Cuttings

It's 90 degrees today. This is too hot for me to be out there fighting the weeds but perfect for working in the green house. I clipped some red monkey flowers, Provence lavender, Spanish lavender, rosemary, and Roma tomatoes. I will start with these since I have plenty of them. I purchased 3 pots of monkey flowers 2 years ago, but only one of them survived. The surviving bush is doing really well, so I am going to see if I can expand the monkeys. Master Ken, my mentor, always makes it seem so easy to grow anything. He also makes his cuttings and pruning in an amazing speed. It's all second nature to him. It took me almost an hours just to get these cuttings ready for rooting.


I don't t think any of my peach cuttings had rooted from a couple months ago. I also didn't use rooting hormone on those cuttings. This time I got a bottle of rooting hormone. Since I am trying to keep my cost down, I decided to make my own rooting medium instead of buying perlite. I know it has to be light and airy so the roots can grow easily, so I mixed some potting soil (1/3) with completely dried horse manure mixed with wood shavings (2/3). I misted the mixture with the water bottle.


I dip each cutting into the rooting hormone powder then stick it into the rooting medium. Tomatoes are supposed to root very easily, so I am skipping rooting hormone on them. After every cutting is in place, I mist everything thoroughly. Since I don't have a sprinkler system in this makeshift greenhouse, I will be misting these cuttings several times a day whenever possible. If everything goes well, they should root in 3 to 5 weeks.

Inspiration and Transformation

A year later

When I redesigned the front garden over a year ago, I carefully selected each plant. The plants needed to be deer and drought tolerant and preferably native California. I also wanted some flowering plants for hamming birds and bees. I wanted to remove all the juniper bushes badly. They were over grown, hard to trim, full of spiders inside and covered in spider webs. To me, they served no purpose and were an eyesore.

A year ago when the flowers were first planted

This project was bigger than we could handle by ourselves, so I hired some people to remove most of the plants. I wanted a low maintenance front garden, but we didn’t know a whole lot about weed suppression back then. The only thing I knew was weed blocker or landscape fabric. More than a year later, I now know that weeds will find a way to penetrate just about anything including concrete since there are several cracks in the drive way made by weeds.

During my research, I found that most herbs are deer tolerant. I planted 2 varieties of rosemary and 2 varieties of lavender in addition to some sage, wallflowers, red monkey flowers, lilac, and a few others.

I wish it could stay this way. Unfortunately, it's now filled with weeds again.

After the initial transformation was completed, I decided to sign up for horticulture classes. Now over a year later, most of the plants have thrived. I have witnessed many hamming birds, butterflies, and bees visiting the flowerbed. I have learned various weed control methods through my class and that weed blocker doesn’t really work in the long run. It might block weeds for a year if you are lucky.