Obtaining plants when you have no budget

Ah, my perpetual conundrum.  I've had to accept that I will need to grow most things from seed to keep my costs down.  Well, seeds, and any cuttings that I can scrounge off of the neighbors.

For example, through the summer, I collected apples, Italian plums, and mulberries, and stuck them in the fridge to stratify them (something I didn't know about until I read up on growing apples from seed).  I'm going to plant most of them in the ground, as soon as possible, but they'll be fine in the fridge for now.  After all, I started collecting them long before I had staked out the positions of my future trees.

For the apples, I collected some from early, mid, and late bearing trees.  One of the early-bearing trees was on a patch of neglected city property, full of blackberries and alder, but it was lush, heavy with small red apples, and clearly had done well without ever being pruned, so I figured it was a good candidate for a no-work garden.  One of the mid-bearing trees was untended on the easement portion of someone's property, so I figured it was ok to grab some apples without asking permission.  These were huge and pale yellow-green.  There's one tree still bearing dark red apples that I have my eye on, but I'm bashful about approaching the owner.  

When I picked these first apples, I took them from off the ground, and I took what I could get, regardless of size or how chewed up they were.  I didn't know until later that you should pick the biggest, ripest, best looking apples.  

Another thing that that I didn't do is taste the apples to see if they were worth growing.  But here's the thing: that would really only matter if I was cloning the tree from a cutting.  When you clone a tree (via a cutting), you're getting a copy of the tree and thus getting the same flavor profile.  With seeds, you're rolling the genetic dice.  I'm fine with rolling the dice on the apples.  I'll be planting at least three seeds in each spot for one tree, spaced apart so that they have room to grow until their first bearing.  I'll pick the best tree out of the three and remove the other two.  

Why not use cuttings anyway?  Well, I found out from a permaculture video on YouTube that with apples, those that grow from seed are stronger because they develop a deeper tap root.  Since my goal is a no-work, no-pruning food forest, growing from seed seems the best approach.  At least for the keystone trees of my food forest.

This weekend, I planned on getting cuttings from a walnut (to back up my plan to grow some from seed), a fig, and a mulberry tree, because I love the taste of the fruits on these particular trees.  In order to prepare, I got three kinds of soil (home-made, Black Magic, and Miracle Grow), planning to test the cuttings in each of the soils.  


To create a propagation tank, I set up an old fish tank that my neighbor was giving away, put an upside-down propagation tray in it for drainage, lined it with the insulation from an Amazon Fresh delivery box, and put an old heated grow mat in the bottom.  


I wanted containers that were deep and narrow: deep for the roots, and narrow to fit as many in the fish tank as possible.  So, I used doubled-up paper lunch bags, and put a strip of masking tape around the outside layer in case the bag disintegrates before spring when I'll want to safely lift the individual plants out of the tank.  


I bought RootX Rooting Hormone, sanitized my shears, and left the house with a bin of 6 bags full of soil.  


I stopped first at the neighbors who own the walnut tree.  I'm anxious about meeting new people, but they were awesome!!  The wife came out to watch what I did, and she helped me collect nuts too!  Then she showed me her gorgeous garden, and gave me a gorgeous purple dahlia!  We made plans to swap cuttings and things that we're going to dig up in the spring (I have a smoke bush and a honeysuckle going out of control, and she's got some... flaming- or fire- somethings that I know are good for ditches).  My experience couldn't have been better!  She's an awesome neighbor!!

Next, I went to the neighbor who has the mulberry and the fig.  Before I got to him, he had taken 4 cuttings of each, and he did something interesting to them.  He used a carrot peeler to take about 3/4" of bark off the bottom of the cutting.  He also told me not to remove all but 3 leaves.  (I had done that with the walnuts.)  Other than that, I dipped them in the rooting hormone just like I had done to the walnuts.  I'm worried that I should've treated the walnut cuttings the same way as he had treated the fig and mulberry cuttings.  Or vice versa.  Oh well.  It's all an experiment.

Here's a shot of all of the cuttings I got, in my patchwork propagation tank.  I need to make another, because I have more cuttings to take now that I know I'm going to share our smoke bush.  I have a clear plastic bin I'll have to use. 

Did you know that you can test the viability of a walnut nut by seeing if it sinks in water?  I didn't, until I looked it up.  Thank goodness I tested the walnuts we picked, because holy moley, only 7 were viable, out of 25!

My weekend ended before I could plant the walnuts and the apple seeds, sadly.  It's because I found out late that you want to put a metal screen over any walnuts that you plant, in order to keep the squirrels from digging them up.  So, I went crazy for a couple hours as the sun set, creating little metal tents for the walnuts.  I've never sewed with metal wire before.  My hands are all scarred up now.  I didn't want to rely on the little dollar store zip ties that you can see holding the seams together.

Maybe I'll have time to plant the walnut nuts, and the apple, plum, and mulberry seeds before next weekend.  I'm just so tired.  I'm glad I took the weekend off of spraying JMS.  Walking your entire property is exhausting.

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October 12, 2018

Well, I finally got the nerve up to plant the viable walnut nuts.

In the two spots I had earmarked for the walnut trees, I cut up a square of sod about 6" deep, flipped it over, chopped at it a bit with the shovel to remove large air spaces, pushed three walnuts into the soil, spaced apart, and patted down the soil.  Then I sprinkled with straw and a little horse manure.  I spread clover seed around and stepped on the seed.  I didn't have a way to pin the little wire cages in place, but hopefully they'll keep the squirrels out.

I had one walnut left over so I buried in on the north side of my property by the neighbor's fence, giving it the same straw/manure/clover treatment.  

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October 26, 2018

Hmm.  No animal disturbed the walnut that didn't have a wire cage.  I wonder if the horse poop deterred them.  That's handy.

Also, the straw is almost decomposed away, but the area where I spread that and the manure is raised up from the rest of the lawn, so it's very noticeable!  That's awesome!  I was worried that I'd lose the location of the walnut, but the raised ring of clover makes it super noticeable.  That'll be good for when we mow--we don't want to mow down walnut saplings.

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October 28, 2018

I killed all of my cuttings.  The heat mat dried out the soil so fast, and also I'm an idiot and didn't check them often enough to see if they needed water.  And also I had the tank in a spot that got the last of the autumn's direct sunlight for at least 4 hours a day.  They're all dead, Dave.  Oh well.  As my dad always told me, "You always seem to have to learn things the hard way."