Geraniums!!!

Guess I'm going flower-garden crazy. After the excitement of succeeding with my front "curb appeal" flower bed, which was composed of store-bought flowers and fencing, I decided to try again, this time using some found materials. My mother-in-law Lois had kindly brought us a wonderfully huge bucket of geranium cuttings from her yard, and she told me that all you have to do is stick them in the wet soil and they'll (eventually) take root.

So I decided to make a home for them right in front of the garage. We already had a lot of dirt; there was a big pile left in our driveway from the umpteen pounds Chris had ordered to fill his raised beds. We also had a lot of old broken (pink!) concrete edger stones in another pile in the side yard. So I recycled those stones and made a ramshackle border, filled it with dirt, wet it down, and stuck in the geranium cuttings.













As you can see below, some of the cuttings already had flowers, which was a plus. But it's surprising how many of them have flowered in the past couple of weeks of living in their new home. I've got mostly fluorescent red ones so far, but then the ones in the middle of the row have emerged pink-and-white candy-striped. Yeah!













Lastly I must say that after finishing this little project I have since read that one of the fastest and easiest way to propagate roots on cuttings such as these is to dip the ends in rooting powder before you stick it in the ground. These pelargoniums are doing it all by themselves so far, thank you very much. (But I'm still getting the powder - I saw it for about $4.50 a can at Walmart. ;))

BTW if you want to know all about plant propagation and rooting powder this site is interesting - a totally old school crazed-out web page that looks like something straight outta 1998, but which actually provides a wealth of useful information it seems. Oh and the inventors were Dutch, apparently, so many of the materials are available in Dutch on the site. Fantastisch!