hope they pull through. They were all mostly green when I planted them, but now the transplants have more yellow leaves than green ones. It's hard to tell if they've just given up on their lower leaves during transplant shock, or if they've failed to regrow their roots completely and are slowly drying out. The original leaf cuttings stayed mostly green for multiple weeks, so that color doesn't necessarily mean anything is alive.

Does anyone have experience propagating, or in general growing this plant? Or advice from anyone is appreciated, really; I'm a beginner gardener just trying my best from what I've read online, so it's entirely possible I'm missing something obvious.

Spring 2025 update: the offset cutting does not look happy, probably gonna dry out and die soon if I don't find some miracle cure for it. If that doesn't recover this year, I'd say my propagation experiments for this species have all failed. I bought seeds from Sheffield's, which are apparently sourced from a location pretty close by, and I'll see if I can get those to germinate, and hopefully grow to maturity. Also I'll try to protect any flowering wild plants from getting eaten by deer, and hopefully collect seeds from those to plant this fall or next spring.

Maybe their bad location was where the deer could not get to them?

By the way, your plants look like they just didn't get enough water.

> Maybe their bad location was where the deer could not get to them?
Nah, it was out in the wide open, and it's possible that some of why they didn't look happy was because the deer also munch on the leaves during the winter (must be pretty desperate times for them to be eating a yucca leaf, wow)

> your plants look like they just didn't get enough water
Yes, it's certainly possible/likely that a couple of these might have done better if I'd watered them more. The thought was that this is their native environment, so they ought to be able to survive on just rain, right? But as I've learned a bit more about propagating plants in general, I guess some extra water might be what they need to get through the stress of transplanting. Next time I try propagating them, I'll definitely water them more than I did last time. I doubt that root rot is going to be a big risk, given how dry it is around here, so there's not really a downside.

June updates:

I ended up ordering some seed from Sheffield's, which said it was collected in Paradox which is pretty nearby. So far, only one of those seeds has come up, one that I direct sowed into a lightly mulched bed of native soil, a couple weeks before last frost. It took quite a while to pop up, so I was probably too early with that. I don't know if the other seeds in the same bed are still dormant, or got eaten by birds, or what. The seeds have a really hard coat on them so I doubt that they've rotted already. The seedling is a very generic looking monocot, growing very slowly, and I might have mistaken it for a weed or not even noticed it was there, if I hadn't marked the spot where I planted it.

I also took another cutting and put it in a pot with some "cactus mix" miracle grow stuff, and this time I've been watering it about as often as any garden plant. I read so many warnings about not overwatering cactus, and I'm sure that's a real problem when growing them in wetter climates, but I guess I don't need to worry about it too much in this case. I had it in full sun at first, and it very clearly got sunburned, so now it's in afternoon shade and seems to be doing alright. It's definitely still alive, not drying out and turning grey/brown like the others did, but the leaves don't appear to be growing at all. I hope that means it's putting energy into growing roots.

And finally... it seems that whatever is eating the wild ones isn't deer. Or at least, not exclusively deer. I put a circle of hardware cloth around one that was flowering, and I guarantee there's no way a deer got around that, but the whole flower stalk still got eaten. So it must have been a rodent or a rabbit, both of which could easily get under the fence that was only meant to stop deer. So the next time I try that I'll have to actually fence the thing all the way down to the ground.