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Welcome All! I'm a dreamer, I hope you are too! A Posse ad Esse, or From possibility to reality, is a general state of mind. I hope you'll share your possibilities with me as I will with you. Namaste~

October 27, 2009

Keeping things clean (21 Days)

One of the most important and probably opt overlooked things one can do to help themselves be successful in thier propagating is to keep things clean.
There are a number of plant diseases that could easily prey on young, newly propagated plants if given the chance. Many of these can lay dormant in the very pots that we use to plant them in. Like many gardeners, I try my best to stretch my dollars and to consume less resources by re-using many of the pots that come through my garden. Taking the necessary care to make sure those pots are clean is a pretty simple tasks that can help to avoid a lot of problems.

I started with a regular bucket filled with water. This is just a preliminary wash to get off most of the dirt and grime off the pots before I sanitize them.While I rinsed them off I used an old rag to wipe down the pots quickly to remove as much dirt as possible.

After wiping down and generally cleaning out the pots I put them in a sinkful of warm bleach water. Using the bleach water is for basically the same reason as you would use a sanitizer when washing dishes. It kills bacteria and keeps disease from being able to spread easily.

After cleaning I stacked all the pots that I cleaned so that they could air out and dry completely. Bleach is not a good thing for plant roots so you do want to make sure that they are dried completely.

So now that I've gotten these all cleaned and sanitized, it's time to get those plants into the dirt.

I did plant one variety of tomato into a few of these pots, some of the romas that I am working to clone. I didn't want to jump in and plant too many of them for fear of they having a problem accepting the transplants. Best to stick a toe in the water first you know?

In the last few days we've had a dusting of snow and a serious cold front. I'll get out to plant some more this weekend comeing up. Watch for more and some photos then.

Anyone else trying to clone cuttings this fall?
P~

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks to your posts, I will be attempting to clone some of my better bell pepper plants this winter. Hope they make it!

-Simple

Barb J. said...

Great idea for something to do over the winter!

Shannon said...

I think we tried to clone some tomato plants, but the whole thing was kind of an accident. When clearing out my summer garden along the fence line I pulled up what I thought was a huge weed, but it ended up being a quite good-sized tomato plant. My husband took a lot of cuttings off of it and rooted it in wet sand for a week or two. He left that tub of sand in the shower stall so he could keep it damp. It appears that one of those cuttings actually took in the pot and is now growing quite nicely in the house. We also have another healthy looking tomato plot in a pot indoors which was transplanted from the exhausted summer garden, another 'volunteer'. It would be nice if they made it through the winter. We were trying to overwinter our pepper plants but that's not working out too well...

Purrfect Haven said...

I'll get cleaning right away.. and stacking.. It will give me a sense of order too. Am planning to clone (bring on Dolly). Helen