Propagating Roses!
I’m beginning to feel a lot like Edmond Dantes in the Castle d’If. Locked away with nothing but a pocket-watch, or in this case, deodorant.
On a related note, I’ve got this bouquet of roses from the same (now ex) lover, and there's no way I'm letting them die on me. They won’t last much longer in a vase, so it's time to propagate!
The Count of Monte Cristo Goes to Lowe's
My journey begins with a quick trip to Lowe's to grab this rooting hormone. The idea here is that I'm going to take the roses, snip off the tops, and stick them in the ground to grow into bushes. To do that, they need roots, and to get roots, they need rooting hormone.
Off to Lowe's we go, tacking it on as a stop in the Mother's Eve grocery haul. I find the hormone in a lil plastic bottle just inside the garden section (after much confusion reading Lowe's online maps) and buy it. On the way out, we nab a small blueberry bush to plant in the corner of the garden. Our last one got engulfed by another plant, so here we are trying again.
Knobby Bits
Propagation begins on day two. I start by trimming the roses down to short stems. We don't want the flowers themselves (they'd be dead weight on the plant) or any rotted segments, just 2-4 little knobby modules per stem. I'm talking about these node things. They look like elbows, and they're where the leaves and roots are gonna start growing.
After snipping each rose down to 2-4 knobby bits (and in the better cases, some salvagable leaves on the top-most knobby bit), I prepare the rooting goop. It's a 50-50 mix of honey and hormones and kinda looks like banana bread dough. I dip each stem in the goop and put it aside, trying to get the bottom snip and the bottom-most knobby bit covered in each case, leaving 1-3 knobby bits uncovered for leaves.
Lastly, I prepare a trough with garden soil, drizzle a lil water in it, and shake it up to get it moist (but not wet!) throughout. Then, each stem is inserted one knobby bit (the one with hormone goop) deep, leaving a few knobs up top for leaf growth. After that I get some ziploc bags to cover each stem with so the moisture doesn't escape, pinning them down with toothpicks. It's like a bunch of mini rose greenhouses.
And that's it! If all goes well, I should have about a dozen rose bush starters by the end of this Summer, and if it doesn't- (I wanted to write something about how it'd be a fun learning experience anyways but the truth is if it doesn't work out I'd be really sad).
Petal Pressing
Ok so the rose stems are in their greenhouses, but what about the flowers? I brought them to my room, plucked off the petals manually (you have to be so careful not to tear them it was so slowwww), and stuffed them into Treasure Island.
I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with them at the moment, but once they're dried and pressed, they'll probably get mailed out? It would be lovely to receive a letter with rose petals in it, so I'll work on that next.
Song of the Post
Want to do this thing where I post whichever song I've been vibing to recently (and/or whichever one I listened to while writing the post). Used to do this when writing letters to someone but anywaysss 505 but shoegazed - originally by the Arctic Monkeys, covered by Hhnglee on YouTube.