Making More Fuschia

With a mind to filling my window baskets, pots, and planters last fall, I saved several plants to propagate this year. One is a fuschia with a bloom something like the one pictured above.

I take a tip or stem cutting about 3" long. When taking this cutting, I try to make as nice diagonal to the stem cut so to expose as much of the thin cambrium layer as possible. I remove the bottom few leaves, any of the leaves on the bottom inch or so of my cutting. Alternately, I rip off a heel cutting growing from the main stem.

I prefer to let the natural plant enzymes released by the act of cutting the plant induce its need to repair itself by growing roots. As soon as possible, I dip the freshly injured stem into some rooting hormone. You can also use an infusion of willow stems smashed with a hammer in warm water as a natural rooting hormone. My choice is Rootone. I shake out a little into a container, this time an egg carton, rather than contaminate a whole bottle. I try not to use water as a wetting agent as it washes away the natural enzymes.

Before dipping in the rooting powder I trim off about 2/3 of the remaining leaves by clumping them between my forefinger and thumb

I use a cooking skewer as my dibbit to make a hole for the stem. I insert the cutting and press the soil down around it with my fingers. When I have filled a tray, often using 2-3 cuttings per pot, I spray with water to further insure good soil stem cutting contact.

Cuttings prepared this way root very quickly with bottom heat on my lighted grow rack. When the top grpwth begins the stem will have formed and callus. Within a few days, roots will begin to form around the callus. Within a month with lighting most cuttings can be transplanted to larger containers.

The Woodpeckers

It is snowing here in central Wisconsin. I suppose it beats tornadoes.

This is my Austrian black pine. It seems to be on attack from all sides. When little (about 4-foot tall), and pre-fence which makes for better neighbors, an ice scanty was dragged across it. Two years ago, it seems to have had some sort of insect infestation drawing woodpeckers. The horror!

I have since contemplated cutting it down while I could still manage the job myself.

This morning, while walking the boxer, the woodpeckers have returned. A quick pound-pound and a flurry of wings. Then a fluttering settling of wings and the peeking around the neighbor's boxelder, "Is she gone?"

I didn't capture them myself. The obvious answer was, "No, here she comes with that soul-stealing thingee! Fly!!"

Mugshot of perpetrator, dragged down from the internet. Shout-out to this birding blog by Cristina Arno.)

(Photo by Gina Mikel.)

So I saw a pair of these pileated woodpeckers. As much as I like to see these guys, I do hope they don't totally destroy the cambrium layer of my pine!

Seeds Are Sprouting, Dreaming of Beautiful Baskets

An empty pot can be its own vignette.

Picture of a mixed hanging basket at Olbrich.

Using the baggy method I have sprouted salvia silver sage and agrostemma Milas in just five days.

Tomorrow, I will start cuttings of my dragon wing begonias, variegated airplane plants, and fuschia. All will be started from mother plants I brought in as cuttings last fall.

I also have some root cuttings of a deep purple phormium tenax that I stuck in a Ziplock last fall and have 3 inch sprouts now which need potting.

I also have laurentia, cleome, delphinium, and nicotiana I have started using the baggy method and several others stratifying in the fridge.

Tomorrow, petunias and those cuttings.

Central WI: Cold Zone

Rose 'Eureka' and Russian Sage

Not a black hole, but a white hole...

Someone, a mathematician and programmer, has put together an algorithm using census data to design an interactive map showing one dot for every resident of the United States.

So I guess what i should be saying that instead of central Wisconsin being a black hole, it's actually the white space between everyone else.

I have been thinking a lot about the plants I want to grow, and those I actually do grow. Especially when it has been so bone-chilling cold as it has been the last few days.

The thing is central Wisconsin is where the cold from the Artic sort of drips down into the lower 48 states. And as there are large bodies of water nearby, one doesn't have to travel to fair to jump a zone or more. The closest botanical gardens are in these areas. The result is I don;t have to travel too far to get huge cases of zone envy. Camera in hand, I have taken pictures of many of these, like the rose Eureka above that grows well in Olbrich Botanical Gardens just 90 miles south.

The other plants in this post also fall in that, "I can't quite grow that zone".

Eremurus - foxtail lilies

Lenten roses

Manchustripe maple

One of my neighbors has a snake bark maple closely related to this one. It has made its way through at least one winter, so this might be a possibility-- if I had room for one more tree. It has survived for the people over at the Paine Art Museum.

Japanese silver grass

I tried this one one year with several plants. None survived.

Oakleaf hydrangea

This is the more likely candidate for a place in my garden, maybe this will have to make the short wish list, if I come across it on sale.

I have started to notice I seem to have a micro-climate on one side of my house, between my house and the one neighbor I never talk with. There is a fence between us with good cause. This space is approximately 12 feet wide, 4 feet of it covered with a pea gravel path.

My son and I have lately talked of making this accessible through his room by exchanging a window for a French door to a landing and maybe a hot tub. I have often thought of adding a hot tub or outdoor Finish sauna to our landscape here. It is one of our more private spaces in the yard. Not a goal for early this year with the garden walk looming, surely, but it is an idea we often discuss.

Needless to say, this area in my yard is scheduled for change or perhaps evolution.

Planning

Wisteria blooming during an impromptu visit to the Green Bay Botanical Garden this last summer.

Planning.

I confess, I prefer to be a doer, rather than a planner. In so many things planning is important. Each day my Handsome Son has been home from college, I do ask him, "So what's your plan?" Me, though, I am plan-less. Spending your time substitute teaching does that to you . You have your scheduled days, and the day you work, because you are always on-call. (For those of you following along, the chef gig did not turn out in very quick fashion, let's say they weren't paying me on a regular basis for time worked, and leave it at that.)

So back to subbing.

Along with my son and others, I have come up with these things I plan to do this year:

Road trip to Quebec City, Canada
Grafting class at Olbrich n Madison
Some electrical wiring work here at the house
Study French, to make the road trip more fun
Start my chosen annuals for bedding and baskets
Have a great garden walk
Have a great vegetable garden with family
Re-roof my rental's garage
Paint the rest of the exterior of the rental
On-demand publish my cookie book
On-demand publish a book I vanity published for dad about the building of the Springwater Volunteer Bridge, a project he lead and built with volunteer help.
Put together a garden journal of the plants in my garden-- this desire a result of my labeling fetish as a result of the coming garden walk.
Continue to work on my book on creating garden art.

I'll probably add to this list, but it is a start, and where my interest lay. So while there will be a lot about gardening and plants, there will also be tidbits here on these other items which interest me.

Continue on, all! And, today... try to stay warm as it is predicted to be the coldest day of our winter.

At Loose Ends, in the Real World

The blue wire trellising with the curves is wire clothes line, something you don't see a lot of in urban hardware stores or actually strung up in many suburbs. Hanging clothes on the line, face it, is not an efficient use of our time these days. I know there is a lot of nostalgia regarding the line-fresh smell of clothes dried outdoors on the clothesline. I know there is a lot of talk of sustainability and such. But really, how many of us actually dry the bulk of our clothes out on the clothesline?

When I first made this porch-sized dream catcher, the roses, William Baffin, themselves were a dream. Now I predict a fairly good show starting mid-June or so, looking something like this.

Before the roses, and coming soon a clematis 'Alionushka' I planted there this last summer, the dream catcher itself was the feature. It is covered with 1"-square mirror tiles, pretty crystals, and bright beads. It has sort of a nature effect as some of the beads, micro-filament fishing line, and tiny mirrors mimic spider webs, caterpillars, and insects of all types. It is a tiny virtual world.

This week, I caught an episode of one of my favorite shows, Criminal Minds. It was the last in a series in an arc where the boy super-genius, Dr. Reed, has been carrying on an affair with a woman he has never met. In this episode, she dies. (Does this sound familiar?) He admits to himself (and Morgan)that although he has not met her or told her, he loves her. It doesn't matter what she looks like. His relationship has been on line, phone call from pay phones (a different one each time). He has this relationship. It is important to him. We, the viewers, must acknowledge it as real.

How much different is this from posting a entry to my blog. It is like tucking a letter into a bottle and tossing it into the internet sea. This week I used a couple day posts to host a virtual garden walk. YouTube! What a resource!

I watch my Handsome Son text his girlfriend when we eat or are traveling somewhere. It is like there are three of us, not two, everywhere we go. Sometimes there are a whole group of us, friends of his, his dad, the girlfriend, all right there, giving their opinions on everything we share with them.

I get up and check Facebook to see what people are up to, what silly meme has been posted, and even who has posted a new blog entry on the sidebar of the gardeners and artists whose lives and efforts I follow in a most tangential way.

How different is all this activity from Manti Te'o's' troubles?

On my blog, my roses can be in bloom. In the real world, it is not 20 degrees and it is freezing. On YouTube, I can visit almost anywhere in the world. At school there is a young mildly autistic boy who during free time uses the Google Earth app to hunt for bigfoot and the Lockness Monster.

This last really had me going.

I asked him to check out what my son was doing. I told him he's at college at UW-Green Bay. In a matter of seconds he was using GoogleEarth to walk the campus sidewalks and had actually found his dorm. This is a boy, who I probably wouldn't let attempt to walk across town.

Social media will continue to blur the lines in our world between virtual and real. I think everyone should give Te'o' a break on this one. Unless someone comes forward and admits to hoaxing him, we may never really get a clear idea what is really going on with this.

Really? Really!

Azaleas and the Sleeping Madonna of Heligan

A wonderful video montage of the Lost Garden of Heligan in Cornwall.

Beautiful Rose Video

Almost inspiration to move somewhere where I can grow roses like these in Chiba, Japan!

A Curated Garden Tour

I've been obsessing a bit as I go through seed catalogs looking for annuals to grow to fill hanging baskets, pots, and anticipated blank spaces in my garden borders for the July 2013 garden walk. In an attempt to get my mind off my own garden buried under snow and a cold front, I turned to today to YouTube.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of poor photography out there. What I did come up with though is what I am calling my Mid-winter Curated Garden Walk.

Enjoy!



A single garden narrated by the garden owner.



A group of five gardens, with a short interview with each gardener, set to, at times obnoxious, music.

And last a tour through Shropshire's David Austin Rose Gardens.

More NIce Pictures From Last Summer - 2012

Nice coloring of Korean barberry, even in a lot of shade. The carex in the foreground is for the most part evergreen, which is a nice feature for a grass.

I love how panicum, this is 'Heavy Metal' interacts with the light. It is a selection of the natie and has very uniform growth and develops earloy particularly for a warm season grass.

I like obedient plant for the nice drifts and late bloom, but it can be anything but obedient, coming up through my nearby 'Blue Star' juniper.

Joy!

This has brought me quite a bit of joy over this last week. There are probably 1,000 of these beautiful, graceful paper cranes fashioned in a chain.

Mirablis - Four O' Clocks

More gardeners should grow four o' clocks. They bloom a longer time span than just at 4 PM and on. They stay open in the morning until about 10 or 11 PM. They can be grown from seed. They come from a variety of colors, including the "broken colors". They also come in white, and a pale yellow.

(Picture of a 4 o' clocks showing the broken colors patterning, courtesy of Rob's Plants.)

They can be started from seed. Once you have grown them a season you can dig the root once the top freezes and store it in a cool place over winter. I'm not sure a lot of gardeners realize these tropical plants can be grown much like dahlias, but with the root sending up flowers much more rapidly than a dahlia. The root in the top picture is a single plant from a third year root.

Checking out the Seed Catalogs with the Twins - 2013

The Twins and I have been busy looking over seed catalogs for this coming season's gardening ideas. Their Momma would like to try cranberries. I'm not sure that will happen. The Twins and I have spent a couple days discussing this.
The one twin is quick to point out the cold snow heavy on the ground. He already feels this might be a permanent condition here in WI. He has felt bad we haven't been able to dig any blue and pink potatoes.

The other twin is much more optimistic. He has seen a plunger-type seed planter resembling a liquid medicine dropper with which he is fascinated. It is a machine. The Twins have motorized tractors that they drive about, farming. The tractors have wagons. They literally load produce and harvest using tiny tractors. However, most of the garden work is done with hand tools or the tiller "Little Man". This seed starter machine looks interesting, the allure of moving parts.

The tiny white 'Lumina' pumpkins have also caught his eye. He has pointed out peaches as a possibility, too.

Baby Gardener simply wants to eat the pages of the seed catalog, given any opportunity. Maybe that's his input that it's all good with him.

My brother, ever pragmatic, asks if we need such a large garden. There was that sweet corn, stalk and all that we cut for the donkeys. What about that bowl of carrots that froze and also ended up donkey fodder. Well, it wasn't wasted, was it? Sister-in-law and I point out. Dear Sister-in-law and I simply look at him cross-eyed. A better balanced garden, yes; smaller, no. I am already out of chopped sweet red peppers. I say maybe fewer Contender bean and gooseberries. He is quick to point out with the terrible weather, gooseberry was nearly our only fruit crop; no grapes, no apples, no cherries because of the frosts.

Sweet potatoes.

Sweet corn, planted in a clump to enhance wind-borne pollination.

Beans.

So. The same size garden for next year.

The Twins have found a picture of a brambled ball of grapevines covered with hanging gourds and squash amidst tall sunflowers in one of the seed catalogs. It looks like a small house. The Twins like to go camping. Each has his own tent. They are continually making houses of sheets, chairs, and clothes pins.

Their Poppa has read them the story of the three little wolves and the industrial big pig. Hmmm.

In this story the little wolves are busy building houses. One of these houses is a house made of flowers. It is the strongest one for some reason and brings peace to industrialized pigland.

So this tiny garden house might be something. We have a spot where a stumpy ball of boxelder root was covered with black plastic. We keep cutting away at any growth, rototilling at the roots. At this point we plow and plant around it.

Baby Gardener enjoying being out in the garden, Summer 2012.

Starting seed for the family vegetable garden is a good two months away at this point. We will continue to ponder this year's garden projects.

Nice Things I Saw This Last Summer

These are some things I saw I liked and have not shared. I liked ho green this hydrangea was. The combination of sterile and fertile flowers is nice, too.

This bottle tree looks like some sort of green sprout.

If I had a place to make this sort of pergola, I'd be all over this design idea.

This pergola had pipe as its frame, but was made from 4 weeping mulberries. Quite a nice design element.

I keep thinking this way of doing an herb bed is nice.

The staging here is pretty simple,but nice. The chairs aren't even all the same color if you look closely. Even that adds to this staging I think.

Garden Plant Labels

Okay. They're not quite done. But I have decided on what and how. They still need a shepherd's hook wire that goes into the ground and holds the tag.

I wanted to have labels resembling what you would see at a botanical garden and labels big enough to get common, Latin, and cultivar information on them.

I'm a big recycler when I can be.

Tools: a tin snips, my garden scissors (not shown), a metal ruler of some sort (mine is a Pica rule), my beat up cutting board which I don't use for food any longer, my P-Touch label maker, and an Exacto knife.

Nobody in my house drinks soda so I picked up a couple dozen Mello Yellow cans from my mother who has a two can a day habit. (She nearly 80 and this is her worst vice, so...)

I washed the pieces of metal in soapy water to get rid of any sticky soda residue.

I was able to get 5 labels from each can. I used the Exacto knife to score the aluminum. I used the ruler as a guide. I cut each corner in about 3/8" at a 45 degree angle.

Once I cut through the rim, it was easier to cut the top and bottom off the can with my old garden Fiskars scissors. And actually, since I scored the can with the Exacto knife,once I removed the edges that ran the curve of the top and bottom of the can, each label simply snapped off from the other.

I used the ruler to bend about 1/4" of the label over the edge of the metal ruler . I then folded over the other long side and then turned it over and creased the edges with the ruler similarly to how I would crease folded paper with my fingernail.

I cut off the little triangles before folding the short sides. I then folded the short sides to the wrong side and creased them as well.

I ran the ruler across the label to crease everything. Viola! I have the label.

I used my P-Touch to make my labels. For spelling and Latin the most useful website is the Missouri Botanical Gardens site. So far, only a couple of my plants are not in their collections. Using the "Noteworthy Characteristics" section, I was able to verify the cultivar and selection names easily.

These look pretty nice. The P-Touch lettering doesn't smear at all and is weatherproof. I don't have a Laserjet printer which has a thermal component to how the ink is laid down on a label or I would have tried using Avery clear labels and my computer. Labels printed with an inkjet printers just aren't weatherproof. (I tried that a couple years ago.)

My neighbor buys zinc labels and uses a P-Touch. He then wraps the front with another layer of adhesive tape. He is, after all, a daylily hybridizer and necessarily needs tobe sure of his crosses for the patenting process. This makes me worried that the P-Touch adhesive might disintegrate over time. I might do the same.

I have contemplated sending the aluminum labels through my laminator. Aluminum's melting point is 660 degrees. My laminator heats to approximately 260 degrees at the hottest setting. So I think this is a possibility. Actually the Mello Yellow labeling has been applied using an industrial laminating process. Something I just hadn't thought about but wanted to research, not wanting to wreck my laminator in this process.

Using a laminator and having to take into account thickness of materials to be laminated; the whole time-consuming process of bending the edges may not be necessary. I still have concerns with moisture coming between the labels of laminate and affecting the adhesive.

I have tried wooden plant stick and they rot fairly rapidly. Plastic plant stakes are white and a bit of an eyesore. Using pen or even permanent marker is an issue. Even "permanent" marker seems to fade fairly rapidly, in just a few weeks.The plastic printed tag that come with the plants often crack and fade in less than a year.

I did research other ways to mark the tags. One method was using a stylus or some sort of pointed device and impress the names no ink. Another was to write in reverse on the back and then shadow the writing from the front for an embossed appearance. I liked the embossed look, but writing backwards is fairly time-consuming.

Cost is definitely in play here, too. With approximately half of my shrubs, trees, and vines labels completed, I have completed about 50-60 tags. I did some searches on marking tags, and just haven't come up with good alternatives. Anyone with a super cheap, upscale method that allows for ample written information, I would like to see it.

NOTE: I just tried laminating a few tags. Remember the part where I mentioned the tags don't smear and that the ink is laid down using some sort of heating process? Well, even though the lettering has been laid down using a heating process, the rest of the tape is still heat sensitive and will turn dark gray to black going through the laminator.

Applying the P-Touch labels to the laminated tag defeats the use of laminate as a protection against water loosening the adhesive. If your goal is to use the laminate to skip the crimping steps, go for it and apply the P-Touch label after. vinyl to vinyl adhesion may be better from a longevity of the adhesive, but that aspect is not clear to me at this time.