Hydrangea cuttings 101 and a bit of dividing and re-potting
Hello friends!
I hope you all had a good wedding! They are obviously a bit batty about each other and for that reason it was a proper joy to watch. Also her MOTHER. Amazing.
On to more banal, everyday things....
Monday: It's a beautiful sunny day. I water all my pelargoniums, which I keep indoors, with tomato food, to get them flowering, and I also do the same to my sweet peas, which are huge by now but don't have any flowers yet.
Tuesday: I decide, on a whim, to re-pot my swiss cheese plant (Monstera deliciosa), which I do, but then decide to re-pot another, and another, until there is nothing left to re-pot. This frenzy can be put down, in part to the scratching of an annoying itch in my brain, telling me quietly but oh so persistently that I need to do this job, and in part to the fact that these plants are all now in active growth and pot-bound. I hadn't intended to do everything in one go though - the idea was much more akin to 'one plant a day' but that's what ended up happening and it felt rather accomplished, particularly after a 4.30am start with a small person. I use multi-purpose compost but nothing else, because I had run out of grit. I hope this doesn't come back to bite me, as generally houseplants cannot stand to sit in wet soil, and need grit or something added for drainage. We shall wait and see.
Wednesday: Today is windy. I tie in the ends of the flailing sweet peas and decide to tackle the sea-thrift (armeria maritima) which has been neglected so long in a pot that it has died in the centre. I pull it apart as gently as I can and put a few bits back in the original pot, and the rest I plant in my gravel path, and as I do so I think about the remarkable Beth Chatto who died recently. The bright pink flowers look so beautiful against the compressed sand that I'm loathe to chop them off (which is what I should do if I want the roots to establish), so I leave some and chop some and hope for the best. My path is now more green (with weeds) than sand, and I know that unless I get a handle on it, the whole thing will become a tapestry of weeds. Some are fine (herb robert) but some I don't want too much of. This will be next week's task and I'm looking forward to it.
Thursday: I start the day weeding at my children's school and becoming obsessed with getting some ground-cover into their large raised bed. It's a mixture of shrubs placed into weed surpassing membrane with a bark mulch on top; lots of blobs with nothing in between. It needs vinca. Fast. I go straight to the local garden centre to try and beg some donations but my friend Lou isn't there, so I plan to come back when she is, and buy a jasmine to put behind my seating area. I immediately plant this as soon as I get home. This sort of shenanigans would never normally happen before The Five Minute Garden. The jasmine would be put on the terrace and wait until one of my 'gardening days' (which could mean tomorrow, but most likely it would be weeks away). Gardening every day, little and often means that nothing languishes. I like it. I also mow my lawn, but not the whole thing. I mow around the edges and leave the centre shaggy. I'm already in love with the way it looks and the fact that it slices my mowing time in half. More on this next week.
Friday: I rush out and take some cuttings of my Hydrangea Annabelle which I bought and planted last year. It was expensive because it is a special one called 'Strong Annabelle' which has stronger sturdier stems than ordinary Annabelle. I took three cuttings from the plant that was sent to me last year, and they have rooted beautifully, and are now 30cm tall, and probably ready for planting. I want more though...I want LOADS, so I take four more cuttings and decide to split them in half (something I've read about in a propagation book). The process is exactly the same as for ordinary cuttings, except instead of slicing the leaves in half to reduce their surface area you leave them intact, and instead slice the whole cutting lengthways from tip to base.
I'm not at all sure whether it'll work, so here below is my 101 on how to do ordinary cuttings. I realise that this is a VERY bad step-by-step because it doesn't have a full set of pictures. My computer (or this tiny letter thing) is playing games with me and every week it gets harder to post pictures, so I'm afraid there's just one here. Please hit reply and ask me questions if you need more info!
Cuttings 101
Great news! you can take cuttings of all the plants you need gazillions of but can’t afford (think hydrangea, philadelphus, lavender, penstemon, pelargonium, verbena bonariensis…I could go on. Each needs slightly different treatment, but the general idea is the same. You need really sharp secateurs, a knife or scalpel, containers and cuttings compost (I use a mixture of pearlite and multi-purpose compost). Most importantly, everything should be scrupulously clean.
For hydrangeas then, water the night before, and snip the next morning just below a pair of leaves, preferably on a non-flowering shoot leaving two to three pairs of leaves above (see the picture below). Remove the tip from the cutting, just above a pair of leaves, to encourage bushiness, and also remove the lowest pair with a sharp knife. You should be left with a 2 inch cutting, with one pair of leaves. Cut them in half to reduce moisture loss.
Make a hole in the compost with a pencil, push the cutting in so that the leaves sit just above the surface, and firm gently around each one. Water thoroughly and place in a propagator or put a large sandwich bag over the pot, sealing with an elastic band.
Keep cuttings on your kitchen windowsill where you can check on them, making sure the compost is moist but not wet, and your new plants should root within a few weeks, at which point they can be potted on and hardened off outside, ready for planting in the garden.
All the good things, always
x Laetitia
Daily posts on instagram
You can find my books here and here (Sweet Peas for Summer is a bargain right now at only £2.99!)
Do you Pinterest? Is that even a verb? Anyway, I love it and you can find me here
I'm also on Twitter if you tweet