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Gardener’s Log – February 2021

February 2^nd

It has been a wild day today. Sun, wind, rain, hail, rainbows – a little bit of everything. It is amazing watching some of these storms out at sea and how they move and the light moves with them. Added a new plant to the collection today – Dietes Iridoides – common names include African Iris (it is isn’t an Iris, although in the same family in which Iris exists) and Fortnight lily (which it also isn’t) The ‘fortnight’ comes from flushes of blooms every 2 weeks and could potentially be blooming from sprint through winter if it remains mild enough. It is just a bunch of grass-like leaves at the moment, but will probably put it between the giant Allium bulbs.

February 11^th

Today is not only my birthday, but also the start of a plant adventure. We have 100% remained in place during COVID, but we decided we needed to get away for a few days, so long as we could do it safely. So, the plan is that we are doing a road trip down to California to visit a couple of places that are important to me and my gardening journey. Today, we start the journey and get down to Bandon just as the coldest weather in years is about to hit Portland. Then on Friday we drive the rest of the way down to Santa Cruz.

February 13th

The first stop is University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum. This is the main port in which many plants come from Australia to be tried out in the California market. The range of plants they have in their arboretum is drool worthy. It will be the first time I have seen many of these plants in mature form. They also have an extensive propagation program, and the car is going to be loaded to the gills with plants to bring home.

February 14^th

The second stop is the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. While they do have a few Australian and South African plants, the focus here is on succulents – Agave, Aloe, Euphorbia and more. It was the work of one woman, but now is a public garden. More plants were acquired from here.

Following this was a visit to Annie’s Annuals and Perennials in Richmond. Annie’s like to specialize in the unusual, trying out plants that are slightly different to what you may find in the big box stores. We have ordered from them on-line in the past, but it was fun to look around and be able to pick out our own plants rather than row run selection.

February 21^st

The last few days has been a crazy effort to try and get as many of the new plants organized, categorized, documented and put up on the website. Priority has been given to those that we had pictures of mature plants from the Arboretum. This is also something that I need to go back and fill in photos for plants that were already posted.

Several things have been potted up in the greenhouse. In the last couple of days I have potted up 4 Grevillea ‘Molonglo’ and 11 Leucadendron galpinii that were rooted cuttings and Protea and Leucospermum that have been grown from seed. Continue to have aphid problems in the greenhouse. Each day I am checking carefully, water blasting or squishing as many as I can find. A few things that seemed to be attracting them have been moved out of the greenhouse.

Weather Report

February this year was a little colder than last year and 2″ wetter. Last year started off the month wet and then became quite dry by the end of the month. This year saw more rainfall later. The winds were also a lot higher this year, but luckily none of the plants saw much in the way of damage.

General

Breaking Seed Dormancy

Getting seeds to germinate can be as simple as showing them some soil and moisture, waiting for a couple of days and seeing fresh green sprouts. But not all seeds are this easy. Many seeds in the Protea family, for example, have specific needs that have to be met to break their dormancy. This includes subjecting them to smoke. Others require scarification, or having the outer coating of the seed removed. Some want to be soaked in water. The list of special treatments is almost endless, with many seeds requiring more than one type of treatment.

You may be wondering why I am writing about seeds and germination right before winter sets in and not in spring. Well, many of the plants that interest me do sprout in the fall. This gives them the best chance to get established over mild winters, put on a lot of growth in spring and then prepare for the harshness of summer. Plants need to have built up a good strong root system if they are going to survive months without appreciable water during the summer drought.

Find Help

I have acquired a couple of seeds recently where there are no serious suggestions for germination. One offered – we don’t know how to break their dormancy, so we suggest you buy thousands of seed in the hope that one or two may do something, sometime. They also added that it may take a few years. Another seed had the suggestion that putting it in Emu dung may help. Fat chance of me finding much Emu dung laying around in Oregon!

In both of these cases, it is not that they would be problematic in the wild. Seeds have dormancy triggers for very specific reasons. They make sure that when they do germinate, they have the best possible chance of survival. Perhaps Emu dung is a good idea. Perhaps it indicates to the seed that it has a supply of food, and that there is something specific about Emu dung that sends a chemical trigger. There are some seeds that require a particular animal or bird to have eaten it. As it passes through their digestive system, the acid probably gets rid of the outer coating and it is delivered with a food source.

Many times, we don’t understand the triggers, or have to find ways to make the seed think it has been eaten. For many years, it was thought that the Proteas needed fire, only to learn that it was in fact chemicals from smoke that triggered them. People are still not certain what chemical it is, and different plants do want smoke from different things being burned.

Experimentation

When starting plants from seeds, these are some of the challenges that we face. We basically have to conduct small experiments to try and find out what works and what doesn’t. Whenever I try seeds that are new to me, I tend to divide them up into several batches. This assumes I have enough seed. Then I can do things slightly differently for each, such as putting some of them on bottom heat or not. I may subject some to wider temperature swings by leaving them outside.

There are some other tricks that you learn along the way. For example, if a seed has a shiny, tough coat, it will not absorb water and thus the chance of success is very low in the short term. It is possible that if left long enough, that coating will break down, but that could take years. So, scarification can help. I have also been using hydrogen peroxide treatments more recently. It can really soften up a hard coating. A 1% solution for 24 hours seems to do the trick.

Another trick, especially for seeds that I expect to be slow in germination, is the use of fungicides. I have been trying two different techniques. The first is to dust the seeds in a powdered fungicide. The second is to water the plants in a liquid fungicide. The former is better when first planting the seeds. The latter really helps stop the onset of liverworts when germination takes a long time or the seeds are under mist.

Better Documentation

Both techniques are helping. I would often see dark patches forming in my nursery pots where a seed had been. Those had basically been attacked by mold. There is a lot less of that now. Results of my germination experiments will be included on the plant pages going forward, but not all of my previous attempts were properly documented.

Recommended Products

General

Seed Starting

When talking about starting seeds, most people think about spring. For annuals and vegetables that will always be true, but most people do that for perennials, trees and shrubs as well. That is because winter is considered the worst season for most plants here in the US.

Starting seed in spring means improving temperatures and longer day length. The plants will get plenty of good growth on them before they have to get through their first winter. Many of them will go dormant during this period, a defense mechanism against the cold and snow.

But what about plants from the southern hemisphere? And more specifically what about plants from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand? Those countries are the host for many of the plants that I am bringing into my garden and they very much enjoy our modified Mediterranean climate. That means dry summers. I know – you are thinking – but that is not true on the Oregon Coast. Yup. We go into drought conditions and since we are sitting on very sandy soil, the ground does not have one iota of moisture in it for a couple of months.

A true Mediterranean climate would also mean hot temperatures, but our temps are constantly modified by the ocean. We may get the odd day or two when we get about 80, but that is not common. Compare that to most of the US where summers are hot and humid. That would kill Mediterranean plants. This is one of the reasons why we see so few of these plants made available in this country. Most of the country cannot grow them and thus the major plant growers are not interested in stocking them or breeding new improved versions of them.

What I do not yet know is if our dry but cool summer conditions will enable me to grow and get many of these to bloom. That is why I am trying many different species to start with.

For these plants, summer is the harshest season and the ones that the plants have to prepare for. The best time to sow their seeds is right after the autumn rains start. Then they have the longest opportunity for putting on lots of growth, and most importantly root development before the dry heat of summer comes around. This is also why many of these plants bloom in the winter or early spring.

I did get a late start on my seed planting in 2019. My greenhouse exterior was finished in October 2019 but I still had to build the benches and the heated propagation bench. Also, my contractor is hard to pin down on when he will get to you, so I was reluctant to get too much seed in, just in case construction finished up being in the following spring.

Getting seed from the southern hemisphere does put me at a slight disadvantage in that it means I am buying 6 month old seeds and many of the choice seeds had already sold out. For 2020, the plan was to buy early and keep them in the fridge waiting for the right time to sow them.

I started sowing seed through November and December. Then I got a bunch more in the early part of the year with the expectation that I would have mixed success. For the 2019/2020 sowing season, I started 80 different species. Now you know why I needed a greenhouse and I could already use a greenhouse extension!

I will be creating pages for each of the seeds I have sown so that I can track their progress. Plus, I will take pictures along the way to see how they develop. Some have not germinated, which is almost to be expected because I am buying seed out of season. I have had pretty good success given that this is my first attempt at growing these plants which do have very specific dormancy mechanisms.

Many of these seeds remain dormant until a fire sweeps through the area. That means they would have less competition from established plants, there are more nutrients available, and nothing to shade them. Then they wait for the rains. They used to think it was the fire that broke seed dormancy, but more recently (and we are only talking 20/30 years here) they realized that it is actually the smoke. Certain chemicals in the smoke, get dissolved in water, that is carried down to the seed, and this breaks the dormancy.

Clearly, I cannot set fires in the greenhouse every time I plant a seed, and not all smoke will break the dormancy of every plant. They are still experimenting with what the specific requirements are for the smoke. Smoke from burning some plants does not work while it does for others. I import my smoke from South Africa and Australia – I kid you not. It has been captured on litmus paper or in vermiculite. When watered, the chemicals are released, and germination can start.

So, it is April and now is the time that all of the new seed is available. Unfortunately, most of it is now not accessible to me. COVID-19 has shut down many nursery operations, or governments are ruling them to be closed, or some are saying that there is no reliable air mail service and thus they cannot ensure seed viability when the journey could take a couple of months. But I have managed to find a few sites still open and willing to attempt to get seeds to me. We shall see.

Calendar

January 2020

After a very dry period from October through December, January became a catch-up month when it comes to rain. With just a few hours left to go, we have recorded a hair over 20 inches of rain for the month and that misses a couple of hours of rain one night when power was lost.

Back at the end of October 2019, the interior of the greenhouse was still coming together, but as soon as the propagation bench was in and operating, I couldn’t resist taking some cuttings. I scoured the garden for anything that looked like reasonable semi-hardware material and prepared some Lavender Silver Anouk, Grevillea Pink Lady and Neil Bell, Callistemon Dark Red, Woodlander’s Hardy Red and Veridis, plus a few other things like some fuchsias that I wanted for baskets next year. With all of the cuttings I used a rooting gel in a peat/perlite mix. Did some wounding on the stems.

While they had bottom heat, the mist system was still not installed, so they got daily misting and a transparent storage box placed over them to keep as much humidity around them as I could.

So far, the Lavenders have rooted with 100% success and are potted up. Yesterday I did the Callistemon Woodlander’s Hardy Red and they were 100% as well. Today I potted up the Pink Lady Grevillea and was very pleased to have 5 out of 7 cuttings rooted. This is plant that the nursery I originally bought it from has had difficulty with over the past year and they didn’t get many of their cuttings to set. It still remains to be seen if I lose any from the transplanting and they will need one more potting up then before they would be planting size, but I love that they have some new growth buds on them already.

There are signs of rooting in the other Grevillea and Callistemon as well, but will leave them a little bit longer before potting those up. To say I am pretty pleased in an understatement.

1/14 Temperatures have dipped to almost freezing (the low was 33.6 at just after 9am this morning). We have had rain, sleet, snow and hail. It has been cloudy and sunny. We have had a rainbow, and a wind gust up to 38 mph. All in all, an interesting day this is certainly not normal for these parts.

I built and installed a mist system in the latter half of this month. While It isn’t really necessary at this time of year, I wanted to get it up and running so that the greenhouse is somewhat self sufficient while we are away for a week in February. I had all of the bits, but needed to connect the water supply up to the greenhouse and get it built. One thing I learned is that with the recirculation fan running, a lot of the mist gets blown away from where it is necessary, so I need to install another relay to turn off the fan while the misters are operating. I think that should do the trick. The relay has arrived, but I have been hobbling around a bit for the past week, so it hasn’t been done yet.

Seeds

There are lots of seeds popping up this month. There are signs of life from Arisaema ciliatum (Cobra Lily), just today, the first Banksia baueri poked through (Possum Banksia), Banksia spinulosa (Birthday Candles), Crassula coccinea, Fuchsia procumbens (Creeping Fuchsia), Grevillea eriostachya – another one showed itself just today (Flame of Orange Grevillea), Grevillea nudiflora, Hakea francisiana (Red Spike Hakea), Leptospermum scoparium (New Zealand Tea Tree), Leucadendron discolor, Leucadendron salignum, Protea scolymocephalon -yet another new one for today, Protea venusta, Watsonia meriana var Bulbillifera (Bugle Lily) and Watsonia borbonica (also know as Bugle Lily).

Plants

One by one the Hellobores have been bursting into bloom this month. It started with Winter’s Song, that actually started to bloom in the last week of December, and now the others are either in bloom, or the buds are opening up. The unknown white heather has been a mass of blossoms all month and Grevillea Neil Bell has been providing sporadic flowers all month. Grevillea Pink Lady is full of buds and that will be a mass of bloom before long. The Camellia (Nuccio’s Pearl) is getting ready to open.

The Weather

	High	Low	Average
Temperature	63.0 F	33.3 F	46.5 F
Dew Point	54.9 F	26.4 F	44.8 F
Humidity	99 %	28 %	94 %
Precipitation	20.02 in	—	—
Wind Speed	38.3 mph	0.0 mph	3.6 mph
Wind Gust	54.8 mph	—	5.3 mph
Wind Direction	—	—	SSE
Pressure	30.27 in	29.19 in	—

General

Seed Starting

When talking about starting seeds, most people immediately think about spring. For annuals that will always be true, but most people also do that for perennials, trees and shrubs as well. That is because winter is considered the worst season for most of the USA, and starting seed in spring means improving temperatures and longer day length. The plants will get plenty of good growth on them before they have to get through their first winter.

Gardener’s Log – February 2021

February 2nd

February 11th

February 13th

February 14th

February 21st

Weather Report

Breaking Seed Dormancy

Find Help

Experimentation

Better Documentation

Recommended Products

Seed Starting

January 2020

Seeds

Plants

The Weather

Seed Starting

February 2^nd

February 11^th

February 14^th

February 21^st