The Stakes Are High

This is the brother in the family of gardeners. Who my mother refers to as "B". This last week, I was given some larger Japanese Maples, or Acer palmatum plants, than the ones that I have potted, but the sister of mine that had been taking care of them had left them in the shade, which allowed their trunks to stay floppy and leaning. I re-potted the trees that I could, and I also put up stakes in the pots to keep the trees from leaning. The stakes that I found were much higher than the plants that I had, but I'm hoping that my plants will grow to reach the top of the stakes. I also put them in the sun to make their trunks more sturdy. Another happy thing that happened in the plant world this week is that we got a new shipment of plants (Thank You, father!). This allowed me to pot more plants. Unfortunately, none of the pots were the right size for growing trees in. Instead, I learned how to clone plants. This last Saturday, I was taught by my mother how to clone thyme, or Thymus vulgaris. I just cut branches off of an existing thyme plants and potted them. To help these plants to take root faster, my mother let me use some of her root-growing hormones. These hormones are man-made but are based on the chemical structure of a real plant hormone. I potted two trays of 32 pots of thyme on Saturday, and continued to potting today, on Sunday. Today, I potted one tray of Rosmarinus officinalis, otherwise known as rosemary. Although the branches I cut off of the rosemary were quite a bit bigger than the branches of thyme, the basic cloning technique is the same. Cut, apply growth hormone, pot. After getting the hang of it, it was pretty easy.

New Additions

Yesterday, I was able to get more Japanese Maples, or Acer palmatum, plants into my plant population. A couple of days ago, my family went on a trip to see our grandparents. My grandmother is also an great gardener, and when we told her that we were growing plants, she gave my sisters some succulants. Along with that, she found some pots that were the size that I used for my Japanese Maples, and gave me 15 of them, the size of one tray of seedlings. On the saturday after wecame back, I potted some more seedlings. I also had a 16th pot lying around the house, and I accidentally put a strawberry seedling in it instead of a Japanese Maple seedling. Along with being able to make another tray of seedlings, I also found out that my mother had potted some seedlings a long time ago, and my sister had taken them and put them in the shad

e. When I found out about this, I repotted them into larger pots. I know have about ten new additions to my set of maples that are outside of trays. On other news besides Japanese Maples, the chives are rapidly growing tall. Also, my older sister has been working on growing Mint plants, but she grew them from parts of roots, so she wasn't able to see if they were growing, but now, the first leaves are peeking out of the dirt. actually, that happened about a week ago. Right now, there are leaves popping out all over the place.

Into the Sun

For the past couple of days, my Japanese Maple seedlings, or Acer palmatum seedlings, have been hidden from the sun in an area protected by bushes, trees, and other large plants. We left the seedlings in the shade because seedlings go through a lot of stress in their roots when they are being moved into pots. This is because the roots become exposed, and also might have ripped while being transferred into pots. These seedlings may wilt if we put them in the sun straight after they are transferred to pots. So for the past five days, my Japanese Maples have been in the safety of the shade. Now that the roots are coming back to normal and there are no big wilting problems, we have now moved the pots into the sun, allowing the Maple Trees to collect sunlight. With luck, the plants will grow quicker now, and not wilt. Along with the movement of the seedlings, there is also news about the newly potted chives. After three days of being potted, the chives have started to have new growths. This is good news! Maybe we will have chives for later on in the year!