Paper pots and glued plugs are very suitable for rooting and raising plants from cuttings. Plugs with pre-dibbled or pre-drilled plant holes are clearly winning ground. And that’s not surprising: they save time and labour.

Ever more cuttings are being produced and rooted in areas with a favourable climate and low wages, such as Africa. To minimise the costs of air transport, the plants are loaded into the planes as small as possible, and in as many as possible per tray. The very tender, lightly rooted cuttings in small plugs then undergo a second propagation phase in Europe or North America. They are to this end often inserted into a larger plug with a pre-drilled plant hole (plug-in-plug).