A series of mishaps

A whole ten days ago I posted that I had some penstemon and geranium cuttings waiting for me to pot them up. It has, as I mentioned, been a long ten days since then. Apart from the various illnesses doing the rounds of the family, there was also the part where I was walking home from work, after getting off the bus at 3am last Saturday night. One minute I'm calmly, but quickly, walking along (it was very cold, wet, dark, windy...), and then next thing I know I'm lying on the side of the road. In the mud. I'd stepped right on the edge of the asphalt, and my ankle gave way beneath me, tossing me over into the gutter: SPLAT. All very undignified. My ankle hurt; the palm of my hand hurt, and there were some furious embarrassed tears too (although, at 3am, it's not like anyone saw me.) And I'm then sitting there, ankle hurting, owwww, how am I going to get home now? Before my better-self piped up with, oh just get over it, stand up for Heaven's sake, can you walk on the ankle, or not? Staggering to my feet, I realised sheepishly that my ankle was not, in fact, broken, and I could limp the last 200m home, where once I got into the light and the warm I realised I was quite literally covered in mud, leaves and debris to my waist, and I even had mud in my eyebrows. In my eyebrows! Good work, if I do say so myself. The next day my ankle hardly hurt at all, my hand had barely a scratch, but my wrist was hurting and my whole knee had turned purple (and still is) which is ironic because I didn't even realise I'd banged it at the time.

Anyway. Moving on.

So, as I said, it was a bit windy that night. I discovered in the morning that apart from my purple knee, the wind had blown my cuttings off the table outside -where I'd left them because I was going to pot them up 'any minute now,' and smashed the glass all over the paving. Bugger.
I rescued what I could and put them back into some water (where they languished for another week).


During the week we went around to our little cottage and I pottered in the garden out the front, clipping roses, planting strawberries, planting my second persimmon, and also, as it transpired, doing a little impromptu pruning on one of my favourite correas by being careless with the hose, accidentally ripping off the entire leading branch. Feck. I guess that particular plant is destined to be even more of a ground cover than I had intended. I thought I might be able to save some of it somehow, so took it home and put it in a container of water by the sink. Look how big it was!


What's a girl-gardener to do? When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. (An unfair judgement on lemons I always think; I like lemons particularly.) Or when you accidentally rip out half a correa, try to take as many cuttings from the poor soul as you can. Like so. Or not like so. This is not meant as instructions because I have very little clue, I'm just winging it really, but more of a record of 'What Katie Did Next.'

This is as far as I've gotten with my propagating for a week: filled pots. They've been waiting, and waiting... and waiting... for me to get my act together.


Then I clipped off as many usable correa twigs as I could and pulled off most of the leaves.


I trimmed them all off to the same sort of size and dipped the ends into the rooting powder.


Then I made a little forest of them in a pot. There may be too many in here, but then I'm assuming that most of them, if not all, will not strike.


While I was there, I finally got around to making cuttings of the penstemon and the geraniums too.


Like little ducks all in a row...


I'll update this one in a couple of months or so when I know if it worked or not.

May your working week pass quickly xx