Basil.

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basil

Huh. I never knew how ridiculously easy it is to propagate basil (Ocimum basilicum) from cuttings, just plopped in a jar of water. Live and learn. If I play this right, I might never need to buy basil again.

It’s funny what you can learn by accident.

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The season begins. Kinda.

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ginger, Streptocarpus, turmeric

As any experienced gardeners knows, gardening is partly about looking ahead: two weeks, or fifty years. Traditionally the planting-out time around here (for most things) starts in late May (spring frost date is middle of May). For really tender things (cucurbits and tropicals), planting out is better done in June. Starting plants/seedlings indoors is a fairly important component to gardening in short-season areas, and this is where looking ahead comes in.

To put it another way, I started this year’s ginger (Zingiber officinalis) and turmeric (Cucurma longa) a few days ago. I find that in my house, it takes about six weeks to break them out of dormancy, and then another six weeks before they start to grow enough to poke out of the pot. Bear in mind that these are tropical species, and I keep the house at 19º C in winter. Assuming the timing works out, this should be just in time to put them outside in June, with a minimum fuss of hardening off.

I also started some Dauphin violet cuttings (Streptocarpus saxorum). I haven’t been growing this for very long, but cuttings last I took year took four months to flower. Since I would like these to be in bloom by the end of May, I may have waited too long.

Other than that, there is little gardening to talk about. The light garden system I cobbled together is working out wonderfully, and so far it has more than justified the effort I put into it. Now that it’s the past the middle of February, the days are noticeably longer, and it’s time to start sorting through the seeds.

Hops.

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hops

So this year I finally got hops (Humulus lupulus) from my bines*.

I wanted a plain hop, not one of those highly bred fancy varieties they use for making beer, so I ordered seeds a few years ago. Of ten seeds, only three germinated; abysmal as that sounds, it’s actually not too bad for hops.

Hops plants are either male or female, but only the female plants are generally considered desirable. The female flowers develop into the structures that humans use. Unfortunately, a hop plant grown from seed takes three full years (that’s four growing seasons) to flower. So it’s taken this long just to find out if I had any female (useful) plants.

Thankfully, I got my ideal mix from the three plants: two females and one male. Although one can use only the female structures, the male plant at least ensures that if I want/need any, I can get seeds from the female plants as well. Two female plants should produce enough strobiles for my needs. I expect/hope that as time goes by and the plants get more mature, they will produce more flowers.

As for why I planted them: I have mild seasonal insomnia. It’s not as bad as it could be, but irritating enough. Hops are a gentle, natural, but quite effective sedative. Hops pickers were notorious for being vague and sleepy all the time. And no, I did not plant them for making beer. I’m not particularly fond of beer.

As an aside, hops can also be decorative; there are ornamental varieties available too.

*Yes, bines. Vines climb by clinging to other things with tendrils; bines climb by using stiff bristles that catch and stick. Hops stems are so bristly that just dragging one across your skin can cause really painful abrasions; it’s almost like sandpaper.

Tea, anyone?

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tea

Yay! My tea plants (Camellia sinensis) got here today. I originally ordered one, but the guy said he could fit two more similar-sized plants in the same box for the same shipping cost. Twist my arm, I got two (plus another plant for a friend).

These are the ‘Sochi’ variety, which is apparently one of the hardiest tea varieties. They still wouldn’t survive outside here without some serious winter protection, but at least it gives me some leeway when it comes to bringing them inside in autumn.

Because I really need more large houseplants in winter.

Of course, I know it won’t let me stop buying tea to drink (I’m addicted to tea), but growing tea is something I’ve always wanted to try. I’ve tried growing plants from seed several times, but never been able to get past the seedling stage.  I’ve read they don’t do so well as houseplants, but you never know until you try. I imagine the reasons are light and humidity, but my tropicals come through winter just fine in a south-facing bay window and with some humidifying tricks.

Other than that I think the trickiest part for me is the soil. As a species of camellia, I imagine they’d need rich, friable, and acidic soil…right now I’ve got them potted in a mixture of topsoil, vermiculite and worm compost, with a dusting of sulphur. Peat moss is the standard soil acidifier, but I personally don’t think it gets harvested sustainably, so I try not to use it. I know the aluminum sulphate people use on hydrangeas damages rhododendrons and azaleas, so I’ll avoid that. Need to think about this.

Ginger snaps

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ginger

I dug up the ginger (Zingiber officinale) today. Edible ginger, not the ornamental sort. It wouldn’t survive winter around here in the ground (it is a tropical plant, after all), so I grow it in a large pot. When the weather starts turning cold (around the middle of October), I bring it in and stop watering it and that sends it into dormancy. Then I just leave it in the pot – that preserves it just as well as, if not better than, any other way, until I’m ready to use or replant it.

People often call it “ginger root”, but of course we don’t use the roots – what we use is actually the rhizome, a creeping underground stem.

I wasn’t desperate for ginger this year, so I never needed to harvest it. However, now is the time I need to think about replanting it for this year. It usually takes up to six weeks to break dormancy, and possibly up to six more weeks for it to actually sprout and grow strongly. If I start that process soon, it should be ready just in time for June, when the weather is reliably warm enough here that ginger can be left outside. I got my original piece years ago from the grocery – I highly doubt that it was organically grown, and I’ve heard that such things are often treated to prevent sprouting. In that case, it might take even longer to grow.

For a starter piece, choose a section that’s firm and has a few small bumps – these are the buds from which new growth will sprout. I like to leave it in a sealed transparent container in a warm place until the buds start turning green (breaking dormancy), then plant it. In the ground it should be planted about four inches deep; in a pot you can get away with planting it two inches deep. Once planted, water well and don’t water again until green leaves appear (or unless the soil dries out completely).

I’m always amazed by how much of a return ginger gives. The piece I planted last year was only a 2-inch section, if that; the piece I dug up measured just about 11 inches – more if you count the bit growing off the side. The rhizome has a strong linear tendency, so as it often does, this piece started distorting the pot when the ends hit the sides. I only use cheap flexible plastic pots for ginger now – I’ve actually had pots crack in the past because of the pressure the growing rhizome exerts. Same thing with ginger’s cousin turmeric (Curcuma longa).

Common sense would therefore suggest growing it in a trough, but it’s not necessarily that simple. As you can see in the picture, the roots need a fair bit of room to grow, so it would need to be a deep trough. Also, if growth is very good, side buds can strike off in their own directions…and hit the sides of the trough. I wouldn’t use a trough unless I can get a big one…which would be a bitch to lift and bring indoors in autumn. Sigh.

It would be nice, though. Leaving the plant undisturbed for a couple seasons could very well result in flowers. Z. officinale flowers aren’t all that spectacular, but it would be nice to do it at least once.

Back to the roots: they were very succulent and fleshy, even though the soil was bone dry. Of course, that’s why I can get away with growing ginger at all – they naturally have a dormancy response to drought. From certain angles, the whole thing looks like some sort of huge spider or centipede or something. The round cracked areas are the scars left from where the leaves grew (the view is from the top).

Ginger

Growing ginger is pretty simple if it gets enough sun and warmth. It also likes good, fertile, friable soil and lots of water. If you can give it these things, you just have to sit back and watch it break the pot.

Autumn chores (for real this time)

Tags

blue jay, calla lily, dahlia, ginger, ismene, lemon grass, pitcher plant, turmeric, winter rye

Right, well, it’s been almost a month since my last post and I haven’t really done much in the garden since then. October turned ridiculously busy for me after the first week and I haven’t had time to do as much gardening as I would have liked until yesterday. We had a nice warm spell in the middle of October and I was stuck indoors working instead of outside gardening. Bah. So now I’m catching up and this is a long post.

Anyway, at the beginning of October there was a somewhat cold snap, followed by the aforementioned warm spell. It really extended the garden season by a couple weeks – it even seemed to trick a few things into thinking it was spring again. My white trumpet pitcher (Sarracenia leucophylla ‘Tarnok’) suddenly sprouted a flower bud. Since the plant is only four or five years old, I didn’t even think it was mature enough to flower. I did bring it into the house, hoping the bud would continue to develop and open, but it doesn’t look hopeful. But it was weird.

Also, one of the lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus) pots sprouted a peanut after I brought it inside early in October. By that I mean I found something in the Fabaceae family sprouting in the pot and assumed it was something else – then I pulled it out and it was a peanut plant. Bloody squirrels. I put the seedling in its own pot just to see what will happen. I suspect it will need full sun to do well, but it really isn’t a priority as far as the window space goes.

Yesterday I pulled out the tomato and eggplant plants and finally made a start on organising the garage to hold the potted things that will be overwintered inside it. The pots of turmeric (Cucurmis longa) and ginger (Zingiber officinalis) came in last week. I’ve stopped watering them and when the top growth dries up I will harvest the rhizomes. I will do the same to the ismene (Ismene festalis) and calla lilies  (Zantedeschia cvs.) soon – the calla lilies are slightly more tolerant of cool weather.

Oddly enough, at least one of the three potted dahlias is still going strong. I could just dig them up and cut all the growth off, but letting dahlias get hit by a light frost sends the plants a clear signal to pack it in for the year. Trying to force them into dormancy sometimes has…unwanted results when you least expect them.

Anyway, most of the things that will come indoors are indoors now. All that’s left are the things that will go into in the garage, and the weather is still mild enough that most of the hardy things are still alive. The biggest single job plant-wise now will be to take the aquatic plants out of the tub ponds, bag them up, then empty the tubs and stow everything. I also need to empty the rainbarrels and bring them in, and bring the worm bin from the garage into the house. Later I need to mound and burlap the roses, and finish wrapping the vine arbour with chicken wire so the [insert curse words of choice here] rabbits don’t chew down the new grape vine. Again.

I had wanted to try winter rye (Secale cereale) as a cover crop on the vegetable bed this year. Unfortunately, because I was only able to get around to clearing the vegetable bed out yesterday, I doubt there’s enough time and warmth for the rye to sprout and grow. I’ll try it anyway, but I’m not optimistic (not that I ever am).

Let’s see…oh, one more pointless addition to this already-rambling post. I wonder if it was the unusally hot, dry summer, but the blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) were different this year too. There’s a family of blue jays that passes through here at the end of every summer; they usually stick around for a couple weeks and then push off. I’m not terribly fond of blue jays – they’re noisy (they don’t even sing, they just squawk), they’re greedy and they tend to chase off the other birds. This year they turned up about two weeks early and stuck around for a month. It’s enough to make one think about investing in a slingshot.

Spring continues.

Tags

bloodroot, calla lily, dahlia, hellebore, marsh marigold, papyrus, phlox, Venus' flytrap

The Black Flowers page (When Black Roses Bloom) is updated to include the ‘Winter Dreams Black’ hellebore that I got last year. It’s a gorgeous flower. I clipped last year’s foliage off – it helps protect the plant over winter, but by spring it looks pretty tatty and obscures the view of the flowers.

The marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) also finally flowered this year. I’ve been waiting two years for this; this is the third season I’ve had it. I thought it would flower last year, but the one little spray of buds never opened. It’s really making up for lost time now, though.

Caltha palustris

It’s in a 1-gallon pot, and in the picture it was on the patio, but I’ve since moved it to a tub of water along with the dwarf papyrus (Cyperus isocladus). The weather’s still a little iffy to be placing the papyrus out, but it should be fine.

The bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) has been and is nearly gone, the moss phlox (Phlox subulata ‘Emerald Blue’) is gearing up to enter full bloom, and the tulips are just starting to open. I bought another Venus’ flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) on impulse at a garden centre a couple days ago, mostly because they looked quite healthy (they usually look pretty sad when you see them in most garden centres).

The not-so-black calla lilies (Zantedeschia ‘Schwartzwalder’) are already blooming. I kept them in their pots in the basement over winter and they started sprouting back in March, so they’re well ahead. Someone gave me some ‘Black Star’ callas as a gift and I just planted them, so I hope these turn out better colourwise. The ‘Karma Choc’ dahlia is well away and the three cuttings I took a month ago are still alive.

I guess that’s about all that’s going on for now. The onions and peas have sprouted and the artichokes are about ready for planting out. The herbs (Greek oregano, a couple types of thyme, orange mint, valerian, wintergreen, orris root, pineapple sage) I got two weeks ago are all hardened off now, so it will be time to plant them out soon too. Tomorrow I head to the NANPS native plant sale.

January blues.

Tags

jasmine, Lachenalia, marjoram, roses, whitefly

Well, it’s just under a month since the winter solstice and the days are getting a bit longer at last. Most of the houseplants are coping, some better than others. The only winter casualty so far is the marjoram plant; I’d managed to keep it going for three years straight, but I think this time I missed watering it. Mediterranean herbs generally need less water, and many plants in winter need less water, but my experience with marjoram (this and ones I had before) is that it’s a bit of a water hog.

I did some risky business with seeds today. Back in…November, I think…I ordered some seeds from Europe. Nothing special. Except when I browsed the company’s offerings, I saw a couple listings for blue roses and black roses, along with accompanying pictures of beautiful flowers. I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting…looks like a crock.” Neither blue or black roses exist in nature, and horticulturists aren’t likely to breed any; the genes for those colours simply don’t exist in the Rosa genus.

Oh, they’ve got things they call blue roses, which are all some shade of mauve. On the whole, true blue flowers are relatively uncommon, so the horticultural industry likes to call mauve flowers blue and expects you to believe a dog is a cat because they say so. And true black flowers don’t exist in nature either. So the possibilities are: 1. these aren’t roses at all; 2. they are roses, but not quite the colours in the pictures; and 3. these are real and direct genetic manipulation of roses in horticulture has gotten further than I’d realised.

So what did I do? I ordered 10 seeds of each (they weren’t expensive), and today I sowed 5 each. It’s far too early to be doing this, of course; I shouldn’t be sowing seeds indoors for another month (six weeks would be smarter), but it should be okay (I hope). The seeds do resemble rose seeds in a general way, but according to the germination instructions on the website they don’t need a cold period; this supports the ‘fake’ theory. Roses grown from seed take three growing seasons to bloom, so I’ve got a wait ahead of me. You could call these a test run; I’ll sow the remaining seeds in spring.

I did order from the company, however, a true blue flower, or rather a true turquoise, which is even rarer in the flower world. Lachenalia viridiflora is a bulb native to South Africa and endemic to a small area. This makes it “rare” and unfortunately getting rarer because of habitat degradation. Fortunately the plant seems to be easy to grow in cultivation. Because, you know, I’m in dire need of more houseplants. These also take a few years to bloom.

That’s mostly it for now. I’m probably jinxing myself by saying this, but I might have halted the whitefly cycle on the jasmine (Jasminum sambac) plants this year; usually the infestation shows up in mid-January. This is probably because the whitefly showed up a month ago, and because of the unseasonably mild December we had it was easy to take them outside and give them two damn good sprayings a few days apart. It’s usually vexing to do that indoors: you have to put the plants in the bath or shower to spray them to avoid making a sticky mess elsewhere in the house.

I’ll end this post on a sad topic. A member of my Master Gardener group passed away on January 3rd. He was 98 and a half years old, and still sharp as a rose thorn up to the end. The only thing that stopped him from gardening was a fractured hip at age 97. We’ll really miss him.

El azafrán.

Tags

crocus, saffron

Or saffron, in English. I like the Spanish word better. It sounds more impressive.

Saffron (Crocus sativus) is a species of fall-blooming crocus. I bought a few corms at the end of summer, but waited longer than I ought have to plant them. They’re borderline hardy around here, so I planted them in pots so I could bring them under protection when the really cold weather sets in. Given how late I planted them I’ve been really lucky that this fall has been unusually mild so far. The note that the vendor (a local herb centre) sent said that corms planted this year wouldn’t flower until next year. Actually, one just flowered.

I’ve been very cagey about them and passing them off to anyone who asks as ordinary fall-blooming crocuses. It is the most expensive spice in the world, after all, and interestingly, the only temperate-climate member of the commercial spices (at least, those commonly known to most Westerners). Black pepper, nutmeg and mace, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, allspice, turmeric, cardamom, vanilla – those are all tropical or subtropical plants.

… but the real reason is that I tried growing it before and failed, so I didn’t want to look a fool if didn’t work out this time either. I’m experimenting as usual; some are in garden compost, some are in leafmould, and a couple are in store-bought topsoil. Since this year’s growth comes from last year’s corms, I probably won’t notice any major differences (if any) until next year.

The spice itself consists of the stigmas of the flower (the female part that gathers the pollen). Probably the main reason why it is the most expensive spice is that harvesting and processing it is very delicate and labour-intensive: nobody has worked out a good way to mechanise the process and so it all has to be done by hand. The flowers need to be picked at a certain stage, and then the stigmas are removed, dried, and stored in a moisture-free environment.

In this case, the bud emerged yesterday (nearly a month later than if I’d planted them on time). It’s a pity the flower needs to be picked – they’re quite pretty, really.

The best time to harvest is considered in the morning just before the bud opens, so I picked it today. Morning wasn’t going to happen in my case, but yesterday and today were pretty damp and cloudy, so it didn’t open fully (as far as I know).

When I brought it inside, the warmth encouraged it to open a bit more in the short time it took to fetch a kitchen cloth and put it on the table.

The flower is opened by removing or pulling back the tepals. The stigmas are the three long red slender structures; the yellow things are the pollen-bearing anthers. Even this one flower smelled incredibly good, better than dried saffron because it also had the aroma of honey. The fragrance stayed on my fingers for hours afterward.

Here with the stigmas removed. You can see that it’s a tripartite structure extending from a single yellow style at the bottom; the style is not considered useful and is discarded. The anthers are usually discarded as well, but I’ve read that they are kept and somehow used in Spain.

In Italian commercial saffron farming, the stigmas are gently dried over a charcoal fire before being stored; studies have shown that this preserves more of the biochemical components (read: results in higher quality product) than, say, drying in an electric oven. However, I wasn’t about to start a charcoal fire just to dry three strands of saffron (…do I even have charcoal…?), so I just laid them on a piece of aluminium foil and held it over the stove. Now they’re in a jar waiting for who knows what, because there’s not much one can do with just three strands…

Odds and ends.

Tags

calla lily, Eastern black swallowtail, elder, hellebore, lavender, poppy, robin, rue

It’s been a rainy day here today, which means it’s been a lazy day here today, garden-wise. I don’t place much faith in rain forecasts unless they predict at least a 90% PoP (possibility of precipitation)…which they did for today, so yesterday there was a mad scramble to get stuff done.

Last year I blogged about some caterpillars I raised, with pictures at each stage. Yesterday I noticed a couple Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) caterpillars out in the garden, which is one of the types I raise. Usually I get them on the carrots (Daucus carota), but this year I was so late starting the carrots that I expected to find them on the dill (Anethum graveolens). So obviously I had to be wrong about that and found them on the rue (Ruta graveolens) instead.

I’m really not sure why I planted rue…I make no use of it, but it’s right in the middle of the other herbs, and the yellow flowers do look nice when the lavender, chives, and sage are in bloom too – all purple flowers. I’m more permissive of volunteer seedlings than I really should be, so the first picture below shows one of the caterpillars on a small rue plant that popped up in the pebble skirt/border around the herb bed. The second picture is a caterpillar on the main plant.

The one on the main plant is slightly larger, despite how they look in the pictures. The quadripartite blob at the top of the second picture is a rue seedpod/fruit forming. I don’t think I’ll bring these inside – they’ve obviously managed just fine on their own out in the garden. Now that I know they’re there, however, I might search for a few eggs to raise.

Yesterday I harvested some of the lavender (Lavandula angustifolia). I’d really hoped to be able to pick some elder flowers (Sambucus canadensis) too (for making elder flower wine), but just didn’t have the time, and more rain is forecasted for tomorrow. They were in perfect condition for picking yesterday too. Sigh.

What else…oh yes, the hellebore. I decided to try growing a black-bloomed hellebore this year (Helleborus x hybridus ‘Winter Dreams Black’). It didn’t arrive until May, so it had already flowered, as expected. Sometime after, it sent out some new growth and imagine the surprise when it flowered too. Right now there are two blooms on it; not quite as dark as they should be but I’m not complaining.

Some ‘Black Peony’ poppies whose seeds I simply scattered are starting to blossom. Unlike the ones I had last year, these really are about as dark as they should be, an extremely deep purple. Unlike the supposed ‘Schwartzwalder’ calla lilies, which continue to flower burgundy. Oh well.

And finally, a pair of American robins (Turdus migratorius) had built a nest in the lilac tree (Syringa vulgaris) earlier this year…right in the branch I’d fully intended to remove because it’s hanging too far over the steps. I saw three eggs before, and at least one of them has hatched. This is going to be interesting. Last year a pair nested in the Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) and for three weeks after the eggs hatched, I kept getting divebombed.