Snip Off A Branch & Put It In Water!

How is your week going?

Here are some tips that helped me, so I hope they will do the same for you. I got another seed packet in the mail today and I am looking forward to planting more pots. Some will be for me but the rest will be for the Plant Sale in the fall. It raises funds for Greene County so I am all for that.

Rooting coleus

Don’t you just love coleus in your garden? I really love foliage plants with a lot of color. Save some to overwinter on a window sill, and you can have many starts for next spring.  Snip off a branch and put it in water. It’s that easy.

Just pinch off a stem and clean the lower stem free of leaves. Put it in water for a few days and roots will develop. As soon as you see roots developing, put your rooted cutting into some soft, loose soil. (If you plan to put it into soil. It will grow for a long time in water.)

It will be a lot harder to get a good plant if you let it grow too long in water. Rooting in the water causes the plant to NOT develop the root hairs need for searching out water since it doesn’t need to search, so waiting too long to put your little plant into soil will make it much harder for the root hairs to develop.   Another post here about coleus.

Testing Your Soil

It is a good idea to test your soil and your local extension office can help you with the procedure. Soil is put into a small bag and dropped off or mailed to an analysis site. A report comes back with a lot of detail on your soil composition such as trace elements, mineral levels, pH, or more. It is nice to know especially for food gardening since you don’t want to supplement for something your soil already has anyway. Over-fertilizing  just causes runoff into the waterways.

You can find out the level of N-P-K in your soil, but also other secondary  micro-nutrients. Each of your nutrients is a link in a chain, so one weak link can make a difference in your yield in a vegetable or flower garden. It is simple to do. The charge here in our county was $15 well spent!

Raccoons……enough said.

These cute animals are such pests as far as getting into things they shouldn’t. And if anyone has any idea of what to do to keep them away, I would like to know. I tried to keep them out of the trash can by using a bungee cord tightly holding that can lid on, but…

They  figured it out anyway and got in!  Smart creatures!

Don’t allow overhanging branches from a tree to lean against your house or roof. The raccoons will climb it and may end up inside your attic. And you will regret that for a long time………..a very long time.  Squirrels can get inside too, along with ants and all kinds of crawling critters. We just had a large maple cut back away from the house. A household expense that is necessary but not usually thought about until you need it done. So many of those types of things come up, like these repairs I wrote about in this post.

And never purposefully feed a raccoon. They probably eat better than you do anyway. Have you seen a skinny one?

Have you ever had a pesky raccoon come visit….again….and again. How did you combat it?  My daughter has had them in her yard too and they sure sound fierce. The Momma raccoon with her row of babies following her along the top of the wood fence snarled and hissed every time she shown the light on them. Fierce little creatures. But they ambled back into the woods, hissing and growling and muttering under their breath ( I guess).

Looking forward to more great weather even though rain is predicted for today. We need a good watering!  Now go garden!