What's your favorite propagation technique? Do you grow plants from seeds or buy seedlings? Have you tried grafting or other trickier techniques? Successes/failures? What technique would you like to learn? How do you propagate plants for your garden?
This year has been full of unexpected twists and turns, but then when everything ends, there is still one thing remains - Hope. The bad weather is affecting everyone, saplings are not ready even in Nursery, even though we are almost in the middle of October. So we decided to try a new technique to grow saplings from seeds - yes WE - meet our youngest Propagator.
Last year I had collected lot of seeds from my garden to grow saplings from them, this year. Ideally that should have happened a month ago, but as you know, life has been a roller coaster ride this season, but I still wanted to give it a go. This year I decided to renovate the garden look at my native, by replacing the poly packs with pots (more to come on that), but when I went to the shop, I brought this new growing tool from the shop.
A simple growing case that helps a lot in the successful survival of saplings because the soil sticking to the root remains attached, when you transfer them to bigger pot or ground. There are several sizes, but 50 saplings would be enough for me, in fact it would cover both my places - here and native garden. This is the first time, we are trying this and also this is the first time of the young gardener - wish him luck.
While coming from the native, I brought some soil ready to be used, with some cocopits that we gave at the bottom. Again, this is all my theory - giving cocopit at the bottom would help in taking out the plant easily, we will see.
The problem with this method of growing sapling is that, you have to put exactly one seed in one hole, otherwise, they won't grow well. And for that, I had to teach him how to recognize the good ones and carefully take one only and put in each circle - he learned to differentiate between a healthy seed vs a weak seed.
Choosing 50 seeds out of few thousand seeds is not easy and we had four varieties - now he realizes why a gardener need to be patient.
Earlier I had thought to put some seeds in a pot in a traditional manner as a back up, but again if both succeeds it will hurt to destroy cute saplings, so I gave up that idea. We still have lot of seeds to use, and if this turns out to be successful, we will grow a few more and give it away for free to other people who are interested in this - the govt nursery takes 5 rupees for each plant.
Then he filled them with soil and look at his face for the sign of accomplishments.
Keeping it on the open was not an option because of heavy rains so we have now kept it inside the pump house - it's in a pathetic state, but at least serves our purpose.
We kept it dry for 2 days and then sprinkled some water and left it there. Starting today I am going on a ritual trip with Mom, so the kid will have to look after this and other plants - once the saplings come out, he will have to take them out and keep it at a place to get mild sunlight and no rain - gardening is a delicate job and experience lays a strong foundation.
This post is in response to the Week 30 of the Hive Garden Question
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