Starting cannas from seed

Cannas produce copious amounts of seeds that are rounded, dark brown to black in color, and heavy enough to sink in water. Since they resemble shotgun pellets (and could possibly be used as that, considering how hard they are), cannas are sometimes called “Indian shot”.

Canna seeds have a very tough protective coat, presumably to allow them to survive until the next rainy season arrives. To speed up germination, various methods have been proposed. They all involve cutting, clipping, or nicking the seed coat—a method called scarification in horticultural jargon. This allows water to penetrate the seed in order to trigger germination.

After trying various techniques involving nail clippers and emery boards, I’ve settled on the following procedure. I’ve used it successfully in past years to germinate several species of canna. This year I’m trying it on the banana canna (Canna musifolia), one of the tallest species (up to 8 ft.) with possibly the largest leaves of any in this genus. In fact, the leaves strongly resemble bananas, hence the common name.

Just a few of the canna seeds I collected last fall.

Step 1: Nick the seed coat using a Dremel rotary tool. After trying a nail, ice pick, nail clipper, etc., I decided to switch to a Dremel (which we use to file down the dog’s nails) because the seed coat really
is that hard to penetrate.
 

Nicked seed coat—I probably took off a bit too much;
just a tiny nick is needed

Step 2: Put the nicked seeds in a glass of warm water (almost hot) for 48 hours. Replace the water twice a day so it doesn’t go sour.
 

Step 3: Stick the seeds in growing medium and keep it moist
(but not soggy). Keep in a relatively warm place with direct light. The experts call for 70-75°F, but it’s never that warm in our house and it doesn’t seem to matter too much.

Everybody has their own preferred seed growing medium and technique, so by all means, use what works for you. I simply stuck my seeds in small cactus pots filled with a coarse potting mix. I keep it moist by spraying it with a spray bottle. You should see growth in as little as 5 days.

Here are some cannas in our front yard, in the back behind the banana (left), lemon tree (middle) and bamboo (right). Their leaves add a tropical flair, and their flowers are hummingbird magnets.

 

 

Gully washers

The series of winter storms that has been thrashing us all week with on-again, off-again rain and at times gale-force winds came to a head on Thursday with torrential downpours—veritable gully washers.

Like many gardeners I’m obsessed with the weather. Even after 4¾ decades on earth I’m still in awe of the forces of nature, and I could watch the Weather Channel all day long if they didn’t have that stupid background music and so many commercials.

Here are some photos I took during the height of the rain earlier in the day. These photos aren’t really about anything, but hopefully they convey a little of the spectacle I was witnessing.

I love watching the sheets of rain being driven down the street.

Our three bambusas in the front yard. They love the rain!

View from the front door. I didn’t step out any further!

15-gallon Bambusa mutabilis blown over by the wind. I’ll tie it to the fence so it stays upright, otherwise the roots don’t get any water.

My temporary cactus shelter
is holding up well!

That’s what happens when your gutter is clogged. Many of the leaves from our formerly mistletoe-infested Bradford pear tree land on the front porch roof. The squirrels must have knocked off some of the gutter guard sections so leaves ended up in the gutter.

View of the woodland garden in the back yard from the dining room. I love standing by this window, looking out at the rain.

Taken through the wet window,
this photo has an almost impressionistic feel.

Our trusty red wagon deserves better than being left in the rain, but since it’s old, it just doesn’t get any respect.

Agaves in the rain

After seeing my post on my temporary rain shelter for cacti, a reader asked what I do to protect my agaves. The short answer is: nothing. However, things are never as simple as they seem, so here is some background information.

About half of our agaves are planted in the ground in mounded beds. This ensures that the crown and most of root system are above grade so water can drain freely. The soil in our mounded beds is heavily amended with pea gravel, sharp sand and crushed pumice. Even if these beds get a good soaking, there is never any standing water that might lead to rot.

Agave filifera subsp. schidigera (left), Agave desmettiana ‘Variegata’ (center top), and Aloe striata (right). The highest parts of this mounded bed are close to 2 ft above grade.

Agave ‘Blue Glow’ (left) and Agave victoriae-reginae (right) hiding under the leaves of a ponytail palm (Beaucarnea recurvata)

Same two agaves from a lower perspective.
Even though it may not look like much, the overhanging leaves do provide shelter from the rain, cold and sun.

Agave vilmoriniana in the driveway-side succulent bed. While not planted on top of the mound, it’s still sufficiently raised to ensure good drainage.

Some of our potted agaves are out in the open year round. The key to preventing rot caused by too much water is to make sure they are in the right container size. As you can see in the photo below, both the Aloe marlothii on the left and the Agave americana 'Mediopicta Aurea’ on the right fill their pots so there is no excess of soil that would get saturated in a downpour and stay wet for an extended period of time.

Potted Aloe marlothii (left) and
Agave americana 'Mediopicta Aurea’ (right )

Other potted agaves are on the edge of our front porch where they are protected by the roof overhead. If rain is accompanied by strong winds—as was the case this morning—they do get a bit wet but since the potting soil is loose and free draining, that doesn’t really matter.

 

I have yet to loose an agave to rot caused by excess water, which leads me to believe that they are far more water-tolerant than other succulents, especially cacti and some aloes. If I lived in a climate that gets more than 30 inches of rain a year I would be more concerned, but here in the Central Valley where we get a mere 20 inches, there’s no reason to be excessively worried.

Note: For a post on protecting tender succulents from frost, click here.

A visit to the Mexican jungle

No, I didn’t go myself—I wish I could. Instead I did the next best thing: I watched a travelogue of somebody else’s trip.

A few weeks ago, fellow bloggers Mark and Gaz at Alternative Eden posted a list of their favorite garden DVDs. It’s an impressive list with lots of DVDs that sounded interesting to me. Unfortunately, most of them are only available in the U.K. That’s a real shame, considering what a large market the U.S. and Canada are.

One of these titles was particularly intriguing: Around the World in 80 Gardens, by British TV gardening personality Monty Don. I ordered the DVD set from Amazon UK, and it finally arrived.

Monty Don’s visit to the surreal gardens of Las Pozas near Xilitla, Mexico

Monty Don’s visit to the surreal gardens of Las Pozas near Xilitla, Mexico

If you watched the introduction to Around the World in 80 Gardens above, you heard Monty talk about his own reassessment of what a garden is and whether it even needs plants. The gardens at Las Pozas are certainly full of vegetation—in fact, a staff of 50 is busy keeping the jungle at bay—but plants aren’t the focus of the garden. That’s a concept that is pretty unfamiliar to most of us who fill our gardens with plants, but it’s an intriguing one, not so far removed from Japanese Zen gardens which often consist of little but sand and rocks.

I can’t wait to watch more episodes of this one-of-a-kind project. Click here to see a list of episodes available on YouTube.

If you speak Spanish and are interested in learning more about Edward James and Las Pozas, this is a great video. Fondo Xilitla, the official website for Las Pozas, has a wealth of information as well (in English and Spanish).

Rain shelter for cacti

After a few weeks of truly beautiful early-spring weather, we’re in for a week of rain and periods of high winds with gusts of up to 40 mph.

The rain is much needed because our precipitation totals for the season have fallen below normal now—we had a wet December with above-average precipitation, but January and February have been very dry. Since inland California typically doesn’t get any rain between May and October, now is the time when we build up our water supply.

While rain is good news for California and almost everything we grow, cacti and other succulents prefer to be dry in winter. A little rain doesn’t hurt, but extended exposure can lead to rot, which in turn can spell the demise of the plant.

Just a few few weeks ago I blogged about how Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek protects its sensitive succulents from the winter rain. In our garden, I’ve never done anything in particular to protect the plants in our raised succulent beds from the rain because these beds contain mostly agaves, aloes, yuccas, echeverias and senecios—no cacti, which are generally more sensitive to overwatering and don’t like to be wet at all during their winter dormancy.

However, now that I’m the proud owner of a budding cactus empire, I’m more aware of how detrimental too much winter rain can be. Next fall we will build a more permanent (and visually attractive) solution to protect our succulent display table. For this week’s bad weather I quickly threw together a temporary shelter consisting of a plastic sheet that I found in the garage, and an assortment of rocks and bricks to weight it down on top of the fence. I’ve been keeping an eye on it all day to see how it handles strong gusts, and so far so good.

I wonder what the neighbors will think???

I should mention that I moved the taller columnar cacti from the display table to the front porch before I put up the tarp—I didn’t want them to get damaged by the billowing plastic.

High-tech way of making sure the tarp doesn’t fly off

Yes, I agree, my makeshift shelter isn’t the most beautiful thing, but it should do the trick.

How does that old saying go? Necessity is the mother of all invention? Well, in spite of the necessity, I’m not much of an inventor—just a gardener who typically flies by the seats of his pants.

Tropical trimming

This past weekend I was busy cutting down most of our tropical plants that had gone dormant for the winter. I like to keep the dried up foliage through early spring because it provides extra protection for the crown of the plant, or its rhizomes or corms, depending what it is. However, spring is here so it decided it was time to trim the tropicals. (I probably just cursed ourselves, saying that spring has arrived.)

Our tropical bed before I cleaned it up. It’s located on the south side of our house where the front yard meets up with the back yard (that’s the fence you see on the left in the photo). It’s a small space, and it went unused for many years until we built an L-shape raised bed specifically for large-leaved tropicals such as a gingers (alpinias, hedychiums, curcumas) and elephant ears (both colocasias and alocasias), with some trailing plants like creeping wire vine and tradescantia thrown in for good measure.
 

This bed gets buried under the leaves from two ornamental pear trees, an Aristocrat in our back yard, and a Bradford in the front yard. Leaves make great compost so I left most of them. I added a bag of composted chicken manure and then about four inches of topsoil left over from another project because the soil level in the raised beds had dropped quite significantly over the last couple of years.

This is what it looks like now, after removing the dead foliage and topping off the soil.
 

Guess what I found under all those leaves? The butterfly gingers (Hedychium coronarium) are already budding out.
 

Just to give you an idea of what this area looks like in the summer: this is our tropical bed last July (the nice lady is my mom).

Silent Sunday

Happy Sunday, everybody. No blog post today but I’ll be back tomorrow.

Death of a century plant

The century plant (Agave americana) is the most common and one of the largest agave species. A fast grower and prolific producer of suckers, it forms huge colonies over time. In California’s Central Valley where I live, it’s frequently seen at the entrance to rural properties, or lining fences. With its vicious end spines and serrated leaf margins, it truly makes a formidable barrier.

On our way to the closest Costco warehouse we drive by a large century plant colony. I’ve been meaning to photograph it for many years, but I didn’t get around to it until this week. These photos aren’t beauty shots, but they illustrate the aftermath of some of the rosettes flowering. Most agave species are monocarpic, meaning they will die after they flower. While this sounds like a tragic event, it really isn’t: a) It takes many years, sometimes decades, for an agave to flower, and b) most produce a generous amounts of offsets, or suckers, before they do die.

When a small agave that is, say, one or two feet across dies, removing it from your garden is a relatively easy task, spines notwithstanding. However, imagine what happens when one of the giant species kicks the bucket, for example the ubiquitous century plant! The photos below give you a pretty good idea. As you look at them, keep in mind that the colony in these pictures is easily 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. The rosettes that died likely were 7-8 feet tall, and the flower stalk they produced (the things that look like tree trunks) a good 25 feet high. Now think of what’s involved removing the dead plants, full of protrusions and edges that are sharp as a knife. Yikes!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love agaves, but the common century plant is so huge and hostile that I would never consider planting it—even if I had a few acres to play with. While the gray-blue coloring is attractive, there are many better choices for gardens.

When I visited Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek last week, I spotted this agave flower stalk, freshly retired from doing duty as a Christmas tree. What a neat idea! Seeing it brought a smile to my face.

I don’t know from what species this flower stalk is, but it’s much smaller than you’d find
on Agave americana.

Some cactus beauty shots

A few people have asked me what the cacti were that I bought the other day at Lowe’s. Luckily, they were all labeled, so it was quite easy to throw together this gallery of beauty shots.

Ball cactus (Parodia magnifica), native to Brazil,
flowers yellow in late spring

Closeup of Parodia magnifica

8x8 inch cactus bowl. Everything in there was on sale at Lowe’s.
Back: Facheiro azul (Pilosocereus pachycladus) (2x)
Front: Caterpillar plant (Echinopsis sp. forma cristata)

Facheiro azul (Pilosocereus pachycladus), frost-sensitive, native to Brazil,
eventually to 30 ft.

You’ve gotta love the common name
of this one: caterpillar plant
(Echinopsis sp. forma cristata)

Second cactus bowl
Back: old man of the mountain (Oreocereus trollii)
Front: (Mammillaria elongata 'Julio')
I’m leaving room for either another succulent
or some special rocks as yet to be found.

Mammillaria elongata 'Julio'.
Beautiful spination on this one.

Red-headed Irishman
(Mammillaria spinosissima)

Red-headed Irishman
(Mammillaria spinosissima)
The small purple spot in the center of the photo is a flower bud forming.

Old lady cactus (Mammillaria hahniana), hardy to 20°F, easy to grow—good starter cactus

Closeup of Mammillaria hahniana.
I wonder why it’s called “old lady cactus”???

The final two aren’t from Lowe’s but from UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. I’m including them because a) they’re small, and b) they’re too funky to ignore.

Silver Torch (Cleistocactus straussii), native to Bolivia and Argentina,
hardy to 14°F.

Closeup of od man of the Andes (Oreocereus celsianus). A cactus with “oreo” in its name has got to be good!

All of these cacti are small, and while I keep them outside, they could just as easily be kept indoors on a window sill or another location that receives sunlight for at least 4 hours a day. I used to have cacti in my room when I was young (I was into horror novels, too, so I’m sure people thought I was weird), and I’m excited to have rediscovered cacti now.

Great plant deals at Lowe’s in West Sacramento

I went to Lowe’s in West Sacramento over lunch today to see what they have on clearance. After finding a very large golden barrel cactus last month, I didn’t expect to have much luck today. I’m happy to say that I was mistaken.

Right now, they have more plants on clearance than I’ve ever seen there before. In fact, there were at least four racks of clearance plants right by the entrance to the garden center. The selection ranged from junipers, heavenly bamboos and ferns to citrus trees, succulents and cacti. Except for a few succulents that were frost-damaged, all sale-priced plants looked to be in perfect condition. I assume Lowe’s is clearing these plants out to make room for more inventory. However, why mark down citrus trees now when their season is just starting? Not that I’m complaining—I snapped up a Meyer lemon. I’m sure we’ll find a spot for it in the front yard.

If you’re in the area, do stop by before these plants are gone. The prices are excellent. 1-gallon junipers, heavenly bamboos and similar landscaping shrubs were $1.50. Citrus trees in 13-inch treepots were $4.00. I saw a large fern in a 5-gallon container marked down from $19.95 to $5.00. Cacti and succulents ranged from $0.50 for the smallest size (2 inches) to $4.00 for 6-inch containers.

Here’s my loot for today. I picked up two Old Gold junipers (Juniperus chinensis ‘Old Gold’) for my in-laws, the rest is for us. Grand total for everything: $29.

Here’s what I picked up at Lowe’s today
 

These 8-inch square metal containers are perfect for a miniature succulent garden. They were $0.50 each.