Hello and welcome to The Compost Bin. I'm Compostwoman and I live with my family in rural Herefordshire. We have nearly four acres of garden and woodland, all managed organically and to Permaculture principles, which we share with Chickens, Cats and assorted wildlife. We also grow a lot of our own food, run courses in all sorts of things and make a lot of compost!

I am a Master Composter and have spent more than a decade as a volunteer Community Compost adviser with Garden Organic and my local Council.
I'm a self employed Environmental Educator so I run workshops and events where I talk about compost, veg growing, chicken keeping, cooking, preserving and sustainable living. I also run crafts workshops and Forest School/outdoor play sessions in our wood.

We try to live a more self sufficient lifestyle here, as best we can, while still having a comfortable life and lots of fun.


To learn more about us click on the About Compostwoman tab and remember to click on the photos to make them full size!


Monday, 15 July 2013

Taking cuttings

One of the things I love to do is grow plants for free. I have a lot of different herbaceous perennials in the garden and I love taking cuttings and saving seeds. I get a real thrill when I see that a little cutting has rooted and grown :-) or that some free seeds have come up :-)

One of the ways I find easiest is to take soft cuttings and put them in water until I see roots forming and then pot them into growing medium. I do this with all sorts of plants, Basil, Lavender, Rosemary are the ones I have been planting out recently but I have many jars full of cuttings on the go at the moment.



I take the cuttings ( well quite often they are "tearings" as I just pull bits off the plant ) and put them into water  label them and keep them somewhere not to hot and not too sunny.


This is a jar full of Lavender and Rosemary cuttings which I made on 30 April 2013


Can you see how well they have grown roots?


Lovely strong healthy liittle plants


I potted these on into multipurpose Fertile Fibre growing medium


Here is a video I took of me doing it :-) I love my outdoor potting bench



 and I now have 10 Lavender and 3 Rosemary plants growing well











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4 comments:

  1. tpals19 July 2013 at 10:10

    Nice. I'll have to try this with my rosemary.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Compostwoman19 July 2013 at 10:19

      As long as the stem is green and soft it should work - and you need to have some leaf nodes on the stem for the roots to form from

      I want a lavender hedge around a herb bed so am taking loads of lavender cuttings at the moment!

      Delete
  2. Kev Alviti21 July 2013 at 22:24

    I took loads of lavander cuttings last year but this way looks easier. I might have to try this, thanks for the tip!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Compostwoman30 July 2013 at 00:31

      It works best in Spring, Kev but should work any time as long as the cutting is softwood.

      Delete

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