Making Airplanes

I'm coming up to my first year anniversary (ha!) of having my grannie's Airplane plant. I got it late in the year last year, wintered it with surprising success, and now it's making little airplanes like crazy. The test case I did back on April 20th of this year looks great; it's making huge new leaves.

Time to do more.

I had recently saved a plant tray along with its pots from the trash at work, and I decided this would be the perfect use.

 

I think they're adorably cute in their little planting tray... In 2 months or so I'll worry about finding a home for them all.

Sometimes the Best Solutions are the Redneck Ones - Fixing the Strawberries

I purchased some bird netting from Amazon for around $11, and I was in a hurry to get it up as more and more strawberries were starting to turn. Last year the birds feasted and I starved, so this year I was determined it was going to be different.

The first step was to move the strawberries from the ground to containers. They've been on the move since that, bugging out whenever the front lines shifted (read: blue jays started hanging around).

Next step was to get them covered. I figured I could drape the netting over them, but I still didn't want the birds getting under the netting or being able to reach the fruit through it. It took a few days to come up with a solution. Wire coat hangars. I'm telling you - those things are useful for just about everything.

Strawberry plants covered with bird netting. You can see the wire coat hangars in between the plants. I alternated the direction they were hung so that they would keep the netting off the leaves.

Ripening strawberries

New Rooting Project(s)

Propagating Rosemary via Cuttings

So after the rose cutting flopped, I ended up doing some cutting on my rosemary bush. I cut a whole chunk out, trying to reshape it, and realized I had some good pieces that would probably make good cuttings. So why not try?

Rooting Rosemary:

1. Cut some rosemary! Take plenty of time to enjoy the wonderful fragrance. 

2. Select semi wooden branches (too green and it might be too weak) that are 4-6 inches in length. 

3. Strip the leaves from the lower half-ish of the branch. 

4. Prepare your pots with soil, and water the soil well. 

5. Gently push the cutting into the soil. 

6. Press the soil into place around the new cutting. 

Rosemary cuttings made May 12th.

The soil should stay moist, but I'm trying not to have to cover these. The humidity is soaring, and I don't want to invite mold. They get shade but bright light during the day and morning sun.

Aloe Vera

So I have a pot of aloe vera that's doing very well (the same ones I sunburned), and sister wanted a piece of it. I had some new plantlets in the pot that grew over the winter, so I fished them out for her. She picked three, and I fixed a small pot with damp soil. Have a look:

So far so good. I hope they have a long life. My other plants are glad not to be so crowded.

Growing Onions from Discarded Pieces

White Onions

So two different onion scenarios. Last summer, I took the bottom of a white onion from the store, cut it from the onion, and planted it. The steps were very simple. I just let the cut piece dry out a little on the counter (couple of hours, maybe a day), then I stuck it cut side up in some dirt, with no dirt covering the onion.

It turned into this:

As you can see there are three different sprouts coming up. I should have split them apart, but I did not.

In the upper right corner you can see what will soon be a flower bud opening to make seeds. I didn't want that to happen; I wanted to see what I had grown.

So I dug it up.

Heh.


Here are the steps:

1. Here's what they looked like washed and with the tops cut off. I cut the bottoms off too. I will only eat the white part. No idea if that's the right thing to do or not, but that's the part you'd normally eat. It smells stronger than any onion I've never gotten in the store!

2. I cut the bottoms of the onions off (with a generous portion of the bulb material left. You can see the very large root systems here. I prepared three new pots with some dirt.

3. I placed the onion pieces in the pots and covered the roots, leaving the very top of the onion uncovered, and watered well.

So there you go. Three onions from one bottom piece. Yes, they were very small onions (and cooked down to a very small portion), but they were delicious! This time around I will be separating the shoots that come up so that the bulb growth can get larger.

Green Onions

The second onion-related project has to do with green onions. The store never sells them in small packages, so when you buy you're forced to buy in bulk, and you never use them all up in whatever recipe you follow.

Steps to growing your own green onions:

1. Secure extra onions.
2. Prepare a pot of soil, and water it well.
3. Since my pieces already had roots on it, I trimmed the green part down so that the tiny roots wouldn't have a lot to support. Then I poked each one carefully into the wet soil. If your pieces don't already have roots, I've read you can set them in glasses of water (which you frequently change), until they make roots.
4. I pressed the soil firmly around the new plants.
5. Wait.

I almost made another mess-up by leaving these in the direct sun. Now they are under my carport in shade and bright light. I'll leave them there until they show significant leaf growth, at which time they'll move into the garden spot.

So there you go. Waste not want not.

Rose Cutting - 5th Week.

A moment of silence, please.

No pictures this time, just a news update. The rose cutting is officially dead. Since all the branches had browned and dried, I pulled it out of its pot to see if it had even thought about making roots, and it had not. Instead I found tiny maggot-like worms. Ew.

The dirt was tossed into the yard (waste not) into a non-garden spot, and the pot will be rinsed out before I stick anything else in it.

Some important lessons were learned.

Diagnosis of what probably went wrong (in no particular order of significance):

1. The cutting was from old wood rather than green wood, and it was very short.
2. No rooting hormone, which might have helped my chances a little.
3. I might have left too many leaves on.
4. I uncovered the rose too soon; should have left the plastic baggie on much longer than I did.
5. Becoming overly ambitious at the sight of new leaf growth, I moved the cutting into a spot with partial sun instead of mostly shade and bright light. Oopse.

I found a great link, here which does an excellent job at teaching you how to do rose cuttings. For me, the most important information this article had to offer that was not readily available in all my previous Googling:

1. Wounding the stem is good; taking all the bark off is bad. I should have wounded the stem in strips, one or two strips, down the cutting rather than stripping the bark all the way off. As the growth hormones are essentially in this top layer, I crippled my cutting without knowing it.
2. The cutting needs to remain covered for the whole time it's rooting, at least until the second set of leaves.
3. It's the second set of leaves you want to watch out for; any initial leaf growth, according to this article, will be as a result of energy already stored in the cutting. Secondary leaf growth, however, will be as a result of successful root production.

It was a very fun project to try, and now that my own roses are growing by leaps and bounds, I will probably begin experimentation to perfect my methods.

Organic Gardening? Getting Rid of Pests

So I'm not usually into the whole organic gardening thing. Yes, I'm generally concerned about what goes in my mouth. I like my plants to be healthy and strong, but the bugs around here are mammoth in proportion, and frankly, I need mammoth-sized products to deal with them.

Plus I think I'd have to go a long way to be as bad as what comes from the store!

All that to say: I have a new favorite product for the garden.

Cinnamon powder.

Thanks to unusually wet and cool weather, almost all of my pots are infested with fungus gnats. They're tiny black critters who can barely fly, and they're covering my soil like fleas on a dog.

They were responsible for destroying my first round of seedlings, and I'm blaming them for some of the damage to my rose cutting, too.

Well, I have found the solution. Sprinkle good ol' Cinnamon powder onto the top of your soil. It kills the fungus that gnat larva eat, thereby starving the buggers. Thusly they die too. For the adults, I've read that a bowl of soapy water (such as bath soap) will attract them. They get into the water, and drown. Excellent.

I have not attempted the soap-bowl trick, but I *have* used the Cinnamon powder. I tried it first on the rose cutting; in two days, I saw no more gnats. Now I have gone large-scale, and every pot outside has received a sprinkling of cinnamon if a gnat so much as landed on the dirt.

My garden smells delicious, the gnats are dead, and I am a happy gardener. One tip: try not to get the cinnamon powder on the leaves. I've read it will burn young leaves. Other than that... happy hunting.

Gathering herbs from the garden

Also: How to make homemade mint tea and how to make your own seasonings

 

Pruning the Mint Plants: 

 

So, from time to time, it's a good idea to cut on your herbs. At first I was a nonbeliever, and I didn't want to cut a single fragrant leaf. My KC mint got three feet tall and spindly, flopping over to the ground. My chocolate mint nearly died, and my rosemary kept getting taller and thinner.

This year I said: I'm going to give this cutting thing a go. I started with the KC mint, took a pair of scissors, closed my eyes, and started cutting. It was like I'd put the plant into overdrive! That mint plant pratically exploded with lush new growth. The rosemary was next, and it's gotten bushier by the week. So now... now it was the chocolate mint's turn.

My chocolate mint had a rough start; it was super tiny and not growing too well. But in the past month I was able to re-pot it into something that gives it more horizontal room. When I turned the plant over in my hands to get the old pot off, the crushed leaves sent up such a blast of spearmint that it was like I'd chopped into an onion! My eyes started watering and I could barely breathe. It was wonderful.

Here's a picture of my chocolate mint, pre-trimming on left, post-trim on right:

It went from an over-sized afro to a scant buzz cut! It looks a bit thin on top now, but I know in a few weeks, it'll be huge again. Just look how much I cut out of it:

  

 I was about to throw the clippings away... but then I decided to bring them on inside and wash them up. I could decide what to do with them later. Then I got struck by the brilliant idea to make some homemade mint tea. 

First, I washed the mint leaves very well in the sink. Then I filled my tea brewer with about 12 stems worth of leaves. 

It wasn't exactly an exact measurement. I just kept adding leaves until I decided I was tired of adding them. I tore most of the biggest leaves as I put them in, and then I poured about 8 oz of hot water into the brewer, and let it steep. 

 Chopping up the Rosemary:

 

While that was cooking, I remembered some rosemary I had harvested on March 16th, a month back. I'd washed it and laid it out to dry. So I decided to chop it up to add some dried rosemary to my spice cabinet. First I stripped the leaves from the branches, starting at about the middle and gently running my fingers backwards down the stem. Then using a large knife, I chopped the little leaves up until they were as small as I wanted them:

Dried Rosemary stems

Here I've stripped the leaves from the stems. I used a small ramekin to catch the fly-away leaves.

Using a knife, I chopped the leaves up until the bits were fairly uniform in size.

Close up of the finished product.

And finally... I didn't forget to enjoy my first homemade cup of mint tea! All in all... it's actually pretty good! 

Propagating Roses from Cuttings

So I had the great fortune to receive a cutting of the Peace rose from a family friend. I've been wanting to try to grow a rose from a cutting for a long time, and I've read tons of material on it, but I've never had the opportunity to before.

The cutting came to me at 9:30 PM Monday night; it had been cut earlier that evening. It appeared to be a hard wood cutting with softwood sprouting from the tip. I'm sorry to say I don't have any pictures from the procedure since I was in a hurry and it was so late at night.

I trimmed off all but the top most leaves, and I also pinched off some new growth forming lower down the stem. Then, with a very sharp knife, I scraped the bark off of half of the hardwood stem. I filled a four inch pot with fresh dirt, and planted the cutting in it.

I topped the whole thing with a gallon bag propped open with some paint stirrers, which will serve to create a mini green house for the rose cutting.

Peace rose cutting, 3 days old

So far, the leaves haven't wilted! I'm taking that as a positive indication of moderate success. I will definitely be keeping close tabs on this experiment.

How To Build A Grow Light

So the seedlings are sprouting! The first two popped up last night, at exactly 7 days. They were the Roma and the Cherry. Naturally, now that I have seedlings craving the sun, we've got a cold front plus three days of rain coming in.

This just wont do. So I went to the internet for solutions. I needed a grow light. I do not have the money for a grow light. So I needed... well this:

The light is about an inch above the top of the box, which puts it about two or three inches away from the tallest sprout. Whatever the distance, the left side is the height of For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe, and As I Lay Dying. The right side is the height of The History of Art, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Scarlet Letter, and one I cant recall at the moment.

The light is one I had sitting around (or rather, dad had sitting around in the shop). And presto. Grow light. The set up was inspired by this article here, via Yahoo.

I'm very hopeful. I may combine this with my idea to put the tray on the air vent to warm the grow pellets. Grow light + warmth = happy tomatoes? I'll give it a shot and report back if I get brave.