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Saturday, April 03, 2010

Adopted Plants: Chrysanthemums, Sweet Basil, and Lavender

I've just attended another session of Gardener's Anonymous (GA).  This time around, I took pictures of a couple of plants I transplanted into pots yesterday.  All these came from Jean and each had its own story.

Let's start with the funniest one.  In one of our first adventures, we bought mums.   That was about two months ago.  She has a textbook behavior of pruning diseased leaves.  With that, her mums kinda shrank.  But then it recovered!  Enter the bird.  For about two weeks now, the mums' growth has been stunted because a bird kept visiting and snacking on the plant.  In the bird's defense, I figured it was just pruning.  Now I have the mums so that it can grow for a while without being a bird snack.  Let's see what happens.

The lavender is more an accidental adoption.  I was just transplanting her now big lavender to a bigger pot.  Then we noticed that there were a lot of stems coming from the ground.  Could it be?  Could lavender be propagated by root division?  Well I just had to find out. I took two stems with some roots and planted it in my own pots.  Will they live?  We'll see in a week.   And by the way, my quick Google search showed that lavender can indeed be propagated by root division.  The plot thickens...Do check out my other root division adventures.  I did my Mums and my Oregano Thyme successfully.

Finally, there's the Sweet Basil.  As you know, I already successfully propagated my Cinnamon Basil.   But I didn't have a Sweet Basil yet and that's what you use when cooking pesto.  If you can see from the picture, there's one tiny stem and two leaves planted.  Turns out, the pruning casualties (the leaves) can grow roots!  I wasn't able to take pictures, but the roots were longer than the leaves!  So that's not one plant that you see, but three different ones!  I hope they survive the transplant into a soil medium.  Watch out for it...





8 comments:

  1. Thanks for your comment on my Herb garden post! I'd love to share tid bits! any help would be awesome.
    Have a good one!

    I know about the mouse, just can't seem to get rid of him! :)

    http://dinedevour.blogspot.com/2010/03/herb-gardening-com.html

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  2. He might end up eating all your herbs!

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  3. Hmmm sweet basil and then lavender... bango!

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  4. Thanks for you comment on my blog. I love basil and grow lots of it every summer. Cinnamon basil sounds so delicious!

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  5. Vera, the Malvarosa smells good too.

    Hi Pat & Mille. Thanks for visiting. The Cinnamon Basil tea I actually did was a little bland. I think I used too little leaves.

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  6. Hi, Thanks for visiting my blog. I'll be interested to hear how your lavender root divisions do. I've only tried propagating by cuttings and then with mixed results. My lavender plants didn't do well this winter--I may end up having to replace them. But first I'll try cutting them back some more and see what happens.

    Claire

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  7. Thanks for visiting my blog, as sparse and uninteresting as it is! I love all your little experiments. I, for one, have had been horrible so far with the dividing/propagating, so this blog couldn't have come at a better time! I'm excited to see how the lavender experiment goes!

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  8. Thanks for dropping by guys. I'll make sure to take lots of Lavender pictures in the coming weeks.

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