As we head towards winter, with the nights getting longer and the days getting colder, our thoughts turn naturally to warm afternoons tucked up indoors perusing seed catalogues and making plans for the coming spring. Yet here in the production department, our focus remains on completing the winter clean and the continued propagation of plants.
Winter clean
The winter clean takes on two forms. Primarily it is the cleaning, weeding and redressing of plants which are available for sale. This affords us the opportunity to check on the quality of the plants, the individual plant’s health and chance to move any of the more tender plants under some form of protection for the winter, such as Pelargonium 'Queen of the Lemons' to guard against the frost or Sempervivum 'Dr Fritz Kohlein' as a precaution against excessive rainfall. Secondly, on the dry bright days, it is a chance to get out onto the stock beds, the home of many of our mother plants, to source plant material and cut back herbaceous perennials, tidying up dead foliage, weeding and re-mulching the area to help protect the plants over the winter. As with the potted plants, it is an opportunity to check on plant health, damage caused by pests and diseases, and renewing any labels which may have become broken, damaged or lost during the summer months.
Propagation
This week when the weather has worked against us, and the rain driven us indoors, we have consoled ourselves with propagation splits from potted stock plants, such as Sisyrinchium 'Californian Skies' and Sisyrinchium 'Quaint and Queer'. This process sees us turning out a stock pot, teasing the plant apart into individual rooted fans, cleaning, grading and repotting them to grow on over the winter ready for spring.
At this time of year, we will also lift and divide some of our mother plants from the ground whilst they are dormant. This includes plants such as Uvularia perfoliata shorter paler form, Actaea simplex 'Prichards Giant' or Paeonia lactiflora 'Evening World'.
In the case of Uvularia perfoliata shorter paler form, it is simply a case of lifting the whole plant from the ground, washing it, trimming the roots slightly to see what we are working with, and carefully separating the small clusters of nodes apart into smaller pieces. With a uvularia, there will be a small brown centre of the previous year’s growth which would have died off. This is the flowering stem from which this year’s growth would have generated from and can now be discarded. It is important to note that if you do propagate a uvularia by this method, the plant will only lay down new roots after it has flowered, which gives us a rough timeline to propagate in the late autumn, early winter. Watch them flower in early spring and once the flowers have gone over, the root system will start to establish. So, three to four months after flowering in the pot, it will be ready for planting out.
Uvularia shorter paler form
Read on: Winter Propagation- Root Cuttings
Written by Growing Manager Marc
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