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Hi, guys,
Now that seasonal perennials have started growing, you might be planning to buy more to fill in any gaps in your garden. Keep your money in your wallet and make your own plants for free.
If you already have perennials like salvias, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, etc., you never have to buy more. You can propagate them yourself using a pair of pruners, a container and some potting mix.
Either purchase a bag of potting mix that contains peat moss and perlite or buy a bag of each and whip up a 50-50 mix, which is the perfect growing medium for new plants.
Fill containers with your homemade potting mix so that they’re ready to go when you clip your plants because you don’t want your cuttings sitting around in the sun – not even for a minute. You can use leftover pots from plants you’ve purchased, old cell packs or even plastic yogurt containers in which you’ve poked holes in the bottoms for drainage.
Cuttings will have the best chance of survival if you take them from the strongest, healthiest plants you have. Clip a piece of stem 4 to 6 inches long, about a quarter of an inch below a leaf on the diagonal. Next, remove the lower leaves from the stem and insert the cut end into one of your prepared pots.
Water it and place it in a shady spot, keeping the soil moist but not soggy.
Cuttings root pretty quickly. You’ll know they’re ready for planting when a gentle tug of a stem offers some resistance.
Want to multiply your sedums? That’s even easier: Clip a portion of tender, new growth from a stem as described above, gently tear off the lowest pair of leaves, and “plant” the cut end of the stem directly into the garden wherever you want it. Keep it watered, and it will root in place.
If you want, you can cut several stems from one plant and create a whole row of free sedums, as I did in the photo above, without harming the mother plant. Just keep it to less than 50% of the plant’s stems.
Sedum cuttings also can be rooted in potting mix, as above, or even in water, but I’ve had success with this easier method.
Give it a try and let me know how you make out!
📬 Ask Jessica
DEAR JESSICA: Do my Knockout roses need to be cut back like my tea and hybrid roses? During the blooming season, should they be deadheaded or just left alone?
Also, I have an oxalis houseplant with leaves that look like shamrocks. Is there an outside variety that I can plant that will survive winter? Or is there another outdoor plant resembling a shamrock with three-part leaves? —Jim Killen, West Islip, NY
DEAR JIM: Knockout roses do not need pruning, but if you’d like to keep them at a manageable 3-4 feet tall and wide, you can cut them down to 12” tall every year when you notice the first signs of new growth. For you, that would be sometime in April; in the south, it’s more like late January. Removing the hips produced later in the season will encourage more blooming, but deadheading is never necessary.
Oxalis triangularis, the very same houseplant often called the shamrock plant, can be grown outdoors in the garden or in containers. The low-growing, purple-leaved plant prefers light shade but can handle a bit of sun. Over summer, it will bloom with small light pink or pale purple flowers.
But you’re right: Although it’s a perennial plant, it would either have to be treated as an annual or dug up and brought indoors over winter in your zone 7 area. In zones 8-11, however, it will grow outdoors year-round.
You can, however, grow another species — Oxalis articulata — as a perennial. Also known as pink wood sorrel and hardy in zones 7-9, the plant grows as a clumping, spreading groundcover with inch-long pink, white, magenta or yellow flowers in fall.
💡 If you do one thing this week…
As long as the soil has dried and reached 55 degrees — and the danger of frost has passed in your region — plant summer-blooming bulbs and corms like those for gayfeather, cana, elephant ears, gladiolus, freesia and caladium.
👏 Sunday shoutout
Reader Janette Diehlmann, who began a weekly practice of Tai Chi during the pandemic, planted a zen garden where a blacktop and gravel driveway used to be. “After some planning, leveling, a Home Depot stop, and fingers crossed, [my husband and I] developed a design and laid the foundation,” she said. “It is a wonderful, peaceful place that brings me such joy.”
Send in your photo, and you could be featured next!
📰This week in my Associated Press gardening column
I write a weekly gardening column for the AP, so you might have seen my byline in your local paper (or news website) — wherever in the world you happen to be. In case you miss it, though, I’ll post the most recent here every week.
This week, I shared tips and tools to help you go easy on your body while gardening.
Before that, I wrote about planting a wildflower meadow at home.
A week prior, five free apps and phone features to help you identify plants, flowers, weeds, insects and diseases. I hope I didn’t write myself out of a job…
You can read all my AP gardening columns here.
📚📺🎵 📚📺🎵 📚📺🎵 📚📺🎵
Random things I enjoyed this week
Walking through a local nursery! Exercising restraint, I only purchased one small rosemary plant to replace my decade-old one that bit the dust last year, but boy, it felt good to smell the mulch and walk through rows of perennials.
I cleaned off my back deck, patio furniture and firepit seating. Did I actually *enjoy* it? Absolutely not! But I’m really enjoying having everything clean!
I also started streaming “The Last Thing He Told Me” on AppleTV, a series about a woman (Jennifer Garner) whose husband (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) took off under suspicious circumstances. If you like a good thriller/mystery, you might enjoy it, too.
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📧 How’m I doing?
I welcome your comments and suggestions, so please send them along — as well as any topics you’d like to see covered and questions you’d like answered in the Ask Jessica section.