Different Ways of Growing Plants

Today at Garden Club Clare had us thinking about the different ways we can make new plants. Planting seeds is an obvious one, and based on what we learned from Tess a few weeks ago we saved some ‘wet’ seeds of lemon, apple and capsicum, by taking the seeds from the fruit and putting them in jars of water to soak for a few days. We will check on these next week.

Another way of making new plants is by taking cuttings. Clare showed us how to take cuttings from a hebe which is going to be removed to make way for our school’s new front garden. We put the cuttings, which were just little branchlets we cut off from the main plant, into potting mix and watered them. We’ll keep them in a warm, sheltered place over winter (hopefully our new greenhouse) and with luck some of them will start to take root. By growing new plants from cuttings we’ll be able to replace the original hebe plus make a few more plants for free! Hebes are a great food source for our birds, bees and insects especially over winter when there aren’t many other flowers around, so they are a plant we really want to encourage in our school environment.

We also got our nectar feeders up into the trees, supervised by our local tui. Mr Rieger put one up right by our garden beds and the others went into the nearby trees. It will be interesting to see whether the tui start using them over the next few days – they were definitely very curious about them.

Not sure that’s an approved ladder there, Mr Rieger.