Rooting cuttings with a Forsythe pot - how did I not know about this?

I was scrolling through the plant propagation forum on the National Gardening Association site and stumbled across something I'd never heard of: a Forsythe pot for rooting cuttings. So I did what any good librarian gardener does: I researched it (OK, I Googled it and followed a link from the forum post). Turns out that the Forsythe pot method seems to solve the biggest problems I have with rooting cuttings:

1. Forgetting to water them enough
2. Solving problem 1 above by covering them with plastic, only to have them mold or rot

The Forsythe pot uses a reservoir of water in a clay pot to provide steady moisture. I haven't tried it yet (I just heard about it a few minutes ago--give me till at least noon), but it sounds promising. 

If you'd like to learn more, see the following: 

• A photo tutorial on plantswap.net
• An article on gardeningknowhow.com
• An article from the University of Minnesota Extension on using the method to propagate houseplants (PDF)

Each one recommends slight variations, so it's worth reading through all three before you create your own Forsythe pot. 

Now if only I had something to take cuttings from, but it's winter in Flagstaff. *sigh* If it weren't for winter sowing seeds, I'd be reduced to sharpening shovels. 

Winter sowing, or how to stay sane till March

I’m not a big fan of winter. I don’t ski (too clumsy), I hate being cold (I’m a Californian - we don’t do cold), and, most of all, I love to garden, which is extremely difficult when the ground is frozen. And really--frozen ground? What sort of hellish concept is that? Apparently I live on Pluto. So my challenge every winter is to keep from going crazy until I can play in the dirt. I do that by:

• Reading garden porn (gardening books, magazines, and seed catalogs, preferably glossy and colorful, preferably read while in the bathtub)
• Playing in the snow
• Planning next year’s garden (the triumph of hope over experience)
• Walking through the garden department of every big box store in town and staring at the empty shelves with a pathetic look on my face, then checking for the 59th time to see if they have any seeds in stock yet
• Looking at the Flagstaff gardening calendar for the 812th time this winter, trying to find something fun I’m supposed to be doing in January (watering evergreens and sharpening shovels doesn’t count as, “fun.”)
• Dreaming up garden projects for my long-suffering husband to do when the weather is better (he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to help me dig a pond in the spring)
• Complaining about being cold
• Moping

When I lived in Portland, I had a greenhouse, so I could play with plants in the dead of winter. I had a greenhouse here in Flagstaff for about 3 weeks till it was destroyed by a dust devil (Yes, really. It was reduced to a pile of plexiglass rubble. So was my soul as I stared at that pile of shattered dreams.) I also tried winter sowing when I lived in Portland, and it worked pretty well. So, since I’m tired of complaining and moping, I’m replacing those two items on the list above with winter sowing.

What is winter sowing? Glad you asked! I’d hate to think I’m talking to myself over here. It’s a method of sowing seeds, usually perennials and hardy annuals but some trees and shrubs too, in miniature greenhouses in the winter. Then you put those miniature greenhouses--usually made from containers like milk jugs--out in the rain and snow and leave them there till spring. The seeds germinate when they’re ready, and you have a garden full of plants that cost you very little.

This is my first year winter sowing in Flagstaff. It may be trickier here than in some places, because we have some pretty wild temperature fluctuations in the winter. We’ll see how it goes. If you’d like to try it (hey, it beats moping and complaining), here are some resources to get you started:

• How to Winter Sow Seeds Outdoors, by Trudi Greissle Davidoff, who is credited with inventing this method. There are a bunch of other useful articles on her site too. This is the place to start if you’re new to winter sowing.
• Winter Sowing 101, by Kevin Lee Jacobs
• Winter Sowing FAQs from GardenWeb - an outstanding resource and the place where I first learned about winter sowing
• Winter Sowing--A Step By Step Guide - from Get Busy Gardening
• The Winter Sowers Facebook group

I managed to sow a few things today: lupine, chives, and two kinds of milkweed. I’m using the patio table on my deck to store them. I hope to have it full of containers by spring, but it looks kinda pathetic now:

If you’re going to winter sow, you’ll need seeds. You can buy them, save them (from your own plants or a friend’s), check out a local seed library, or--my favorite--trade with other gardeners. Try hosting a winter seed swap with your gardening friends or trade seeds with people online. GardenWeb has seed swap forums, and some members of the Winter Sower’s Facebook group post their trade lists. If you’d like to trade seeds with me, just leave a comment on this post. Here are my current trade lists:

• Annuals and perennials
• Vegetables and herbs

You'll also need containers. The sites listed above will give you lots of ideas for those. Right now I'm using containers from restaurant takeout and the Safeway deli. When my stash gets low, we'll probably start eating takeout or supermarket fried chicken for every meal--just so I can have the containers for winter sowing. Gotta love my priorities. 

Good luck staying sane this winter, and just remember: spring is coming.

Christmas past--with Krylon

Christmas is one of those times when past and present converge in a strange time warp. Memories haunt this time of year--happy memories we try to recreate for our kids and grandkids (often at the cost of our own sanity), sad memories that rush back with the sights, sounds, and scents of Christmas, and memories of loved ones no longer with us. The ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Present blur together in a muddle of memory and emotion and nostalgia and joy and pain. It’s no wonder people drink a lot this time of year. But this isn’t going to be an essay on the joy or heartbreak of Christmas or (heaven forbid) how to do Christmas right. Ugh. Instead, I’m going to share one of my Christmas stories with you, the first memory of Christmas I have. And yes, for you purists out there, it’s gardening-related (sort of). Come on in, find a comfy chair, and join me for a visit to Christmas Past.

The first Christmas I remember was when I was somewhere between 4 and 6 years old, so sometime between 1971 and 1973. We lived in the country in Northern California, and we were, ahem, dirt poor (garden jokes = dad jokes with dirt, not to be confused with dirty dad jokes). I don’t remember the presents I got that year, though I’m sure there were one or two. What I do remember are the ornaments. My mother bought a dozen royal blue Christmas balls, and those were the only ornaments we had. So my mother, being the creative problem-solver she was, decided we would make more. We cut up styrofoam meat trays and some other sort of packaging we had lying around, glued bits of eucalyptus to them (California, remember? Not a lot of evergreens where we lived except for juniper), and coated the results in silver spray paint. A Krylon Christmas! See? When I describe myself as a California redneck, I’m not lyin’.

Somehow my parents had gotten an artificial tree, and that year it was festooned with blue globes and silver eucalyptus meat tray parts. Awesome, huh? Actually, it was. I still have a few of those homemade ornaments, though the last of the blue balls (ho ho ho - I said, “blue balls”) broke about 20 years ago. There's a picture of one of them at the beginning of this post. Here are a few more:

They don’t have much eucalyptus left--it’s worn off over the last 40+ years of loving use--but they’re still around, and I still hang them on the Christmas tree each year. Each time I do, I think of my mother, doing the best she could and making something beautiful out of what she had and could afford--and teaching me to do the same.

I’m not poor now. We aren’t rich, but we have what we need and some of what we want, and that is a blessing beyond measure. But the lesson I learned that Christmas, cutting out scraps and gathering bits of eucalyptus, has stuck with me. For me, it’s part of the allure of gardening. You can start with almost nothing--a tiny seed, a fragile transplant, a cutting--and nurture it into something beautiful. Growing things is a form of magic to me, a way to make something out of (almost) nothing. Gardening also teaches me to find clever uses for stuff that other people throw away: garden art from recycled materials, pots from yogurt containers, winter-sowing containers from takeout boxes, and, of course, compost from kitchen scraps and yard debris. Reuse and repurpose and recycle--and make something beautiful. Thanks, Mom, for teaching me a lesson that has shaped my life these many years. It’s the best Christmas gift you ever gave me.

Gifts for Gardeners

Yesterday my husband asked me what I wanted for Christmas. He asks me this every year, and every year I give him some variation on the same answer: gardening stuff. Yesterday he thought he was pre-empting that reply by asking, “What do you want--besides plants?” It didn’t work. I said, “Other gardening stuff.” He rolled his eyes and changed the subject.

So, as a public service for people like my husband who are stuck buying gifts for the plant-obsessed, I offer you this list of gifts for gardeners:

1. Plants. Duh. Especially plants they can plant in their yards rather than something they have to pamper in the house. They’ll think of you every time they see it, water it, or pick aphids off it.
2. Seeds. Seeds are my favorite stocking stuffer. It hardly matters what kind. If you give me seeds, I’ll try to grow them. Seeds are magical.
3. Gift cards for nurseries or even big box stores that have plants, seeds, and gardening stuff. This is the easy option for those who want to do all their shopping in under an hour. Bonus points for gift cards to specialty nurseries (check online if you don’t have a local one). We gardeners will have a blast picking out weird plants that the local Home Depot would never think of carrying.
4. Good quality tools. Some of us hesitate to spend the money for high-quality tools, but good tools will last long enough to be passed down to the next generation of gardeners. Plus, they are a joy to use and make it less likely that your favorite gardener will get injured and need a ride to the ER. Don’t ask me how I know this.
5. Books and magazines about gardening. Bonus points for ones with full color glossy pages. These are called garden porn, and we love them.
6. The gift of your time and your hands--a homemade gift certificate for a load of manure or mulch and a promise to haul and spread it. Or maybe a promise to build a new raised bed. True story: my husband once got me a truckload of compost for our anniversary. I was thrilled. We gardeners are a strange bunch.
7. A tree can be a wonderful memento for you and your gardener to admire for many, many years to come. But only get one if you know what the gardener wants and what will grow in their yard.
8. Amaryllis or paperwhites to force indoors. Winter bulbs are great for brightening up dark days.
9. A piece of garden art--if you know the recipient’s tastes. Garden art, like any art, is personal. If you’re going to buy that giant orange welded wire slug, be sure your gardener wouldn’t rather have a sundial or a full-scale model of Stonehenge.
10. Some smaller items can be combined to make a gardener’s gift basket: seeds, a pair of gloves, a nice trowel, a gift certificate for hauling and spreading manure, etc. You can use a big pot instead of a basket. Big pots are the best.

So that’s my list. How about you? What gifts make your gardener’s heart thud with excitement?

First snowfall transforms the garden

One of the things I love about gardening is that it makes me appreciate the changing of seasons more. A week ago, I posted about buttoning up the garden for winter. Today we're getting our first snowfall of the season, and I couldn't resist taking a few pictures to capture the transformation in the garden.

Here's the area near our front door. Our garden doggie looks cold.



And a more sweeping view of part of the front garden. I love how ornamental grasses look in the snow.



We bought four mosaic stepping stones from a tea shop in Southern California that was going out of business. My husband thought I was insane, but I insisted on moving them to Flagstaff; I just couldn't part with them. Here's a look they never had in SoCal:



When I first walked outside this afternoon, I was captivated by how cute the mums looked in the snow. I snagged these guys for $.50 per plant on closeout at Wal-Mart about a month ago, and they've been doing great. They should survive the winter just fine. Here they are being adorable little puffballs amid the white powder:







This post reminds me of another thing I love about gardening. No matter the time of year, no matter how nasty the weather or how neglectful the gardener, there are always spots of beauty to be found in a garden.

Don’t toss that turkey carcass! Make broth instead.

A belated happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

If you’re like me, you’ve been eating turkey since yesterday, and the turkey carcass is probably starting to look a little bare. But don’t pitch it yet! I like to keep a little bit of Thanksgiving with me all year long, by treasuring that extra stuffing-induced belly fat. Well, OK, I don’t really treasure it, but I do seem to keep it with me. I also keep a bit of Thanksgiving around in the form of turkey broth, which (most years) lasts me until the following Thanksgiving, when I use the last of it to flavor the Thanksgiving Day stuffing. Dontcha love it when things work out neatly like that? Yes, I used to alphabetize my records when I was a kid (note for those of you under 30: records are big round black things made of vinyl that play music for approximately 3 days till they scratch or warp or your best friend’s kid sister gets hold of them and turns them into something that looks like an Etch-A-Sketch. I may forgive her for what she did to my Pyromania album, but I’ll never forget.).

Oops, I digress. Anyway, back to broth-making. You can substitute homemade turkey broth for chicken broth in almost any recipe, which can save you quite a bit of money throughout the year. And broth is brain dead easy to make.

First, make it within a couple days of Thanksgiving. You don’t want your broth to taste like old, stale turkey.

Next, gather your supplies.

What you need

• A big pot. Big enough to hold your turkey carcass (and maybe your best friend’s kid sister).
• A turkey carcass (duh)
• Water - enough to cover the turkey carcass.
• A recipe. Grab a recipe for chicken stock from your nearest cookbook or Chef Google and scale it up based on the size of your turkey. Broth-making is not a precision operation, so don’t agonize about quantities of stuff.
• Whatever stuff your recipe calls for. I’ll give you a few hints that a lot of recipes may not include:
• You can use celery tops and bottoms and scraps for the celery. It’s a great way to use up stuff you’d otherwise compost.
• If you use white or yellow onions, you can leave the skins on. Just cut off the roots and any outer layers that are dirty or moldy, quarter what’s left, and throw it in the pot. The skins from yellow onions will help give your broth a nice yellow color.
• You can leave the stems on parsley. They’ll add flavor. Ditto for any other fresh herbs you use.
• Use your old, limp, sorry-looking carrots that have been in the vegetable bin since last Easter. As long as they aren’t moldy or rotten, they’re fine for broth.
• If you didn’t use them for gravy or doggie snacks, throw in the giblets, heart, and neck--but not the liver. The liver will make your broth taste liver-y. Blech.
• Don’t chop anything, just cut it into chunks. You’re going to strain your broth, so big pieces are actually better.

Here’s today’s pot o’ broth. Everything’s in the pan and ready to start cooking.

After you’ve boiled everything for awhile, strain the broth with a colander or big sieve. Line the colander with cheesecloth if you want clearer broth.

Here's the broth all strained and tidy:

Don’t throw the stuff you strained out away. Not yet, because you can boil it all again for a second batch of broth. Add new vegetables, herbs, etc., and boil this batch longer. You want the flavor and minerals to boil out of the bones. Strain it as before once it’s done.

Chill your broth and skim the fat from the top. Separate the turkey meat from the bones and soggy veggies. You can throw away the bones and veggies and use the meat for soup or something else.

Preserving your broth

Unless you have your very own Brady Bunch (RIP, Florence Henderson), you won’t be able to use that much broth all at once. That leaves you with a few options:

• Freeze the broth
• Can the broth
• Use the broth to make soup or something else that you freeze or can.

Freezing is easy, but you need freezer space to accommodate your gallons o’ broth. If that’s not a problem, freeze your broth in whatever size containers best suit the amount of broth you normally use at a time. If you use tiny amounts, you can freeze some in ice trays and put the cubes in a freezer bag. I usually freeze some in pints and some in quarts.

Canning broth requires a pressure canner. You cannot can broth or other low-acid foods safely in a boiling water bath. Most pressure canner instruction manuals include a recipe for chicken stock that you can use, or you can find one online. Note: if you look online, only use a recipe from a reputable source. Reputable sources include freshpreserving.com (the Ball and Kerr site), the National Center for Home Food Preservation, or any USDA Extension Service site.

Those last two paragraphs also apply to soups. You can use your broth in any soup recipe that calls for chicken broth. If you’re canning, just be sure you use a recipe from a reputable source. I know families are annoying, but killing them with botulism is a little extreme.

Here are a couple of recipes from trusted sources that you can try if you have a pressure canner:

• Canning Meat Stock, from the National Center for Home Food Preservation
• Homemade Chicken Soup, from freshpreserving.com

One final but very important note: If you’ve never pressure-canned before, follow the directions that came with your canner exactly. Also read:

• The Principles of Home Canning (National Center for Home Food Preservation)
• Using Pressure Canners (National Center for Home Food Preservation)

I also recommend the Ball Blue Book, which has both canning instructions and recipes.

Pressure canning isn’t scary (it’s actually really fun!), but it does carry some risks. If you follow up-to-date instructions from a reliable source and use appropriate equipment in good repair, you’ll be fine.

Now go get that carcass and make some broth!

The virtues of scrounging

One of the things I learned from my father1 was how to be a good scrounge. Scrounging or scavenging gets a bad rap in our culture; it’s seen as a sign that you’re poor or desperate or lack the dignity to go to the store on Black Friday and club other shoppers over the head with truncheons like everyone else does. I disagree. Baseball bats are cheaper than truncheons. Also, I see scavenging as a mark of intelligence and resourcefulness. Why pay retail for something you can scavenge for free? Certainly there are exceptions to that rule (condoms and dirty underwear come to mind), but there are 3 big benefits to scavenging, two personal and one environmental:

• You can save lots of money.
• Figuring out how to get stuff without spending (much) money or how to reuse stuff no one else wants stimulates creativity and ingenuity. My parents, especially my dad, grew up during the Great Depression. My dad’s family were Okies who lost everything in the Dust Bowl years and migrated to California, Grapes-of-Wrath style. They were dirt poor, so they learned to make do with the little bit they had in order to survive. That sucked, and I don’t intend to romanticize that kind of poverty (The only people who romanticize poverty are those who’ve never experienced it). But it did have one benefit: learning to make do, being creative about solving problems with what they had.
• Scavenging is good for the environment. You can keep stuff out of the landfill by reusing it. And if you’re scavenging for your garden, you’re reusing stuff to help you grow stuff, which should make your local insufferable-patchouli-coated-locavore-who-composts-his-own-poop bow in your general direction. Just make sure you stay upwind of his compost pile.

It’s easy to find uses for stuff when you’re a gardener. Here are just a few examples of stuff I’ve scavenged:

Plants. Lots of ‘em. Probably my favorite example is the three salvias that my husband found discarded at the curb on trash pickup day in Southern California. He’s also a veteran scrounge, so he brought them home. They looked mostly dead, but remember what Miracle Max said about being mostly dead? I watered them, and they came back. I planted them, and they flourished. I didn’t even need a Miracle Pill. That's them in the foreground of this pic:

We’ve also dug up plants from old housing sites and natural sites that were being bulldozed (all with permission of course). I naturescaped a creek bank in Portland with trilliums and other woodland plants salvaged from a forested site that was being bulldozed to build a school. Those plants would have cost a fortune at the nursery; meanwhile the ones on site would have been destroyed. And of course I’m not shy about asking for cuttings from people’s yards.

Organic matter. When I have new beds to build, or I need inexpensive organic mulch, I ask people for grass clippings (if the grass hasn’t been treated with herbicides). I’m on a pile of bagged leaves at the curb like jawas on a burned-out village on Tatooine. Pine needles are plentiful here, so I grab those too. I answer ads on Craigslist for free manure2. I offer to haul away people’s straw bales after Thanksgiving. Just last weekend, we bought some hay for our goats, and the feed store person offered us a big broken bale for free. The goats got some, and my compost bin got the rest. My husband was hauling a load of trash to the dump (no, we don’t reuse everything). He saw a guy there with a load of spoiled straw bales. The guy agreed to deliver them to our house instead, and I’ve been using them for mulch for the last 2 years. There are still about 6 left.

Landscape material. The free ads on Craigslist are a gardener’s gold mine. People give away rocks, soil, landscape timbers, railroad ties, fencing, and just about anything else you might want to put in a yard. I use cardboard as a sheet mulch, so I scavenge cardboard sheets from my local Sam’s Club. I’m not sure why they find it necessary to put a thin piece of cardboard between those 55-gallon drums of mayonnaise, but I’m glad they do.

Seeds. I’ve been known to ask people if I can collect seed from plants in their yards, and I’ve also been known to carry envelopes in the car for exactly that purpose (Girl Scout motto: Be Prepared). I got a huge white pumpkin for almost free at Home Depot on Halloween, not because I needed the pumpkin, but because I wanted the seeds. I don’t know if they’ll come true from seed--that monster might be a hybrid, or possibly the product of a nuclear accident--but I’ll take a chance and see. That's it on the far left in the photo below. I'll be butchering it this weekend for its seeds, because I'm ruthless like that.

I saw a cool warty pumpkin in a bin at Safeway just before Halloween that had rotted into a slimy mess. I asked the produce manager if I could have it. He seemed glad to be rid of it; I can’t imagine why (But the look on his face when I asked for it was priceless. That’s another benefit of scavenging: free entertainment.). I’m pretty sure it’s an heirloom, so it should grow true from seed. Digging the seeds out of the slime was a nasty job--thank goodness for latex gloves--but it’ll be fun growing some new pumpkins next summer from seed I didn't have to buy.

Crops. I canned 13 quarts of apple pie filling a few weeks ago, all made from apples we picked from a local dentist’s office. They have several trees on the property and don’t use the apples, though I'm sure they'd be horrified at the amount of sugar I dumped into the pie filling. You know, they're dentists. We’ve gotten permission to pick fruit from people’s yards a few times too.

So ignore the snobs and the stigma and get busy scrounging! You’ll have a bigger, better garden, the thrill of the hunt, and the satisfaction of getting something useful for free while doing your bit for the planet.

---------------

1. Besides the First Law of Thermodadnamics: “Close the damn door! I’m not paying to heat the whole outside!” Dad would have loved global warming.
2. “Happier than a gardener in shit” is one of my favorite expressions. And of course, shoveling manure is a shitty job, but someone has to do it. Manure jokes: even shittier than Dad jokes. Sorry if my language offends; we gardeners are an earthy lot. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.

Putting the garden to bed and taking stock

We've had an amazing fall here in Flagstaff. Our average first frost date is September 15, but I was harvesting tomatoes till about 2 days ago, when the warm spot in my front yard finally got below freezing. We seem to be getting our cold weather at last, so I hereby declare this weekend the End of Gardening Season for 2016.

It's been a good gardening year for me, when my enthusiasm for my favorite hobby rekindled, and I got to work on a bunch of projects (see the About page for my saga of gardening in Flagstaff to date). This year's accomplishments include:

1. Finishing the drainage ditch/dry creek bed in the front yard:



2. Hauling a crap ton of manure (tee hee. "crap ton" "manure" Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.) to attempt to create decent soil in our front yard garden. I still need to haul tons more, but the plants are already doing better (not that you can tell from these pictures; freezing temps killed off most signs of life).





3. Creating a container garden in a warm, sheltered corner by the front door, in hopes that I will have fresh herbs and green onions through at least part of the cold months. This plan is working so far; I harvested a big bunch of parsley for chimichurri last night, as well as a big bundle of green onions for topping baked potatoes.







4. Started constructing a new kitchen garden in a boring, formerly-unused corner of our front yard:





The new beds are filled with barn litter, straw and chicken manure from our coops, horse manure from a riding stable a few miles away, and old straw my husband scored from a guy at the dump. One of these days I'll write a post on frugal gardening and scavenging.

I'm using the Lasagna Gardening method, which I prefer to tilling. It served me well in Portland and Southern California; hopefully it will work just as well here. If you want to try it, here are a couple of books to get you started. The first one is the original Lasagna Gardening, and the second one adapts the techniques to smaller spaces. Both are excellent. And fall is a great time to gather materials for new lasagna beds!




And so another gardening year comes to a close. Time to celebrate the harvest and give thanks for our many blessings. Today I give thanks for the year that was, for the lessons I learned and the many joyful hours I spent in the garden.