Good Morning Everyone!
How can it be Friday again already! Seriously, while I am not complaining about the weekend being here, as fast as the days seem to fly by it just seems to make my head spin!
But I do have another Frugal Friday that I wanted to share with you this week, and that is the idea of taking cuttings from your current garden to produce more FREE plants! And in my case this week, I am talking about FREE roses!
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I were doing a little yard clean up on a sunny day, and one thing we were sprucing up was my rose trellis. This is a trellis that my husband built for me, and we were going to leave it the natural wood color but sadly after a summer or two we realized the wood bees that we have in our area just loved to drill holes into my trellis and use it as a place to lay their young— not exactly what I had in mind when I asked my husband to build me a garden arbor/trellis! So after some research I learned that the wood bees will usually leave painted wooden things alone, so we knew we were going to have to paint that trellis after all. Well, I had already had a climbing rose growing up one side of the trellis for probably three years, and had always meant to plant a different color of rose to grow up the other side. But you know how things go— I had not yet gotten a rose planted up that other side. At this point, it was probably a good thing, since we were going to have to remove the rose that was already growing on it in order to paint. So with many apologies to my rose bush, we started removing it from its trellis. We tried to cut it as little as possible, but there were many canes weaving in and out, so it was impossible to not cut it at all.
With both of us working together, we finally managed to untangle the rose from the trellis, and my hubby painted the trellis a natural brown color (take THAT you bad wood bees!). As I surveyed the pile of rose canes that we had had to clip off, on a whim I decided to try and start some new roses. I had read previously that cuttings need to be about the diameter of a pencil, so choosing some pencil sized canes I cut two canes into strips, dipped one end of each rose piece into first water, and then a dip into my container of rooting hormone (bought at Walmart) before poking it down into one of two pots I had sitting on my back porch filled with pitting soil. I watered my new “rose sticks,” and left them alone.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and this week we were once again doing some spring cleaning in our backyard, when I came across the two pots and low and behold there they were! Nine happy little new rose plants, growing beautiful new leaves! Not all of my starts “started,” as I had planted twelve sticks, and only nine grew— but I thought that was pretty fantastic!
Of course, now I had a new problem, as the type of rose I started is a vigorous climber, so I knew they would not be content to live in a pot all summer. But forgoing my original idea of two different roses on my trellis, I decided a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and I really do love this rose bush as it is very hardy and is almost completely thornless. So two baby rose bushes have gone into the ground on the far side, so maybe by the end of the summer there will be roses growing on both sides instead of just one.
That still leaves me with seven more roses to find a spot for, but my Aunt and Uncle came to stay one night with us as they traveled home from being snowbirds, so I offered one rose to my Aunt, which she gladly took. It will be interesting to see if it grows as well in her state as it does in mine! And I still have a few gardener friends to ask and see if they would like one for their yard.
So there you have it! My Frugal tip for this week is to see if you can create new plants from plants that you already have. Your starts might not “start,” but then again, it doesn’t hurt to try!
~Susan
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Note--Yes, I am aware of plant patents. From my research, the rose I have is not a patented one so I am not breaking any laws by growing new cuttings. I am also not selling my extra plants. In addition, my understanding from my research is that even if a plant IS under a plant patent, the plant owner is still free to create new plants for their own use and to share, as long as they are not selling the plants.
