Good morning, and welcome to another edition of Frankenoid's Day Off ... sort of. Actually, welcome to the first multi-author edition of Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Has anyone noticed that there seems to be a lot of gift-giving around here lately? Why not continue the theme? But first, as one of the many garden bloggers who recently had an anonymous benefactor, I would like express my gratitude again. I couldn't afford a subscription and am overwhelmed by the generosity. Kossacks are an amazing bunch!
Gardeners are also an amazing bunch. Sharing our gardens with family, friends and neighbors is one of the many benefits of gardening. And it doesn't take much (if any) money to do it. As it's often said, the best gifts are the personal gifts you make yourself. And there are many gifts we can make from our gardens.
Propagating many of our plants is easy and inexpensive. Too bad that Christmas doesn't come during the summer growing season for those of us in the north, but there are still plant gifts that can be put under the Christmas tree from our indoor gardens.
One of the easiest plants to propagate is a Christmas cactus. Just take a few healthy segments, stick them in soil, and keep them moist. Somehow, despite all the mistakes I always think I'm making, they all seem to root so easily. I think kids who are being exposed to gardening for the first time would really enjoy a Christmas cactus as a gift. They're so easy to grow and are so colorful. And probably because they are so easy to grow, many of us have Christmas cacti that have descended from plants that generations of our families had before us. I have one Christmas cactus from a plant my great grandmother had. What an easy way to connect a kid to his or her roots (so to speak)!
Another one of my favorite house plants is the lowly spider plant. They aren't as ubiquitous as they used to be. Fallen out of fashion I guess. But I love their fresh, light color, and their ability to filter the air. And talk about easy to propagate! Just stick one of the baby offshoots in soil, and keep it moist. When it has sufficiently rooted, cut the 'umbilical cord' to the mother plant.
Also among the easy-to-share, almost full-proof house plants are African violets, Swedish ivy, philodendrons, pothos and jade plants. Jade plants in particular seem to propagate themselves without any prompting from me. Leaves get knocked off, fall on the soil and just root there. In fact, that's how I got one of my jade plants from my brother. A small branch of his got broken off by one of his dogs, it fell on the soil and he just left it there. I saw it was growing roots, asked him if I could have it, wrapped it in a damp paper towel, threw it in a baggie and took it home on the plane with me.
When gifting parts of our garden to others, don't forget the critters! My pootie pack gets to share in the garden, too. Cat grass is incredibly quick and easy to grow. The seeds don't even have to be buried, and they sprout in only a couple of days. I've just learned to use a wide-based pot for stability and to let the grass grow some strong roots for a couple of weeks before letting the pooties have it. Otherwise, they tend to uproot it rather than bite it off.
The pooties also have a never-ending supply of 'nip from the garden (and so does kishik's Pootie #1!). Fresh leaves to eat during the growing season, then the leaves that I harvest and dry for a winter supply. The plants themselves are perennial, but they also easily re-seed, so the first and only packet of catnip seeds I bought oh-so-many years ago has proven to be quite a deal when compared to the price of a little package of dried catnip in the stores.
But contrary to popular belief, I'm not totally a cat person. (Who said, "yeah, right"?) My outside garden (or in the case of the photo at left, kishik's outside garden!) has plenty of seed and berry gifts for the birds ... and chipmunks and squirrels, heh. Of course, those seeds and berries are gifts that keep giving because all that feeding activity in the yard makes for some good "Cat TV" for the pootie pack!
Finally, gifts from the garden don't have to be living. For those of you who are talented photographers, I know for a fact that there are people out there who would love some of your framed garden shots in their homes!
Those are some gift ideas from me. I think Frankenoid has an idea, too.
As welso noted, gift subscriptions have been sprinkled liberally amongst the Garden Bloggers — and, as I noted noted in my subscription-drive diary on Wednesday it's a good thing, as the weekly display of garden porn is a bandwidth-sucking monster.
I'm not going to make a list of garden bloggers who "need" or are "deserving" of gift subscriptions. In my opinion, every single member of our community is valuable and "needs" a subscription.
So I'm just gonna ask you all — if there's a garden blogger or two with whom you look forward to touching base every week, and if you can afford to brighten a lifetime of Saturdays for them, please click on their name and see if they have a subscription. You can tell if they are not a subscriber by looking for a gold badge on their profile page, or looking under their name for the pale gray "give a gift subscription to this user" link.
It's easy, and the warm glow you'll feel is greater than the output of a hundred yule logs.