One of the joys of getting a bit older is having the time to putter around in the garden. Below is my garden blog. This site also contains sections of recipes and features about specific, and often obscure, gardening lore.

Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - Shopping Guides Rerun

I ran this posting last month, but in this shopping season, I thought I'd run it again.

I updated our garden shopping guides last night. The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners shown at left was the first I put together as a gift guide for non-gardeners shopping for gardeners. It mostly has items that could easily be wrapped and put under a Christmas tree or even fit in a Christmas stocking. Well, I'm not sure the garden cart, Garden Tower, or a rain barrel meet the criterion of being wrapped and fitting under a Christmas Tree.

After doing the gift guide, I realized that there were lots of basic gardening items I'd omitted from the guide. So I wrote a general Shopping Guide for Gardeners. As usual, I advise new gardeners to start small even with garden tools. "If you're going to garden, there are a few basic tools you'll want and need. Think shovel, garden hoe, rake, and a trowel to start with. You might be able to get by with just the first three." I do go on to list lots of garden tools a gardener might eventually want and/or need. In a section I mentally named shoulder wreckers, I added a post driver to the section about post hole diggers.

I'll add here that such pages fall under the FTC's Required Disclosure Statement (shown at right). In actuality, the pages don't produce many sales and commissions for us. Experienced gardeners often wisely insist on being able to hold a tool before making a purchase.

As you might guess, we have a considerable investment wrapped up in gardening stuff. It's important to remember that we acquired these things over fifty years of gardening.

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

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With winter setting in, December is a slow month in our Senior Garden. Fall chores will continue to get done outside as the weather permits.

I moved the last of our gloxinias from our dining room table to under our plant lights downstairs today. As the plants fade, they get trimmed down to the corm and set on a dark shelf for their required period of dormancy. But...I also repotted one gloxinia plant that had emerged from dormancy, moving it under our grow lights.

One important job this month will be ordering garden seed for next season. I stayed up late last night working on our seed orders. We don't need as much new seed as we did last year, but have some holes to fill. One of the holes is for Walla Walla sweet onion seed. Our seed this year, although supposedly fresh, didn't germinate well. And I've noticed that a lot of seed vendors are currently sold out of that variety. If you've perused seed vendors online sites recently, you may have found that they aren't showing replenishment of many vegetable seed varieties they sold out of last season.

Although it may be a bit early, I took a first set of cuttings from our rather glorious Wandering Jew plant today. We've had a Wandering Jew plant in our kitchen window for ten or twelve years. It's not the same plant, but a succession of cuttings have kept the line alive. Wandering Jew plants are only good for about twelve to eighteen months. So every winter, I take cuttings for the next generation of plants.

Our first Wandering Jew plant was a gift from Samantha Eads, one of our daughters. She now has her own plants that we gave her from cuttings from one of our plants.

Rooting Wandering Jew cuttings is pretty easy. You just snip about four to six inches off the end of a stem. You can root the stems in water or treat them with rooting gel and root them in sterile potting mix. We usually do a bit of both, although today's cuttings just went into a glass of water on our windowsill. They replaced the peanut butter jar of plastic plant labels getting cleared in a bleach water solution. Obviously, Tux, the cat on the windowsill, is semi-permanent.

Towards the end of this month, I may start our egg carton petunias for hanging baskets and some onion transplants. The petunias need to be ready to go outside in April. And some onions such as our sweet Walla Wallas, take a bit longer to mature than our other onion varieties.

And wow! I really need to clean those kitchen windows!

Required FTC Disclosure Statement: Botanical Interests, Burpee, and True Leaf Market are some of our Senior Gardening affiliate advertisers. Clicking through one of our ads or text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. We're also a consumer member of the Fedco Seeds Cooperative.

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