Propagating the bread and butter items
Post categories: propagation
| 08:09 UK time, Wednesday, 9 February 2011
There is still a curfew on soil cultivation in this neck of the woods, more snow and rain making the land unworkable. That is no excuse for putting the feet up! My wife, the chief propagator, has started taking cuttings. We have a small collection of flowering plants for our lean-to garden room (west facing).
The Camellia japonica 'Moshe Dayan' in the Garden Room
Let me explain the 'garden room' title. Some years ago I stopped using the word 'conservatory' because that means something quite different to the modern generation. In the modern conservatory, people come first and plants die in their thousands whereas in another era, the conservatory was designed and built to suit plants with a bit of space to accommodate we humans when the weather was not suitable for sitting out. We bring the garden indoors and enjoy it all the year round and grow a few plants that might struggle in the open. For example, one of our pot grown camellias has just come in to flower - the double white 'Moshe Dayan'. It is a Camellia japonica cultivar and would really struggle outdoors in the NE of Scotland. In fact, as a general rule, I suggest that the C. x williamsii cultivars are really the only ones that should be planted outdoors in Scotland, EXCEPT, of course for areas in the west, influenced by the Gulf Stream.
Our Garden Room has a tiled floor (no matter if a bit of water is splashed about) and is fitted with electrically operated automatic ventilation - the key to keeping plants from expiring in the summer heat when you are out of town for a few days. The ventilators, three in number in a 2m x 6m space have proved to be adequate. They have a controller, which is set to open the vents when the temperature reaches 21ºC and close again when it drops to 15ºC. There are other manually operated ventilators, which can be operated when we are about. Through the winter months, I have a little fan heater in place set at 5ºC and in recent weeks the temperature has never fallen below 4ºC when outside temps have been as low as -17ºC.
Pelargonium and verbena cuttings in heated tray
Other plants in flower at the moment are pelargoniums of various sorts, primula obconica, , azalea and Christmas cactus.
In the glasshouse, another lean-to that I have partitioned with an outer cold compartment and an inner, bubble-lined compartment, once again frost protected with a fan set at 5 degC. This area is pretty full of a range of half hardy perennial (HHP) stock plants including fuchsia, verbena, cyclamen, pelargoniums and chrysanthemums and some pots of bulbs. The first harvest of cuttings has been taken, pelargoniums, geraniums and verbenas. Why bother? We could pop down to the local garden centre where very soon they will have an awesome range of plug plant HHPs. Oh yes, we will have a look to see if there is anything new that we fancy but we still do the bread and butter items ourselves - it is part of the world of being gardeners.
Geranium cuttings on the windowsill
Our cuttings are rooted in the little expanding pots of growing medium, which have been around for many years and we have found to be an excellent system. If space is limited, I revert to my original material, a 50:50 mixture of peat and sand filled into 9cm pots, which will take several cuttings depending on the subject. Treatment of subjects does vary. Zonal pelargoniums - definitely no hormone rooting powder and placed on a windowsill. Most others at the moment are placed in a heated tray with a domed cover, which is removed for 15-30 minutes each morning to allow a change of air. It is sat in the garden room. When things hot up and we need more space, we move all the propagation to the glasshouse.
Jim McColl presents ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland's .
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