Reflections, Realizations, and Bad Ideas

I returned last night from a 4 day vacation to the coast. Although I had someone very nice who was willing to water things for me, I came back and stood at my garden's gate, and I feel as if just that quickly I have lost the battle that is my garden.

Haul out the white flag.

Now that I've slept on it, I still feel like there is a lot of work to catch back up, and after time away I see some problems that I failed to identify until now.

In no particular order.

Problems:

- What in the world was I thinking with the peas? I set the pots up in rows just like you'd plant rows of peas. The tomato cage idea on the peas is working, although not as well as I had anticipated. My peas still don't seem to have enough room to 'go' anywhere. But the main problem is the row placement. I cannot reach the pots in the back! It's almost impossible to get enough water back there because of the tomatoes on one side and the squash on the other.

- Speaking of squash: those monsters are taking over my garden! The storage box idea is working great, but... give an inch, they take a mile. Instead of growing along the soil in the pot, they're... they're growing through the gate. And into the flower bench. And although I had pollinated 2 zucs before leaving on vacation, none set, and since I wasn't here to pollinate all this time, I can see half a dozen squash and zucs that probably didn't get pollinated by the bugs. Lazy bugs. So now I'll have an extended period of time without squash and zucchinis while the plants reset. Ultimately, however, I don't have enough room. Not in this arrangement. Maybe I need to back off to one plant each?

- The lavender needs a bigger pot. The more I look at it, the more I realize that poor thing is slowly dying from lack of water due to constriction in its current pot. I don't have one bigger on hand, which means a trip to the store if I want to keep it a live. Which I do.

- I have *got* to think of a better solution than those wimpy cages from the store for my tomatoes. While I was gone on vacation, they decided they'd grown vertically for long enough, and they tipped over into each other. So when I came back, I couldn't tell where one tomato began and another ended. I got outside and drove some stakes into the ground to hold the cages up, and I sorted the branches, so that will hold them for a little while.

- ... I may not be planting another Bell Pepper. That thing is just sitting there. It *is* getting visibly larger but good LORD could it grow any slower?

- My Roma tomato is still suffering blossom end rot. Ngh. 

- Back to squash. I think they're getting mold.

Ideas:

- Maybe I can do some emergency rearranging to save the hassle and confinement of the peas and squash. If I straightened the peas out to run along the wall of the house and set the squash in front. Sure, I'd be reaching over the squash to water the peas, but both would have ample sun and I could definitely reach them with the hose rather than with a hand pail.

Successes:

- The tubs for the squash: working great.
- The cages on the peas: not so bad.
- The bird netting on the strawberries: excellent! Sister brought in a huge handful of strawberries just yesterday, and they were delicious.
- My gnat solution is perfection personified.
- The barrel lilies are getting huge!
- I actually grew carrots!

Tis all for now.

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.

Wintered Plants, Beware

Sunburning Wintered Plants

This is what sunburn looks like on an Airplane Plant and an Aloe Vera cactus:

 This past winter was my first time to winter plants in my house. I took some to work and borrowed generous windowsills there, but my biggest plant, the Airplane plant, had to make due with being shuffled between the windowless laundry room, a back bedroom, and the porch (on warmer days).

 The Aloe was wintered in a north facing window, and when I brought it home this spring I placed it under my carport on a table. It sat there last summer and did very well. The next afternoon, I came home and the whole thing had turned brown, like above. It didn't occur to me til then that my carport was open to the east and the south. Oopse. If I turned the plant around the other way, so the opposite side was facing out, it was bright green. Oh yes, my Aloe had tan lines.

The airplane plant got scorched because I let the cool weather fool me into thinking it wouldn't hurt to sit it out in the full sun. Ah well. Lesson learned. 

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.