summer_jackel

I am really enjoying my garden right now; it's so lush and green, and really pleasant to spend time in. I added a lot of manure, mulch and topsoil this winter, and it has responded by exploding with green this spring. The fuchsias haven't started to bloom yet, but I'm starting to see the first buds---so here are shots to record my shade garden in high spring, before the summer changes start to happen.



( More garden pics from this morning )

Sadly, both potato grafts died. All of the cuttings in willow water, glass jar of perlite and in a rockwool cube over perlite in a glass jar are thriving. All of the cuttings in rockwool cubes on tray of perlite began to wilt, so I moved most of them into glass jars. With the remaining four, I covered the rockwool with plastic and moved them to a shadier location.

Surprisingly, one very small clone that I thought was a throw-away is doing really well. It has lots of leaf nodes on a short branch, which are supposed to be helpfiul traits. Now I have the "root for the underdog" sentiment going for this one.

Supposedly, cuttings taken from lower in a plant are the strongest, because the lower in the plant, the more rooting chemistry will already be in its tissues, and the easier it can convert some of itself from shooting to rooting meristem tissues (the 'growing tip' cells in a plant, in either direction). Hoping that thia might help me, I stole borrowed a cut from the lower branches of the neighbor's fancy laceleaf. At least three of the six resulting clones are thriving, so I may have a laceleaf. I love any organism that can be made to grow a new one from what is essentially a severed limb.

My red cuts all came from the very top of the tree, because that's what needed to be pruned, but it may be meaningful that the healthiest cuts now are from the lowest side shoots of the part I took off.

Three week old cutting is doing ok, though its leaves are a little bit stressed. None have dried up for over a week, though. I may be imagining root buds, but I think I see them.

About 6 years ago (geez, has it been that long?) when we'd just topsoiled the yard, the neighbor's mature Japanese maple volunteered a bunch of seedlings, a little over half a dozen of which I faithfully collected and nurtured in little pots. One in particular had unusually bright red foliage even on its first autumn, and in subsequent years it has only gotten more spectacular, going a very pure lacquer-red in fall, with these lovely red/purple/green shadings now. (Most of them, seed parent included, are pure green and turn yellowish with some red in the fall, which is the commonest phenotype for wild trees. Breeders often seek the red ones).

My prize tree is beautiful, and I am now trying to clone it. You can see why:



( Detailed descriptions of plant geekery beneath the cut )