Cascadia Rootings

Cutting - part of a plant cut off. Rooting - part of a plant that was cut or broken and now has roots on it. Which means I can officially call my broken Cascadia petunia fragments... "Cascadia Rootings." Woot!

A couple weeks ago, heavy rain knocked a couple branches off the Cascadia Petunias. I stripped the leaves off the ends of two of them and stuck them in dirt. They were green a long time but eventually one died. So I pulled the other one out of the dirt because it still looked living and dropped it in a dish of water, which is now called the Mini Pond.

The Mini Pond was just a puddle of rainwater in a gardening dish into which I dropped a couple plants that needed care.
Weeks have gone by and I'm still lacking in time/knowledge/terra cotta pots/ice tea/personal backhoe/whatever in order to plant them. So there they stay.

The Mini Pond is turning into a veritable ecosystem. I didn't plan on keeping it more than over night, but so far, three broken petunias and two Jade plants are thriving in it. I accidentally spilled a little soil mixture into the dish so maybe that provides a little nutrition to the plants. The petunias now have tiny roots at their broken ends. Yay! I'll keep them in the dish until the roots are long enough to plant. The whole thing will get dumped if I see one squirmy mosquito larva though.
...thinking...
I suppose I could get a bigger dish and a goldfish to keep the mosquitoes in check...
Hmm, does this mean I'm starting a water garden? In a dish on the picnic table? That's an exciting concept.

Next year, I'm going to buy red Cascadia Petunias as well as white. The red sure does brighten up the deck. You can see a Red Cascadia at the right hand edge of this photo.
Once the patio is finished, we'll have a couple big planters of red and white cascadia petunias along with more geraniums and ferns.

Most exciting is counting SEVEN new buds on the Pat Austin. I can't wait till that one blooms again! I wonder if each successive wave of Pat Austin blooms will increase the number of blooms as the summer progresses? At what point does a rose bush stop making roses? None of the other roses are faring as well as the Pat Austin. The three Fair Baincas have no new buds. The Scepter'd Isle on the deck has a couple tiny new ones. One Scepter'd Isle by the road had lots of buds but I don't know what happened to them. The last Scepter'd Isle by the mailbox is constantly getting munched by the, ahem, deer.

Almost as exciting as seeing new Pat Austin buds is getting a little peek at our first tomato ripening on the plant on the deck.
Sweet!

Na, na, na, na-na. Take that, you ravenous deer. You can't get my tomatoes, green peppers or cucumbers. You can't get my Pat Austin, Scepter'd Isle or Fair Bianca. Ha!