Winter Update

1. I repotted Hens & Chicks from Plantworks in nice earthenware pot from Plantworks, & its doing well on the outdoor bathroom window ledge.
2. The garden place at the Tuesday Farmer's Market in Brooklyn had more hens & chicks so I got one from them too. It's on the living room window sill.
3. Most of the coleus cuttings I had planted & brought inside from the winter have died. :-( The remaining coleus plants are where they always were, on the living room windowsill.
4. The viola & forget-me-not seeds are in their own earthenware pots, still in the struggling seedling stage. I brought them inside with this week's freeze, put them on another windowsill.
5. Ir's cold. Baseball season is long past, & I can't seem to care about football this year. Tommy LaSorda, what am I supposed to live for now?
   

New Additions

I've bought 2 new seed packets, Viola & Forget-Me-Nots, with the intention of planting them on the now vacant window ledge.

Meanwhile, the last few weeks I've noticed a nursery that comes to the Farmer's Market in Columbus Park in Brooklyn that has many plants, including some hens and chicks cacti. I kept looking at them, & thinking no way do I have enough light for them, but then I read someplace they don't always need full sun. This week I planned to get one, but they were all gone. I found a cool site called (of all things) No Thyme Productions that has a whole page about Hens and Chicks, lots of different kinds of them. I was considering it, but I only want one. They ship Priority Mail for $8 no matter how many plants you order. I didn't want to spend $8 to ship one $4 plant. So today I went to Plant Works & asked if they had any. They had 2, a different variety from the Farmer's Market, the kind with pointy leaves. So I bought one for the ledge. It's in a plastic container, needs to be repotted. Plant Works has a great selection of earthenware pots, so I'm going to get a couple of small ones for the seeds, as well as a bigger one for the hens and chicks.

Who knows if any of these plants will survive what I have planned for them.

Coleus Fall Update

All the coleus is in pots now, and I've decided to hope they don't need as much light as I'd thought, because there is simply not room for all of them on that one windowsill. The other sill in the living room is the one that will get the blast from the heater once we start using it, and the kitchen window leads to the fire escape. The coleus in the tempera pot is now inside. There are 2 coleus in the living room, besides the ones on the sill, and one in the kitchen. And one more cutting, 3 leaves and a flower that broke off of the one in the kitchen.

We'll see if they'll adapt.

One out of Four Finds a New Home

The kids did not pot the cuttings at camp, so Friday at pick-up time I collected the pots, soil & the 4 cuttings in peat pots, still in the shoe box M. & I had used to bring them to camp, and went to the park next door. Special thanks to Chris who watered the cuttings during their time in the office!

M. & Jen, a girl waiting for her mom to pick her up, helped with the potting.

It wasn't as messy as I'd feared. The peat pots were crumbly, but instead of trying to pull them out of the styrofoam cups, I peeled the cups off of them. The bottom of the cups remained intact, some with water in them. Once the water had been emptied into the plant, the cup bottom was good for scooping soil out of its bag. Each cutting-in-a-peat-pot went into a small black planter, and we filled in around the edges of the peat pot with soil. Then each plant got a drink of water from a Poland Spring bottle full of tap water that had been in my backpack for a few days. Jen took the plant of her choice home, and M. & I brought home the other 3.

We still have 5 cuttings in cups of water, each with plenty of roots. Plus 3 small coleus plants in pots, 2 in peat pots, the big one on the ledge outside the bathroom window, and the original 3.

Maybe a stoop sale?

Whew!

No phone service here for I'm not sure exactly how long. We may have missed some very important calls, plus no internet from home for me. Plus many frustrating calls to and from Verizon. This morning M. & I debated the merits of James Earl Jones coming to our house and either fixing the phone or turning it to the dark side. Tuesday I was home waiting for Verizon and I ran out and signed up for Cingular at their store on Avenue A, though I'm not sure I can afford it.

Last night in frustration, unable to internet, I made a list of hardy perennials from The City Gardener's Handbookby Linda Yang, which is one of 2 plant books I own. (The other one is The Indoor Potted Bulb.) I've been thinking I'd like to plant a hardy perennial now, and give it that spot outside the bathroom window, and hope it blooms in the spring.

Meanwhile, though, the coleus in the tempera-painted pot is in that spot, and it is getting BIG. I'm worried about it getting too big to get through the window, when the time comes to bring it in for winter. I guess I could go out on the fire escape and take it around and through the kitchen window.

I've been wondering if I could hang it near a window, instead of insisting on a window sill. Maybe the kitchen window.

Meanwhile, I went to the Tru-Value at lunchtime today with my list, and they didn't have any of the seeds on it. Oh well, I don't think seeds are their best thing. There's always the place on First Avenue and 6th Street.

Tomorrow is the last day of camp and the kids have not planted the cuttings yet. If they don't tomorrow, I'm going to take them to the park next to the school where camp meets, and pot them myself together with M. and whatever kids are there. (Then what?)

My plan for getting the cuttings out to make room for more hasn't gone so well.

Pots for the Cuttings I

Yesterday I found out about a new (to me) kind of planter, with a built in tray underneath to catch drainage. I bought 4 black ones for $1.99 each at the Tru-Value and brought them and a small bag of potting soil to Day Camp to provide new homes for the 4 coleus cuttings M. & I brought there on Friday. I can't wait to hear whether they did the repotting. We still have 3 of the little guys at home waiting impatiently for a new home as their peat pots try to decompose. Also, about 4 cuttings rooting in styrofoam cups, about ready for their own peat pots soon.

My Coleus Cutting Info Sheet

I am a COLEUS CUTTING

I like light, so keep me near a window.

(Any window is ok. It doesn't have to be a sunny window.)

Water me when my soil feels dry, every few days.

(The white styrofoam cup is there to catch water that runs out when you water me.)

My little brown pot is a "biodegradable" "peat pot.

When you plant me in a bigger, more permanent pot, put my peat pot right in the soil of my new pot. (I won't need my white cup anymore, so throw it away.) My roots will grow through it, and it will become part of the soil. Cool, huh?

Some Cuttings Leave Home

M. & I brought 4 of the peat-potted cuttings to her summer camp on Friday. Her group was hosting a fund raiser that involved selling food, and it seemed you could sell other things as well, like plants. I made information sheets, the content of which I will put in another post.

The cuttings didn't make it to the sale, and ended up the the office. One of them was pretty dry, so I hope it makes it thorugh the weekend. I'll see how they're doing on Monday morning. The peat pots are getting pretty crumbly, so I might see if the assistant group leader, who told me she's into plants, would like to lead some of the kids in a potting project. If so, I'll give them some cheap pots and soil.

One of the potted cuttings has a nice growth of almost all-red leaves, bushy, not leggy. I think that one's a keeper. We need to move the rest out to make room for the ones that are now rooting. Before we can find new homes for our potted cuttings, we need to give the new owners something they can take with them to catch the drainage. Today I bought styrofoam cups, and small styrofoam bowls, in case the cups weren't big enough.

Meanwhile, J. organized a lot of stuff and gave some much-needed first-aid to the air conditioner. After the week we've just had, I'm glad we have power, let alone an air-conditioner that works. I climbed over the debris he'd generated to test whether the cups were big enough to hold the peat pots. They were.

The glass vase with the unruly cuttings was in the air conditioner window. He handed it to me. "Do something with this," he said, or implied. Sometimes he communicates without audible words, and I've developed the uncanny ability to hear them. I took the vase into the kitchen and made more cute little cuttings in styrofoam cups of water, discarding unruly vines, and rinsing the glass vase. The new cuttings went on the windowsill next to the rejuvenated air conditioner.

AFTER THE FIRST CUTBACK

During the week sometimes I stop by the Tru Value hardware store (also called Bruno's Home Center) on Court Street near where I work. I found a package of 10 small peat pots, which would be perfect for planting the cuttings. I originally said "Peat pots are biodegradable pressboard containers which hold a plant, which can later be repotted, container and all." I have since learned that they are made not from pressboard, but from peat, which comes from moss. The roots grow through the peat pot, which biodegrades. The next weekend M. and I potted the cuttings in the peat pots. I put 4 of them in that same windowsill with plastic takeout containers under them to catch the drainage. Two more went on the ledge outside the bathroom window, along with Number One Cutting..

SUMMER 2006

One day during the summer of 2006, J. said "The trees are getting in my space." Sure enough, several tendrils of one of the coleus vines was peeking around the blind, sending flowers in his direction.

I'd been thinking for awhile that much as I love the wild growth of these crazy plants, I was going to have to do something about them.

The first step was replacing the broken blind. Yes, I hated living with a blind I couldn't open, but I've been living with a lot of stuff lately.

Before I got the new blind, I impulsively took one cutting and rooted it a glass vase that was a keepsake from my cousin's wedding. It was there for about 2 weeks, during which time it grew a healthy crop of shaggy roots. With M.'s help I planted it in a terra cotta pot she had painted with tempera paint the winter we planted those little black beans that fall off East Village trees. Those died of forgot-to-water-it-itus. I'm not sure why, my plants seem not to be susceptible to that particular disease anymore. The potted cutting, which was fairly large, got the prime summer spot on the ledge outside the bathroom window. We agreed we should not give the next cuttings so much time to grow untidy roots before potting them.

Once the blind was replaced, I began taking cuttings. The first step was to cut back the rude plant that was invading my darling's environment. Most of the tops of the plants relocated to the now vacant vase with fresh water. The exception was the one that had formed a woody stem, which led to a vine terminating in a long flower.

By now I had done enough reading to know that when books and seed packets say coleus plants are grown for foliage, not flowers, that doesn't mean they don't flower, it just means most growers don't want the flowers, and pinch the buds off before the flower appears. I had also learned that my experience was typical for coleus beginners. Untended plants grown indoors tend to become "leggy." I even found a picture of The Little Coleus Branch That Wanted to Be a Vine. I was intrigued that coleus seems to mimic other plants, the mockingbird of the plant kingdom. I read they sometimes form woody stems and behave like trees. It's possible to stake them to make them stand upright. I plan to try this with Woody, the one whose top I didn't cut back.

After I'd put the long unruly cuttings in the vase, I took smaller cuttings and put them in paper cups of water to root. I used the dinosaur paper cups left over from my daughter's 8th birthday party, which I bought because Party City didn't have any Darth Vader cups (the party's theme.)

SUMMER 2005

The summer of 2005 began with me reading On Writing by Stephen King. It was the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade for my daughter M., her first at Beacon Summer Day Camp.

I wanted to plant something. I thought maybe if I planted something and it grew it would be a symbol of hope for the future.

I gathered the pots and trays for under the pots I'd been storing under the sink. I bought new pebbles to line the pots from the garden/hardware store on First Avenue and 6th Street. I inventoried the open and unopened seed packets under the sink. I decided on coleus, since they were the only plant to thrive from the Shade Mix seeds I'd planted the year I had a windowbox. (Maybe it was more than one year, because I remember growing pansies and petunias in that windowbox. Every time my poor pansy produced a flower, a big bluejay appeared, let out a squawk, and ate it.) I bought new potting soil. M. and I spread newspaper on the kitchen floor, lined three pots with pebbles and broken pot shards, put soil in the pots, planted the seeds, watered them. Three was the number of pots that would fit on the one windowsill where we can put plants; the one without an air conditioner or fire escape. The one where my husband J.'s desk is.

For a long while there was nothing more than little green shoots. Then small plants with no color on their leaves. Then I put one of the pots on the ledge outside the bathroom window, and soon it looked like a coleus plant is supposed to: bigger, with red spots on its leaves. After that, the plants each got a turn on the ledge, a couple of days at a time Soon they were all healthy colorful coleus plants.

When it got cold I watched for the first frost warning to make sure the plants were all inside for the winter. Because the blind on that window was broken it was awhile before I noticed how big they were getting. They had climbed most of the way up the window, like climbing vines. I had thought that coleus didn't flower, but these were flowering like crazy.