Cheapskate gardening 1: Propagating plants

Photo from Flickr user mannewaar. Creative Commons licensed.

For much of my gardening life, I’ve had a large yard and a small budget. Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought it might--especially the small budget part. That seems to be an issue for a lot of us. Food gardening in particular tends to get more popular during hard economic times, but you won’t save money if it costs more to garden than to forage at the local grocery store. So let’s talk about how to garden less-expensively. This post will be the first of several, written on no particular schedule, that talk about how to be a frugal gardener. Since spring is in full swing, let’s start with how to save money on plants.

Plants are expensive. Every time I go to my local nursery, I wish I were in the nursery business. I’m pretty sure they must use gold-plated potting soil or something. (OK, nursery people, put down the garden forks. I know it costs lots of labor to produce a beautiful plant and grow it to market size. Really I do. But nursery prices still strain my budget.) So, let’s look at some ways to avoid paying top dollar for the plants you want. This first post will cover plant propagation. The next one will cover other ways to get cheap--or even free--plants.

If you’re willing to do some of the work that nurseries do, you can save lots of money. Go to your local library or flex your Google muscles to learn about plant propagation techniques. Most are not difficult; they just take a little time and know-how. I’ve listed a few techniques and links to articles to get you started, but dig deeper (garden pun alert!) to learn more.

Start them from seed. I’m planning another post on how to grow from seed frugally, so stay tuned for that one. For now, I’ll say that even if you pay full price for seeds at the most expensive nursery in town, starting seeds is going to be cheaper than buying plants.

Take cuttings. You don’t need a degree in botany to grow plants from cuttings. Let’s look at some options:

• Stem cuttings. This is what most people think of when they hear, “grow from cuttings.” See articles from NC State Extension, Mother Earth News, and the Missouri Botanical Garden for an overview. Fine Gardening has an article on taking softwood cuttings from shrubs that includes step-by-step pictures and a list of shrubs that root easily from cuttings. And see my post on Forsythe pots for an interesting way to keep your cuttings from drying out.
• Root cuttings. Fine Gardening also has this topic covered with a nice illustrated article that includes a list of plants that can be propagated this way. Weekend Gardener also has a good step-by-step article on the process. Root cuttings should be taken in fall or winter, when many of us gardeners in cold climates are bored out of our minds, so that’s a bonus. Heaven forbid we should be reduced to sharpening shovels.

You can also start plants from offsets--mini-plants that grow from the original, like those cute mini-spider plants that dangle from the mother plant. Just pinch it off and stick it in wet dirt, and soon you’ll have a new plant. True story: The only thing I ever deliberately stole from a store was an offset from a spider plant. I was probably about 10 or so and had fallen in love with houseplants (gardeners, like serial killers, often show signs of their pathology at an early age). I had very little money, but I would stroll through the houseplant aisle at the local Value Giant and look longingly at the pretty green wares. One day temptation got the best of me, and I pinched off a tiny offset from one of the big, beautiful spider plants, took it home, and planted it. It grew, and I had the plant for years, though I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of guilt whenever I looked at it.

Try layering. Layering is similar to taking stem cuttings, but the piece to be rooted remains attached to the parent plant while it’s rooting. See articles from Gardening Know How and NC State Extension for clear, detailed instructions. GrowVeg has a great post on propagating herbs and other edibles via layering.

Propagate by division. Division is the easiest propagation method I’ve ever tried. It works with plants that form clumps, bulbs, suckers, tubers, or rhizomes (so basically perennials that have more than a single stem, because you have to have something to divide).  It consists of 3 basic steps:

1. Dig up the plant.
2. Cut it into pieces.
3. Replant the pieces.

OK, so there’s a little more to it, like knowing what time of year works best for a specific plant and the best days to do it (hint: not when it’s 112F in the shade). Bay Gardens has a list of plants that can be propagated by division with recommended times of year. Seasonal Gardening offers more detailed instructions for those of you who liked to do all the optional reading in school.

Propagate stuff you get from the supermarket. When I was a kid (Oh, no! There she goes with another story about back in the day…), my mom seemed to always have an avocado pit suspended from toothpicks in a plastic cup filled with water. And it was always on the kitchen windowsill. It looked just like this, except after about 2 weeks it was coated with green algae.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons licensed.

I don’t ever remember any of those pits actually germinating, but they were there, by golly. I’m pretty sure there was a law in California in the 1970s that said you had to have an avocado pit in your kitchen window.

Turns out there are lots of things you can grow from grocery store produce (besides algae avocados)--so many that people have written entire articles and even books on the topic. See this article from the Missouri Botanical Garden for a good starting point. A few words of advice from my own experience:

• You’ll find lots of information warning you about what not to do. Don’t propagate [thing] because it’s been treated to inhibit sprouting/it’s not organic/it will explode on contact. OK maybe not that last one. But you’ll hear the other two a lot. I’m not going to get into the “organic vs. not organic” debate except to say that if you’re not dumping pesticides on it, your homegrown version will probably be healthier than conventionally-grown produce. So I’d worry less about what you started with that what you do with it after it’s in your yard. As for the bit about being treated to inhibit sprouting: I put old potatoes and onions in my yard after they sprout, so it’s not really a problem. (If they haven’t sprouted yet, I’m probably going to eat them). And I’ve grown garlic and shallots from supermarket stock many times with no issues. So don’t be afraid to ignore the naysayers and give it a try.
• Fruit grown from seed (like the aforementioned avocado) can work, but don’t expect any fruit for several years, and don’t expect the fruit to be like the stuff you buy at Safeway. But if you want to do it for fun, go for it. Citrus is especially easy to start from seed.

OK, so I’ve directed you to a bunch of online resources. But does any of this actually work? Yes. Yes it does. I’ve started lots of stuff from cuttings: mint, basil, roses, citrus trees, rosemary, the pilfered spider plant, and probably a ton of other stuff I’ve forgotten. I dig and divide perennials like Shasta daisies and irises all the time, and I’ve started blackberries through layering. Instead of composting my onions when they sprout, I’ve started sticking them in the garden, regardless of the time of year, then using the tops as green onions. This year I stuck an old yellow onion in the ground in late winter. It has survived multiple hard freezes and snowfalls and is now sending up a bloom stalk. Onions are tough.

Propagation can be fun, and it’s especially satisfying to grow plants you’ve propagated yourself. Plus, it gives you bragging rights when your fellow green thumbs come over. “Oh, that? Yeah, I grew that from a cutting I got from my great-grandma. The original plant came over with my ancestors on the Mayflower.” Don’t forget to include a casual flip of the hand, as though this is an event so routine in your life that it barely warrants mentioning. Then you can be both a cheapskate gardener and a snob.

You’re welcome.

Find (or make) your microclimates

My complaints about the weather are a standard theme on this blog. I’m a transplanted Californian; winter confuses me. Now that I live on Hoth in Flagstaff, I’ve had to learn about stuff like snowblowers, de-icers, negative temperatures (what the !@#$% kind of hell are those?) and microclimates. That last one is especially important if I want to ripen tomatoes or keep anything alive through the winter. So I’ve spent lots of quality time observing in my garden to see where the warm spots (not many), the windy spots (the entire yard), the extra cold spots (most of the yard), and the dry spots (also the entire yard) are. This kind of close observation is part of what makes gardening such a fascinating hobby. The really ambitious can go a step further and create microclimates. I’m going to try that this year for tomatoes, since I get tired of having to ripen my entire tomato crop in the house every fall.

So, how do you find or create microclimates in your yard? I’ll share a few articles on the topic, then give you one of my shortcut methods for finding the warmest spots.

• The Chicago Daily Herald offers a Q&A with a master gardener on the topic. The piece provides a short, simple overview of microclimates. If you’re new to the concept, start there.
• Less Lawn offers a slightly more detailed introduction.
• So does Today’s Homeowner, and their article includes a link to a Garden Site Microclimate Evaluation Form from the University of California-Riverside Cooperative Extension.
• A post from Good Life Permaculture in Australia offers some creative ideas for creating microclimates.
• And for much more detail, check out this PhD dissertation long article from Mother Earth News.

Microclimates can make the difference between a beautiful specimen and yet another dead plant. In my yard, my front porch faces south and includes lots of concrete plus the giant heatsink known as my house. We’ve had temps down to -1F (or as I refer to any temperature below 0, !@#$% freezing), but I still have pansies and snapdragons alive there--in containers, no less. I’m guessing that means my porch is more than a full zone warmer than the parts of the front yard that are further away from the house.

And that brings me to one of the quickest ways that those of us in snow country can identify at least the warmer and colder microclimates in our yards: observe and take pictures of the snow melt. We got about 2 feet of snow last month (“What the !@#$%?,” says the Californian) with drifts as deep as 4 feet. I spent most of the 2+ weeks it was on the ground scowling and snarling at it. That didn’t make it melt faster, but other factors besides my bad temper did have an effect. Take a look at this picture, taken about 3 weeks after the snowfall:

That’s a great visual demonstration of house-as-heat-sink creating a warm microclimate. The remaining snow in the picture is a few inches deep, and over by my new potager, the snow was about 7” inches deep. How do I know this? Because I sunk into it every. damn. time I carried something to the compost bin. But I digress. My point is that taking pictures of the snow melt around your house can give you a visual reminder of where the warm spots are, so you can take that into account as you plan your garden. You could also note the reverse, where the snow sticks around until you want to take a flamethrower to it to make it go away already. Those are the places you don’t want to plant anything that’s only borderline hardy in your zone.

I went a step further and tried to note where the biggest drifts were, because that tells me something about the wind patterns in the yard. That might be useful information too--if I can ever plant anything. As I write this, my garden is once again buried in snow. !@#$%.