Share A Cutting

  It sometimes bemuses me to see how expensive plants are.  I understand buying something for the first time but, once you own a plant, there is not a lot of reason to buy more of the same plant.  Root them or save seeds.  With just a little ingenuity, rooting plants is the way to go.  Most plants will indeed try to reproduce one way or another.  Plants are just like every living thing.  They want to reproduce.

  Earlier this month, I had given Darling Daughter a bunch of Night Blooming Cereus plants that I had rooted.  (By a bunch, I mean a car packed with plants.)  This evening, she told me that one of the plants had 6 buds on it and she was anxiously awaiting for them to open.  Mine are budding again but that is beyond the point.  The point is that the rooted plants are doing so well. They were all rooted by just breaking off some leaves and tossing them in the gutter drain better known as Pebble Creek.  There are still rooted cuttings among the gravel just waiting to be potted.  Folks, don't give in to those that are overpricing things.  Five minutes with a pair of snips and a jar of water is all you need for most rootings.  Snip, put in a jar of water and wait about a month.  There you have it.  New plants.  This works really well if you have a neighbor with different plants!  Swapping cuttings can give both of you a bunch of free plants. Just a thought...just a thought.

Healing Plants

   The pomegranate has one of the prettiest blooms of all shrubs.  It is often unusual to find a shrub of any type that has true orange blooms.   I prefer to call it "Halloween Orange" as it reminds me so much of my favorite holiday.  Plus, if all goes well with a tree, the fruit will be ready to harvest just around Halloween!  (How ironic is that?)  They are self-pollinating but encouraging bees to pollinate gives the tree a better chance at setting fruit.  Come on, bees!  Do your thing!

  While doing chores in the garden, today, I noticed that the pomegranate was blooming so, of course, I had to take time to admire the "orange".  While checking the shrub, I had the grand thought that I need to root more of these things.   Between these and the gardenias, I could have the entire yard filled with loveliness and both are simple to root.  

  It seems that since a good deal of my time this past fall was spent confined to the Small Gardens, it is now a unspoken goal to root every type of plant.  I want to fill my little corner of the world with plants...lots of plants...any kind of plants!  Plants from the tallest trees to the smallest mosses.  While ill, I found complete comfort in piddling around in the Small Gardens.  I think that being near the plants hastened my healing greatly.  It is only fair turnaround if I now help the plants. So, propagating shall commence!  Halloween Orange shrubs will dot the hillside!

Maybe What Started It All...

  Growing up on a small farm taught me many things.  I use a lot of this knowledge every single day, here on the Bayou.  I will come face to face with some odd problem and it only takes a few moments of retrospect before I remember a similar enigma from far back when I was a kid.  A few more thoughts and the answer is often shown clear.  My problem is solved purely from things learned as a kid.  

  While out doing a bit of yard work this afternoon, I mused that the sapling camphor tree really should be transplanted from its pot into the ground.  The thing has already outgrown the largest pot I have and to be a healthy tree, it needs room to grow.  No problems there but this started me thinking back on camphor trees, the old farmplace and Pop. I had to smile.  It was a camphor tree that sparked an interest in gardening on a full scale.  There was a rather large camphor tree in what we called the "Circle".  This was an area in the center of a large circular driveway that was on the west side of the house.  The area was not actually round but more of a large teardrop shape.  It was a good seventy five feet long by perhaps thirty feet wide.  This area was filled with camellia bushes, roses, golden rain trees and my beloved camphor tree.  The "Circle" was my private "Secret Garden" where I often played in a make-believe, fantasy world.  It was also my place to learn a lot of gardening tips from Pop as I was his "hired" help when it came to caring for his plants there.  The camphor tree was a large, spraddled tree with branches that just begged for climbing.  There was also a neat hole in the middle of a the main trunk where a rat snake lived.  The snake and I became quite friendly with each other but I dared not tell another soul of my friendship as the snake would have surely met its demise.  Snakes had a tendency to eat eggs and baby chicks both of which were part of the livelihood of the family.  But enough about my friend, the snake, and back to the camphor tree.  I mentioned to Pop how much I loved the tree and the scent of its leaves.  With that, he took a notion to teach me how to take cuttings and root new trees.  My very first successful attempt at rooting a plant of any kind was that camphor cutting!  I was fascinated that I could make many more trees simply by trimming branches and rooting them.  To me, a young child of about 6, that was amazing!  I was hooked for life on the captivating world of gardening.

  I find it bewildering that these days not many folks are teaching their kids any useful "tricks of the trade", as Pop used to call these tidbits of information.  You would be hard-pressed to find any youngster or even young adult these days that can identify a camphor tree, yet alone, propagate one.  I use the knowledge gained from the farm on a daily basis and have passed a lot of what Pop taught me along to my kids.  Hopefully, my kids will, in turn, pass it along to theirs.  I understand that not everyone is interested in plants or gardening but it has never hurt anyone to learn new things.  In fact, I strive to learn something new everyday just to keep the brain in good operating condition.  In reality, it only takes one small instance to trigger a passion about doing things.  Then, again, most people (even youngsters) have their noses stuck to some electronic device and have no interest in anything other than some blinky (irritating) screen.  I am glad I grew up on a farm and still live much the same life.