December « 2016 « The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

December 15, 2016

Protect potted perennials from winter cold

Filed under: Potted Plants,Weather — bob @ 8:45 am

Just about every year, going into winter, I have perennials or other potted plants left over from the growing season that never got planted for one reason or another. I usually have plans for them so I like to keep them over winter.

It’s a good idea to keep plants out as long as possible in the fall. An occasional short cold snap doesn’t bother the plants at all. This year the mild fall weather lasted so long that I just now got most of them put away into their winter storage spots.

The most valuable plants I worry about are my bonsai. They are several years old, my false sequoia is well over 20 years old. All the bonsai are hardy trees that require a cold dormant period to complete their annual life cycle so have to be kept outside during the winter.

There’s a spot under my mature pine trees where the bonsai spend the winter. There I dig a hole and place them in the hole on their sides. Placing them sideways keeps snow melt water (which we get sometimes) from accumulating in the pots. That reduces the chance that the terracotta pots will crack when the water re-freezes. Soil excavated from the hole gets banked up over the pots and the crown of the trees. I then rake plenty pine needles over the tops to insulate them from the cold winter temperature and wind. The entire storage area gets covered with a tarp or other kind of covering.

I put the rest of my perennials in various places around my property. I have a number of left over grape cuttings that I rooted this spring. Those I tucked away in a well-drained spot in the vegetable garden. A few miscellaneous perennial flowers are mixed in there with the grapes.

A few years back I had some potted elderberry plants that I overwintered in the ground. I buried the pots as usual but put them in a new place, somewhere way out of the way. When spring arrived I was so busy that I forgot I even had elderberry plants. It wasn’t until late June that I saw a group of elderberries growing out of the soil that I remembered I stored them there the previous fall. I learned how a squirrel feels when it forgets where it buried its acorns.

Some weather forecasters are predicting another polar vortex may be taking shape again so it’s time to finish up getting those plants into the ground.

Bob

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December 5, 2016

Blooming jade plant

Filed under: Houseplants,Indoor Gardening — Tags: Crassula sp., jade plant flower — bob @ 2:08 pm

One of our jade plants has started blooming this week. Anyone with a jade plant knows this is fairly uncommon. I have had a few jade plants through the years that produced flowers but not very many. So whenever it happens, I get a little excited about it.

There seems to be no way of predicting when a jade will blossom. Lots of people, horticulturists included, have their theories about it. Some folks on the internet say they have it figured out. If that were the case, we’d be seeing truckloads of jade plants in the stores blooming just in time for Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day — pick your favorite holiday.

Jade plant flowers are white with hint of pink near the edges. They are about 3/4 inch across.

Flower production in plants can be a complex process. Before a plant can flower, it has to go through several steps before vegetative cells change into reproductive cells, ie. a flower bud.

A basic principle in botany is that a plant, like most other organisms, will not reproduce until they reach maturity. One familiar example of this is an apple tree which might not bloom for six or eight or even ten years.

We forget sometimes, that our houseplants’s ancestors originally grew out in the wild with no help from people, thank you very much. Jade plants belong to the genus of plants called Crassula. Many Crassula species go through an annual a rest period in their native habitat. In their part of the world, the rains stop for a while and the Crassulas go into a rest period. It’s critical for the Crassulas that the humidity falls to an arid, desert-like condition during this time.

Once the dry period is over, the plants resume growing and that completes one life-cycle. So, to induce flowering, it would make sense that we try to reproduce those types of conditions found in the wild.

OK, so here is my theory of the erratic flowering of jade plants. Many gardeners or houseplant fanciers love their plants and don’t want to hurt it, I don’t blame them. So they keep watering and feeding the plant all year ’round which keeps the plant in a continuous growth stage. The jades never get a chance to rest and they never get a chance to complete a full annual life cycle. This either delays maturity or fails to trigger the reproductive response.

Many factors are involved in stimulating plants to flower: fertility, moisture, intensity of sunlight, length of daylight, temperature extremes both warm and/or cold, length of time exposed to temperatures, air movement, insect damage, and others. The timing of all or any one of these factors can determine if and when a plant will bloom. Some easy-blooming plant species will bloom despite not growing in ideal conditions. Others, like jade plants I’m guessing, require a more complex sequence of events in order to produce flowers.

All that being said, I have noticed that jade plants are more likely to bloom is they are slightly pot-bound. So does this mean that the plants have been growing long enough that they’ve reached reproductive maturity? Or does crowding their roots induce flowering? Maybe sometime in the future a budding horticulturist will discover the secrete.

Bob

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December 2, 2016

Fall rye growth

Filed under: Cover crops — bob @ 2:08 pm

Our mild autumn temperatures have accelerated the growth of fall-planted, over-wintering, cover crops.

Back in October I wrote about planting cereal rye as a cover crop in my garden. Since then the crop has germinated and made excellent progress toward establishing itself.

When rye seed germinates, it emerges out of the soil as a single shoot. As time goes by and temperatures are conducive to plant growth, leaves begin to form on the main shoot.

The rye crop is in great shape going into winter.

The rye plants are about four inches tall.

After a couple of weeks of growth, the plant enters the “tillering” stage of development.

Rye is a bunch grass, a self-descriptive term meaning that the plant grows in tuffs or bunches instead of spreading by over-the-ground stems called rhizomes. To spread and take advantage of growing space, the bunch grasses form extra stems called tillers. Tillers grow from the main stem of the plant.

When you look at a rye plants and see it staring to form dense tuffs, that growth you see is the tillers. Each tiller has the ability to form it own roots. In that way the plant has the ability spread vegetatively, essentially producing baby plants along side the main plant.

Farmers are concerned about encouraging tillering because the more fully-developed tillers the crop has, the greater the yield.

Extra tillering allows the plants to fill in bare areas thereby compensating for thin stands or weak germination.

My rye is is in the early stage of tillering and should be in fine shape going into the winter.

Bob

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