Grow Your Own Avocados

Wow, was this ever a throwback to my college days. Back in the days of macrame, yogurt makers, and prayer plants - otherwise known as The Seventies - homes, apartments, and dorm rooms everywhere could be seen with this sitting on their window sills:

It was ever so cool to grow your own avocado plant from a pit found inside one you'd gotten at the grocery store. I did it, my friends did it, and I'm betting some of you did it too. I honestly don't remember if I was successful at actually getting that thing to germinate or not, but I tried.

With the trade situation with Mexico kind of up in the air right now, there's been a lot of talk about what things are likely to go up in price if things change. Avocados and limes are mentioned, as is Corona beer and tequila. I can live without all of them, but each one enjoys popularity here in the U.S.

So, about this growing your own avocado thing . . .  Even if I can manage to get this avocado pit to germinate, it's highly unlikely that I will be able to grow an avocado tree that produces any fruit.

First of all, I don't live where avocados would be happy. They're hardy in USDA Zones 8-11 and I'm in Zone 5b, though I do have a greenhouse and they also make excellent house plants. Secondly, even if I can keep it happy, it can take from 4-13 years for an avocado tree to bear fruit. Some trees never do yield anything.

When I cut open an avocado last week and saw that pit, it took me back (sing it with me now . . . "You fill up my senses, like a night in a forest,") and I kind of wanted to try it again. What did I have to lose?

If you want to try it too, it couldn't be easier. Just clean the avocado pit, let it dry, then poke toothpicks into it to suspend it over a jar of water, with the fat side down. Place it in a warm spot and keep the water level so that its bum is submerged. In about 2-6 weeks, you should see both a root and a stem sprouting. At that point, be sure it's in a well-lit location.

As it grows, once the stem reaches 6-8 inches, prune it in half to induce branching. Once it has started to branch, you can plant it in a container of well-draining potting soil. Be sure to leave the top part of the pit exposed, similar to how you plant an amaryllis bulb.

Don't overwater, but don't let it dry out completely. In the summer, you can put it outside, where it will likely grow faster, but make sure to bring it in once temperatures dip below 45°F.

Far out, man.

Gifts From the Toad Lilies

I'm a seed saver. If I have some annuals or perennials that I love, you can bet that beginning in late August, you'll see little glass bowls with seeds in them lining up on the kitchen counter. They grow in number until about the end of October, which is usually when seed saving season is forced to come to a close. If the plants haven't produced seed by then, frosts and hard freezes put a stop to it.

I've long considered the toad lily (Tricyrtis spp.) to be my signature plant - the one that I take the most joy in, because [a] its bloom resembles an orchid's [b] it grows and blooms in the shade, [c] it blooms at the end of summer through fall, when blooms become more sparse, especially in shade, and [d] I can't imagine my gardens without it.

Toad lily
Tricyrtis hirta 'Miyazaki'

Every year, the toad lilies (not actually lilies, by the way) bloom their little hearts out and form seed pods. And every year, I hope to collect seeds. But I don't. They get soooo close to maturing enough, and then frost happens and I'm left with green pods and immature seeds.

But thanks to an unseasonably warm fall this year, I've got toad lily seeds. I've got lots of them because they're so tiny - nearly as small as petunia seeds. I have petunias that self seed every year and I've said that if every single petunia seed germinated, there would be enough petunias to supply all the garden centers for 50 miles around.

The seed pods of these toad lilies measure about an inch, tip to tip,
with the seeds about the size of flecks of pepper.

But that never happens and maybe that's the reason that petunias produce so much seed to begin with. Toad lilies have the same potential, but they can be difficult to grow from seed.

They need cold stratification and they need light to germinate, so that means I'm going to need to sow those seeds now by sprinkling them on top of the soil where I want them to grow, and hope that the freezing and thawing cycles (not to mention the cats) don't manage to bury them by spring.

I'll let you know next spring how successful I am.

Daylily Proliferations

Hemerocallis 'Sarah Christine'

I have never really thought of myself as being a daylily fan (no pun intended!), but I've been rethinking this in the last few years.  Every time I see a beautiful one, I want it. In spite of the foliage of some of them getting rather ratty looking late in the season, I still want it. I've made a compromise with those by cutting the foliage back to about 8-10 inches and pulling off the brown and yellowed leaves.

As a result of my non-love of daylilies, I have no less than 44 different ones (possibly a couple more that I missed when I just went out to count) and I have a wish list of some that I'll buy if I ever run across them.

One of my favorites is a very large lemon yellow one, called 'Sarah Christine'. The American Hemerocallis Society's Online Daylily Database says this about it...

 

 'Sarah Christine' 

Introduced by Millikan-Soules in 1993

Scape height: 28 inches
Bloom size: 6 inches
Bloom season: Early-Midseason
Ploidy:  Diploid
Foliage type: Evergreen
Fragrance: Fragrant
Bloom habit: Diurnal
Color: Pale yellow and ivory to pink bicolor with cream throat
Parentage: (Siloam Mama × Groovy Green)

I would challenge the bloom size as stated in the database.  Mine have gotten larger than that on a regular basis. Regardless, it's one of the larger blooming daylilies out there. Its color doesn't really command attention because there are a gazillion yellow daylilies (at least), but its size certainly does, and that makes it worth having.

This week as I was walking through the garden doing a bit of late summer clean-up, I noticed 'Sarah Christine' was doing something her friends and cousins hadn't. She had proliferations! I've had a daylily do this before, but I didn't do anything with them and merely cut off the scape and composted it.

What are proliferations?

Sometimes a daylily will start to form little plantlets at nodes on the stem of a flower scape. These will often form roots while still attached to the plant. If the stem of the scape is cut on both sides of the plantlet - the proliferation - and put into potting soil, a new plant can be grown. It will be a clone of the mother plant - in other words, identical to it.

'Sarah Christine' has several proliferations on this flower scape. The middle
one is actually two, which I will pot up together.

The reason I don't get too many of these is because I'm pretty obsessive about cutting scapes off once they're finished blooming.  I missed this one.

There are four proliferations on this scape.

I cut it off at its base and then cut each proliferation and put them in water so they can form some roots before I pot them up. I'll keep the potted plants in the greenhouse this winter and then plant them out near the mother plant in the spring.

'Sarah Christine' had babies!