Selecting Carrots For Seed Saving

So the seed saving bug was strong on Sunday after the swap!

Pulled up all my Heritage Seed Library carrots, Red Elephant, today for selection. Some are real beauties!

I laid out the 70 or so carrots and then selected the best 32 of the roots for growing on for seed. I could get away with about 20 but more gives them a bigger genetic pool and prevents inbreeding depression. I would have liked to have selected from a bigger group as well but we've eaten quite a few! 

These will get planted in a bed in the spring, quite close together, to flower and pollinate each other.

This will hopefully give me plenty of seed for next year's swap and to send back to the heritage seed library, as well as leaving me enough to feed our family next year. Believe me when i say we eat a lot of carrots!

Anyone else saving carrot seed this year?

Comfrey As A Weed Barrier

I've posted before about dividing up comfrey and using root cuttings to make new plants and the other night I decided to make another huge number of plants with one purpose in mind. 

Plastic down to suppress weeds. 

The idea is to grow a 4ft strip of comfrey (boking 14) down the side of my garden to create a "weed barrier". The idea being that if these plants are established it'll leave far less room for other plants to take hold (like the nettles that are there now), I'll also under sow the plants with clover as a ground cover. 

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98 root cuttings to make some more plants.

I'm not sure how well this idea will work but it seems like a good idea on the surface. It should stop the buttercups creeping their way back in and with the plastic cover this summer it should get rid of the nettles. 

On top of this I'll be growing a hugely beneficial plant right next to where I need it, I can use it as a mulch, a plant food or to go in the bottom of trenches to grow beans on top of. 

I wanted more comfrey plants and this seems like a good area to plant them.

What do you think? 

Will it work as a weed barrier?

Rooting Hormone From Willow

This is part self sufficiency, part being tight and part forgetting to buy some rooting compound when I went to the garden centre! 

Crack willow

I'd got back from the garden centre with compost, grit and sharp sand and had plans to do lots of cuttings in the afternoon, then I realised I forgot to buy rooting compound, so I decided to make my own and see if it works.

The idea is simple, willow roots so well because of the indolebutyric acid it contains in its branches, this is a plant hormone that simulate root growth. By steeping branches in water this acid, along with Salicylic acid which cuts down on infection into the cuttings, leaches into the liquid. In doing so you create a liquid that can be used as a rooting hormone. 

Well that's the idea at least.

Here's the stages in pictures:

Child labour stripping leaves

I got both of them working!

Stripped branches - leaves for compost.

Cut up small

Boiling water added

The liquid 24 hours later, strained and ready for use

Some of the cuttings - now I have to wait.

To use the liquid I stripped some leaves off each cutting, then cut each to the right length, then left them for ten minutes to soak in the liquid before putting it in a gritty compost mix in my root trainers. After I finished I diluted the remaining liquid and used this to water the cuttings in.

Hopefully the cuttings will root easily and I'll have lots more plants in a few months.

Has anyone else done this and what result have you had?

Grafting Success and Failures

I grafted more fruit trees this year than the year before and I had a fair few more failures.

This years tree nursery - a little weedy maybe...

 The apples did relatively well although I only had a success rate of around 75%, I think this is down to a number of factors: I used some "grafting pliers" for some for the grafts and the majority of these ones failed compared to the ones I did traditionally with a knife. I also stored the scion wood differently, some in the fridge (this all took well) and some in the shed, as it was much more mild than the year before, I don't think the shed was cold enough and so some of the wood wasn't alive enough to be grafted.

One of the many failed cherry grafts

 Some for the other fruit didn't do so well. Only two cherry grafts took and much the same with the plums and pears, although the two apricots I did as an experiment are both doing well. 

A successful graft with apricot wood

In total I've still got over a hundred fruit trees growing in the nursery with successful grafts and the root stocks that had failed grafts on can be used this next spring so no money lost. Next year I will trying budding some trees in the summer (although there never seems time in August) as I think stone fruit like the cherries and plums do better that way.

Has anyone else been propagating fruit trees or tried their hand at grafting?

Temporary Cold Frame For Cuttings

On Thursday I had a bit of a frenzy on taking some cuttings. Trying to increase my stocks of rosemary, sage, bay, blueberries, goji berries and a few others for free. 

Quick fix cold frame

I've no idea if they will all work or if it's the right time for all of them, bay for one I'd imagine would be better in the autumn but it's worth a shot as I'm doing others and had everything set up.

A gritty sandy mix for the cuttings (I mixed up an ericaious one for the blueberries)

Rosemary cutting with the bottom leaves stripped away

Once I'd finished with the cuttings I needed somewhere to keep them. Most books say a plastic bag over the top or a cold frame out of direct sunlight. I decided that a cold frame would be better so I found a few sheets of old corrugated perspex saved from a job and set about building a temporary one on our north facing patio.

All the cuttings under my temporary, quick fix cold frame.

This turned out to be a little bit simple, even for me. I stacked the quarry tiles that I've got saved for when we build the porch and then added one of the sheets on the top and front weighted down with a few more tiles.

Temporary cold frame

Hopefully this should work well, it's easy for me to water them and as it's by the house I should be more inclined to keep an eye on them. One day I'll get round to building some proper cold frames, with brick sides and glass tops, but that's some way off yet!

What else should I be taking cuttings of at the moment? Anyone else built a temporary cold frame like this?