Thread by @UrsulaV

It’s New Glove Day! I wanted to take a glamour shot for the eleven seconds they were pristine.

It’s supposed to get cold tomorrow night. It maaaaay not be cold enough to kill some of my weird new salvias, but then again, it may. So I’m taking cuttings of the ones that have thrived, just in case, and will grow them out under lights in the garage.

A couple will come into the garage in containers once it gets Really Truly Cold, but I gotta get the cuttings before the leaves drop, which the cold snap might cause even if the roots are fine.

The garden is no longer a Wild Green Rumpus, but has settled a bit, as the pine needles dropped during the windstorm and carpeted everything with burnt sienna.

Still color, though! These are the ragged remains of the Tithonia, an annual I grow every year because they’re just so tough and fabulous.

Still feeding pollinators, too!

I desperately love lantana, which is a terrible plant for people like me to love because it is extremely invasive in warmer climates. So I am very careful to only grow reliably sterile cultivars, like Miss Huff here.

(For hardy lantana, that is. Annual lantana drops dead in winter here, so is safe for a few more decades, until our zones have shifted completely.)

The problem is that growers will happily tell you a lantana is self-sterile but neglect to mention that in the presence of another cultivar, they’ll set fruit. This gorgeous low-growing variety is everything I wanted, but dammit, it’s getting sexed up by Miss Huff.

(Miss Huff won’t set fruit, but is a cause of fruit in others, let us say.)

So, alas, if it overwinters, it’s getting pulled out. Which sucks, because it’s lovely and tough and all, but I’m not gonna run the risk of spreading a hardy invasive, even one that I love.

But on the native front, delighted that my climbing asters have established nicely! These are weak climbers but vigorous growers, and do fantastic threaded through a trellis. I planted one on each side and one’s even getting ready to flower!

Rather more earthbound aster is blooming out front. These plants are probably on their way out because they’re getting smothered by some taller stuff, but a few poke through a bloom and as long as they do, they get another year.

Right, enough blather! Time for cuttings!

Rare salvias are one of my great passions, and I really hope this weirdo overwinters for me, but it’s worth stacking the deck to be sure.

For those asking, this glorious weirdo is S. involucrata! anniesannuals.com/plants/view/?i…

Okay! Cuttings taken and assembled. I used to think cuttings were some weird mystic Real Gardener thing that I couldn’t do, until I watched Gardener’s World and @TheMontyDon did a whole segment on it and it seemed...easy?

So I took a couple from a plant I was pruning anyway, and they took! They were real plants with roots! So I took more, because it couldn’t be that easy and next thing I knew, I was hip deep in cuttings!

Anyway, there’s lots of guides online, but the best trick I learned from Monty Don was to put the cuttings down along the sides of the pot, not in the middle, as was intuitive. For some reason, plants seem to really like that.

Why? Nobody knows! Maybe it’s warmer! Maybe it’s an airflow thing! Maybe it’s magic!

Anyway, that’s one major garden chore done. I’m gonna go kick back and play video games.