**First of all, I am a little broke, but if I weren't, I would support this Offhand Designs fundraiser and buy her beautiful knitting bags on the cheap. Check it out!**
In the new apartment (I guess it's not that new, we've been here for 5 months now) one of the biggest drawbacks is the lack of a garden! I love plants and planting them, and encouraging them to flourish. So, I do the best I can in the little spaces around the apartment, and I figured it was time for a little gardening update. So...
A hanging basket of petunias:
Petunias are inexpensive and can stand a little bit of neglect. We had two of these hanging baskets outside of our kitchen window and they grew and grew. They're excellent as hanging plants as they do the spillover effect willingly.
I recently uprooted ours and tossed it (it's only an annual) and planted some sweet pea seeds as an experiment...we'll see how these look in the hanging baskets once they grow.
My Plumbago flowered:
I love this plant because a.) it's a perennial so it comes back year after year and b.) you can stick it in a pot with other plants and it plays nice. I stuck some cuttings in with this plant and it just grew right around them; now the pot they share looks interesting and complex with the different foliage.
Just for kicks, a shot of the cactus pot where I always put the rocks, stones, and quartzes I find on hiking trips. The orange ones are from the high sierra of Yosemite; the ground was covered in these bright orange rocks!
I *love* these handcrafted pots I got at the annual Cactus and Succulent Show in San Francisco. Each year, I pick out a new artisan pot to bring home. The one on the right is from this year's show. It looks like it wasn't thrown on a wheel, but was molded from clay by hand. There are many fingerprints all over the pot (I like them). The design was simply stamped in with a wood or rubber block, and the stain brushed over and wiped off so it settled in the grooves. Then fired. So simple, and it came out looking so cool!
I also found this teensy little succulent for a few bucks at the show to put in the little funky pot with feet from last year's show. For reference, the pot's hole is about the size of a 50 cent piece.
And now a brief missive on how to get free plants:
Take cuttings!!
Geraniums are excellent for taking cuttings. I wish all my geraniums were in bloom so I could show the different varieties I have, but only this one was flowering:
You can see the foliage of some of the geraniums I have in this photo, though:
Anyway, back to cuttings. Yes, you don't have to spend a lot of money on plants. I learned this from a neighbor of mine who had sooo many plants, but not much money. He would take small cuttings from the neighborhood or from friends, get them to root, and voila! he had a garden. A lot of my geraniums I got from past visits to Napa, the California wine country. I kept seeing pots and pots of geraniums all over town, outside of stores, in beds, in windowsills. All with different foliage that I loved. So I took a few cuttings, and wrapped them in moist paper towels. As soon as I got home I potted them in a small pot and kept the soil moist until they began to put on growth (that means the cuttings have developed new roots).
And when I went to San Diego this summer I replenished my geranium supply by taking cuttings from the many plants in Balboa Park. My boyfriend and I drove back home, so I was able to put them in small pots on the floor of the car.
I also got this orchid cactus cutting while I was in San Diego. There was a huge specimen in a pot outside my grandparent's apartment, and so I snipped this bit off:
As you can see, it's already re-rooted and sprouted a whole new branch! When they bloom, they produce a big, gorgeous flower that looks like an orchid bloom sticking straight off the side.
This cute fellow I cut from a rather neglected cactus that grew on the porch of my old college housing building. I think it's actually a San Pedro cactus, the kind that produces mescaline (that's probably why it was growing at the student housing!) It's still small but it will grow; it already sprouted that little mini-cactus next to it since I took the cutting. And don't worry, I won't ever try to harvest it for the hallucinogen. ;)
I have other plants (both indoor and outdoor) that I've grown from cuttings, but no pictures of those yet. Maybe they'll appear in the next garden update. So if you're on a budget, or just see a plant in a public place that you really like, try this:
1.) Snip or break off some of the new growth. If it's new growth, it's brighter green and less woody than the rest of the plant. Make sure the piece you took is at least a few inches long. If you won't be planting the cutting for a while, wrap the cut part in moist paper towel.
2.) Take it home, and if you broke the piece off, re-cut it with sharp scissors to make a clean edge. If it's a cactus cutting, let the wound completely dry out (about a week more or less) before planting it in soil to prevent rot. If it's a leafy plant, break or cut off the two bottom-most leaves, and plant this section below the soil in a pot. New roots will form here.
3.) Keep the fresh potting soil moist every day until the cutting starts to grow. Don't fertilize, but you can water with some vitamin b solution to prevent shock.
And voila! Sometimes the plant takes, sometimes it doesn't. But when it does it's so cool! I find I'm especially attached to the plants I've grown from cuttings.
