Hmm

I've been thinking about this blog a lot lately. I've been thinking about how I never write in it. I originally decided that I'd just write about plant stuff here. But I really like to write about what I'm thinking about. I'm a fan of stream of consciousness. I do like thinking about plants, so just writing about plants here seemed like a decent goal. But I've put plants on the back burner lately. I now have a job, so I don't have tons of extra time for plants. (This isn't really a huge deal.) The big thing is that my plants are all struggling to make it because of bug problems. I'll admit that I haven't been so good about physically removing bugs from the plants. The plants are inside, so the bugs that find there way to them don't have too many predators around. Also, I can't just spray whatever I want on the plants. So my plants are doing poorly, and it saps my motivation because i just wish I had someplace outside that was mine to plant them. That's why I stopped writing. It's not that I haven't had anything on my mind. I would like to use this space for general thoughts.

Lately I've been putting a lot of time into searching for housing. I really want a house. I want space to put plants in the ground. I like the idea of having a pet chicken and goat in a fenced backyard. Maybe a basement with exercise equipment and a beer brewing setup. We've been saving and can make a decent down payment. Searching for houses leads to some interesting thoughts. Sometimes I find myself seeing what the best is that I can just afford. We can afford a certain amount, but it would be difficult. With the massive number of foreclosures we're seeing, going for the most you can barely afford seems way too risky. But it's nice to see what you could possibly get. On the other hand, I found myself looking at the cheapest I thought I could stand. This was somewhat limited by the fact that I wanted a half decent backyard. But still, you can find some pretty cheap houses out there. To imagine saving really hard and completely owning a home after, say, two years sounds really fucking awesome. Additionally, I like the idea of upgrading my own home (not just fixing existing problems, but using my ideas to add creative and awesome features). I read about this guy who built secret passages into his house. He even sealed off a room and made it only accessible through a secret passage. It's your own space! You can do whatever you want, even crazy things like that. I just think that's awesome. Now is a great time to buy. The only problem is, where do I buy? I was looking around in our area when it hit me. How do I know which city to pick? I know there's usually a money/niceness correlation, and that living in the city is more costly than in the country. But that's not really what I meant. Am I looking in the right overall area? Am I even looking in the right state? Hell, we're young and not tied down - am I even looking in the right country? I think I'm going to back off for now. We haven't seen the bottom of the housing market yet. I don't have enough saved up to survive a layoff. And I don't know where I want to be for the next 5+ years.
If I did, I'd be writing about plants because my plants would be doing well because they would be planted outside in the lawn of the house I bought. See how it all connects? :)
It's really just a giant stalemate, and it gets worse. The largest factor determining where we end of living just may be what type of work is available in the area. Currently I am on a very unsteady career path; I just don't know what I want to do. Should I work in this type of job, or that? Should I go back to school? I just don't know. You generally want to live somewhere convenient to your work. I feel like I need that goal settled and worked out before I can determine where I might want to live.

Perhaps this is a nice start back to writing. Welcome to my thoughts.

Yay

Chocolate cherry tomato plant sprouted. Carrots are getting bigger rapidly. The catnip plant I trimmed back to encourage branching has 2 new branches that have already recovered the lost mass. Aforementioned lost mass has rooted in a bowl of water and seems to have received a lot of help from the honey I used. My pepper plants are steadily growing despite the cold nights. Same goes for my hops, coffee, japanese maple, jacaranda, and raspberry plant. My hops cuttings have extensive healthy roots. I'm going to see about selling five or ten of them.
On the down side my maple graft was hosting a fungus - I took it out. Also, many of my seeds have yet to sprout. I'd love to raise lemon, lime, orange, and apple trees. I just planted cranberry seeds and may have a bush soon. I'm trying some indoors and some 'winter sown.' My peach tree may end up having a stunted recovery in the cold. There's nothing I can do about it. My umbrella plant cuttings don't seem to be going anywhere. I will most likely have to start over.
Overall, things are going very well. I will soon have way too much catnip on my hands. I'll have to figure out something to do with it.

Water

I'm trying to make an automatic watering system for my plants. The main reason I want to do this is to regulate how much water my plants are getting. Keeping that in mind, an ideal system would allow a different amount of water output for each plant. Each plant has different water requirements which depend on the size of the plant and the type of plant it happens to be. An ideal system would be difficult to build, and I'm building a system that's cheap and consists of some recycled parts. So, I'm shooting for the simple alternative - a watering system that satisfies the water requirements of the plants in my collection that use the least amount of water. Then, I could simply supplement the remaining water manually. You could make a good argument that I want this system because I'm lazy, but if that were the case, I wouldn't bother with plants at all. I really want to regulate how much water my plants get. I guess I am, at least, too lazy to measure out amounts of water with glassware each time I water each plant, but come on, that's a waste of time.
Anyways, I've looking into solutions for individual plant pots, and a system for the whole group of plants. (I keep all my plants in one room so my cats don't eat them.) For individual plants, there's that "earthbox" idea where the pot has vents at the base to use the soil as a wick. The entire pot sits in a container of water. When used correctly, this neatly simulates ground water. But I don't want to spend the money on all those new pots. I have considered trying to make earthboxes myself, but I don't have any cheap ideas that I like yet. Maybe if I bought a box of colanders to use as the inner pots. Either way, that idea is out for now. The other local idea I've been considering is using those things called "water spikes" or "aqua spikes." You attach a 2 liter bottle to a spike and push the spike under the soil. You cut a hole in the bottom (now top) of the bottle to add water, and the water seeps out slowly through the holes in the water spike. I like this idea because you can see how much water you have, and you can see how long it takes to dry up. So, if you can guess the rate of evaporation of the water, you can guess the rate your plant takes in water. I'm sure the changing water pressure in the bottle makes a difference as well. Neat. But the only spikes I can find cost more than I'm willing to pay. I wish I could find them at a real store, instead of online where I can't look at them, and I have to pay to have them shipped.
Making a drip system is my final consideration. This one looked pretty cheap, customizable, and it allows me to buy the parts I need at a store I can physically go to, so I'm going for it for now. I've melted a hole in the bottom of a bucket and attached a 1/4 inch hose adaptor through it. The hose runs to inline drippers that are rated at 1/2 gallon per hour. 1/2 gal. per plant per hour is way too much water for me. My system is not pressurized, so I think that slows the rate some. Also, I've blocked the hose adaptor with a wick, and that's slowed the rate to 3/16 gal. per hour. That means that the rate is currently less than half the standard rating. But I need to make it lower. Before I change any more variables, I need to figure something out. The 1/2 gal. per hour rating is with some water pressure. This means that that's just as fast as water is designed to come out of the dripper. In my situation, my wick has lowered the rate that water can flow through the hose enough to reduce the drip rate. I need to determine if this reduced pressure allows for a new constant rate of several drippers in series, or if the lowered pressure is now the limiting factor in the drip rate, causing a new, slower rate for each additional dripper attached and sharing water pressure.
That question determines my next test. I will measure the rate of several drippers in series. If the pressure changes with each inline dripper I add, then I may already have my ideal water flow rate. For example, if I put 24 plants in series at a shared rate of 3/16 gal/hr, each plant would get 3/16 gal per day. If the bucket I'm using holds about 4 gallons, this could water my plants for a week. It may not be all the water some of the plants need, but they will continue to get water over a period of time. That's what I want. Also, that will really help me when I need to go out of town.
We'll see how it goes.

Graft Update

It's been about 3 weeks since I grafting my twig to my Japanese Maple. I've been really curious about it. So, today I took off the bag misted with fungicide, and I removed the rubber strap that held the junction snugly. The First good news is that my scion didn't just fall off when I did this. Additionally, upon inspection, I noticed that the wood visible in the gash was all a light brown color. It didn't look like a clean cut, but more like it had a layer of glue over it.
So, it looks like it's fusing. This is awesome! If you look carefully at the image, the tips of the sliver of rootstock have turned brown simply because they are no longer in contact with a cambium layer. If the graft had failed at this point, I believe more of the plant would look like that.
The scion in the picture looks much more green than before. Overall it is actually just as red as it was before; I think a lot of the green color is coming from the flash. (The shot was taken from very close up.) Except the side shown does have some green color appearing from the grafted end and moving up. I'm hoping this is a sign of growth returning to the scion. I'd like for it to stay red for the most part. I think it just needs to grow some leaves. :D
I've heard that if you remove the rubber strap too soon, the gash will swell, so for the time being I've replaced it. There still doesn't appear to be any new growth on the grafted scion. That's a true indication of success. However, this is a nice midpoint.

First Attempts

Hi. My name is Michael. I just graduated with a BS in Chemistry. In August I moved to California with my girlfriend. While looking for a new job, I’ve been using a lot of my free time to grow plants. This is a hobby I’ve had for quite some time. I did not have any room to bring plants with me on my cross-country drive, so I’m starting from scratch. Additionally, due to the fact that I am unemployed, I can’t spend much on this hobby. In fact, from this point, I’ve told myself that I won’t spend any more money unless I just have to (scenarios for this include a low cost simple solution to save a dying plant or something awesome being sold for very little). This would explain why I have a table with thirty-something hops cuttings waiting to take root. Plus, if you have hops plants, why not clone them, right?

Lately I’ve been growing a Japanese maple tree. It’s about 4 feet tall (5 with the pot). It’s your standard green leaf variety. I bought it locally for twenty something dollars. I’ve only had it for a couple of months, but it’s doing very well. We have a sunroom in the apartment, so I’ve been successful thus far in tricking all of my plants that it’s still the growing season. This plant is, I think, the second plant I’ve bought since I moved here.

Anyway, I’ve spent some time reading about grafting. This is probably due to the fact that I was looking into plant propagation in general, and I thought it would be really great if I could clone my maple. I do have 6 cuttings of my Japanese maple; so we’ll see how those turn out. Rooting trees is very slow-going. So I tried to sharpen up my concepts of grafting and how it works. It was actually a new discovery for me. You can actually attach similar trees together to form a new tree. So, you could select a proper rootstock and make a few grafts and eventually grow a tree that has lemons, limes, and oranges. I would love to make a tree like that someday.

Recently I got a small twig from a beautiful red laceleaf tree. I was really excited, but I was also nervous because I have never grafted a tree before. I need lots of opportunities to practice grafting, so this was my first chance. Grafting is a difficult skilled task. The main reason that it’s so hard is because you have to match up specific parts of the two trees’ tissue. It’s one of the outermost layers, called the cambium. As I understand it, the cambium layer produces new growth and helps relocate nutrients. A common graft to use with Japanese maples involves slicing back part of the soft green trunk of your rootstock, the adult tree hosting the graft, and inserting the tissue of the scion to be grafted in the cut. The piece of tree that you want to graft is cut into a wedge shape so that it fits snugly. First of all, when performing this type of graft, you have to match up the cambium layers of the two trees so that they may exchange nutrients. If this isn’t done correctly, the grafted scion will quickly dry up and die. Now imagine this thin cylindrical layer in the tree. When you make a cut in the main trunk, you will most definitely cut deeper than the cambium layer. So you have this portion of exposed tree tissue, and a ring of the outer-ish part is what needs to be in contact with your little twig. Like I said, the scion end to be grafted is cut into a wedge shape. This needs precision because you need to expose as much cambium as you can. Obviously the wedge and the cut in the trunk need to be the same size. Now aesthetically thinking, you’d assume to stick the scion parallel to the trunk so that it is pointing upward. But if you imagine those two layers that need to connect, this position would only allow up to two points of contact. So scions are positioned at an angle across the cut. This allows four points of contact, ideally. After everything is positioned as you want it, you have to secure everything in place. If the pieces are large, a small nail or two can be used as part of that process. You can use electrical tape, rubber strips, wax, etc. I cut a rubber band and wrapped it tightly around the graft point of contact. Then I covered the rubber with clear tape to help prevent moisture loss. Finally I got a plastic grocery bag and sprayed the inside with a mild fungicide. I covered the entire graft with this bag and tied it snuggly to the trunk of the host tree. Because my tree stays in the sunroom, I was worried about the inside of the bag getting too hot. So, I cut a tiny hole in the bag and pulled it down over the scion. Finally, I taped the hole closed. I’m hoping that my setup minimizes the water loss at the junction. If everything went well I should see signs of unification in 4 to 8 weeks. I just did this a day or two ago, so it’ll be sometime in November or December. I have some pictures of the tree after everything took place. Thanks to the plastic bag, most of the interesting parts are covered. I may take a picture of the actual graft in the future. I must admit. I’m pretty anxious about the graft. I hope it’s successful. 56 days is a long time to cross your fingers.



On a side note, I think it would be really cool to attract readers interested in trading plants, seeds, cuttings, etc. If it grows, and it’s a cool plant, and you can clone it (huge plus!) then that turns out to be new free plants for everybody. How could you pass that up?