Cuttings

I have decided I want some native shrubs in my yard.

One that I've wanted for several years is Serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea).  I know of one little plant that hangs precariously off the edge of the bluff overlooking the creek.  But there's no way for me to get to it to try to collect any berries from it, so for several years I've just had to admire it from the other side of the creek.

Common Serviceberry, observed March 5, 2017.

But this fall I found the website for "Food Forest Nursery," in Westfork, Arkansas.  According to their website:

We specialize in bare root fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, fruiting vines, nitrogen fixers, and other perennial permaculture plants.  We select the varieties we grow for disease resistance (in our humid climate in the Arkansas Ozarks), flavor, overall variety in our diet, and hardiness to zone 7 or colder.

 

And one of the plants they sell is Serviceberry (https://foodforestnursery.com/product/serviceberry/).  

I ordered one.  

And as I looked through the plants on their website, I started thinking about other plants I'd seen on my walks.  I didn't realize that several of those have edible parts.   I wondered if I could start some of those from seed?

The problem with that idea is that if you're going to start plants from seed, you have to first find plants with seeds.  

I knew where a Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) plant was growing along the creek where I walk (a section of creek we call The Maple Hole), but I had never seen any berries on it.  I've come to the conclusion that the plant must be a male (Spicebush is one of those plants that is dioecious, meaning some plants have only male flowers, while others have only female flowers).

Spicebush (Lindera benzoin), observed March 7, 2020.

I had walked about three miles down the creek from The Maple Hole over the years, and knew there were lots of Spicebush plants along the creek below my sister's house.  So she and I walked through the woods about a week and a half ago, looking for Spicebush berries (and Paw Paws).  There were none to be found.

I actually thought about ordering a couple of plants from the Food Forest Nursery, but I wanted to be sure I got a male and a female plant.  I sent them an email asking if they knew which plants were male and which were female, and if I could specify what I wanted, but they never answered.  Plus, I worry about introducing non-local plants into the environment...even though Spicebush is a native plant, the ones that grow around here have evolved to live here, and introducing plants from another location could disrupt the ecological balance (yes, I am going to be doing that with the Serviceberry and I do worry about that...).  So I held off placing that order, but continued to read about Spicebush.  I was actually becoming quite obsessed with wanting one.

Then one evening I happened across a website that said Spicebush could be propagated from cuttings.  Ding, ding, ding, ding!!!!  If I took cuttings from several different plants, surely I would get lucky and at least I could get some cuttings to root, and if I got really lucky, maybe I would get a cutting from a male and a female plant to root! 

That next weekend, I walked down to The Maple Hole and took cuttings from what I believed to be the male Spicebush plant.   A few days later, my sister and I walked through her woods again and I took cuttings from maybe a dozen different Spicebush plants along the way.  

I don't know if it is the right time of year to take the cuttings...some websites said take softwood cuttings in June/July, while others said take semi-hardwood cuttings in late summer or fall.  The cuttings I ended up using were all new growth, and were what I think would be considered semi-hardwood cuttings.  I snipped off the ends, scrapped the bark off the lower end on one side, dipped the cuttings in rooting hormone powder, then buried them in a pot of the Fox Farm "Salamander Soil."  When all of the cuttings were potted up, I put the pots inside a plastic bag to hold in the moisture.   

Spicebush and fig cuttings, all bagged up ready to take root!

Now I wait.

I did notice differences in the cuttings as I was working with them.  The ones from the plant at The Maple Hole already had prominent buds where the flowers will be next spring.  Some of those from my sister's woods also had those buds, but others didn't.  I tried to separate the cuttings into pots according to whether they had buds or not.  I'm curious know now if those without the buds are female plants.

And now, I have "cutting fever."  Apparently there are lots of plants that can be started from cuttings.  My sister gave me some cuttings from her fig trees, so they're in the plastic bag with the Spicebush cuttings.  I walked down into the field today and took cuttings from a Blackhaw (Viburnum prunifolium) that grows by the slough.  Again, it may be totally the wrong time of year to take the cuttings, and if they don't root, I'll try again next summer.

Blackhaw (Viburnum prunifolium), observed April 11, 2015.

I took cuttings from a Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida) (these were definitely what I would call hardwood cuttings though, so they may be totally wrong).  I  am also trying to root a cutting from an American Bladdernut tree (Staphylia trifolia) and from a couple of Paw Paw trees (Asimina triloba).  In the past, I've successfully rooted cuttings from the little white rose bush that was here at the house when we moved in; Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) cuttings; and a cutting from Common Dittany (Cunila origanoides).    I still want to try some cuttings from Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) too...I just need to find the plant again!  And I saw YouTube videos today about starting Red Mulberry (Morus rubra) from cuttings - it sounds like that's a very easy one to do as well! Persimmons (Diospyros virginiana) can also be started from cuttings..I know where I'll be going tomorrow during my lunch break!

So now I'm wondering...can I take a cutting from this?  How about from that?  There are possibilities everywhere I look!

Update 11/5/2022 - I finally got to go after some persimmon cuttings yesterday.   While there were several "new growth" limbs on one of the trees, I couldn't reach them.  I did remember that there was another small persimmon tree down below the pond, so I walked up the hill on my way back home.  I was in luck.  Not only was it a female tree, it also had some new growth limbs down low enough that I could reach!  I ended up potting up 10 cuttings.  

Today I walked back down to the creek to see if I could find the coral honeysuckle that I had seen growing in a small tree on my dad's side of the creek a few years ago.  I looked and looked in the area where I thought I remembered it was, but just didn't see it.  I was just about to give up, when I happened to notice what looked like a few honeysuckle leaves in the little tree right beside me.  LOL  That was it!  I just didn't see it because it had already lost most of its leaves.  It did, however, have one set of fused leaves where a flower had been, so I knew I had the right plant.  I took a very few small cuttings from it, but leaving some I would have liked to get because they had caterpillars of some sort feeding on them.  So now I have three small cuttings of the native honeysuckle!  

Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), observed on April 24, 2016. 
This one hangs down the bluff on the opposite side of the creek from my dad's field, so it was out of reach. 
But a few years later I found on growing in the woods on my dad's side, so now I have some cuttings.  What a gorgeous vine it is!

No-Till: One Year Later

Just a little over a year ago I wrote a post titled "To till, or not to till:  I think I'll try not to."  And after my first year of no-till, I know one thing for sure...I'll never go back to my old way of gardening.

To be clear, I can't say that my no-till garden has been a huge success - quite the opposite actually.  I don't think I got what I'd call a real harvest from anything until late summer.  But when I walk through the garden now, it just seems "right." 

I began the transition to no-till by building raised rows in the "good" part of the garden.  I raked up the old straw mulch and shoveled dirt on top of that.  Cardboard topped with cypress mulch covered the walking space in between the rows.  Over the next few months, I slowly added more rows and by early spring the east part of the garden was pretty much complete.  I started planting.

So what are the positives about no-till?

First, I love being able to take my seeds and little transplants out to the garden and just plant them without having to worry about getting the tiller out of the shop.  

Second, between the cardboard and cypress mulch in the walking rows, and the straw mulch on the sides of the raised rows, there were hardly any weeds, and what weeds or grass did pop up were easily pulled out by hand.  The exception to the "hardly any weeds" were prostrate sandmat (Euphorbia prostrata) and common yellow woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta).  But since both of those are very low-growing, I just left them.  (I may regret that next spring.)

Third, it seemed like there was just more "life" in the garden than there was when I was keeping it tilled.  Until the weather turned off hot and dry, there were always earthworms and other little soil-dwelling critters under the mulch.  That meant there were toads living in the garden too. And because I interplanted different kinds of flowers in with the food crops, there were bees, butterflies, wasps, and syrphid flies.  When the sunflowers set their seeds, there were goldfinches and chickadees hanging upside down plucking seeds from the seed heads.  

A Fowler's Toad (Anaxyrus fowleri) hunting in one of my walking rows.

What were the negatives?

I don't think there were any real negatives that weren't caused by something stupid that I did.  But I did learn a few things from my mistakes, and will try to correct them and know better what not to do next year.

First, my raised rows were too steep.  As a result, when I tried to water them, the water didn't have a chance to soak in - it just ran down the sides into the walking rows. (...and in some cases, taking my seeds with it.  I had quite a few carrots growing at the edge of the walking rows!)  The rows will need to be reshaped this winter so that they are flattened out, but with the sides slightly higher than the center so they hold the water until it can soak in.

Second, my raised rows went all "hollow" underneath.  Best I can figure out is that the straw underneath has decayed, leaving a big void under the top couple of inches of soil.  For whatever reason, the rows haven't collapsed, but when I tried to set out my beet transplants this fall, every hole that I tried to "dib" punched through the top crust into a big empty space.  So when I'm reshaping the rows, I'll need to break that top layer so that it collapses down into the void below.  The decaying straw might also explain why some of my plants didn't look as healthy as I thought they should.  There might have been some nitrogen tie-up going on.

I really can't think of anything else to list as a "negative" of no-till. If something else comes to mind later I will edit this post to add it.