The rhodondendron strikes again, as well as karma

I had this little corner in my garden which is kind of dark where nothing was hanging around. One of the corners where you would see that the mice would pull up through the weeds. Do you know those as well?

The corner that is not sunny enough to grow something edible but the corner that you see enough to want to put something nice over there.





As the saying me be about 'going Dutch' which means everyone pays there own portion of the bill instead of one person taking one for the team, that is the biggest reminder that in general Dutch people are cheap as fuck.

I am certainly no exception to this, because why spend something when there are other ways to get it as well. This applies especially for the garden. I really hate buying stuff for the garden as because everything grows, that means it also can it can also grow here. And that means next year as well.

But what to grow

So I was looking around in the early spring time to see what kinds of evergreen plants survived winter but also have a cool effect when it starting to get warmer.

The rhodondendron is one of these kinds of bushes that I really like. Sturdy, has the option to grow really big, in now in May the flowers are fantastic and there in abundance.

That would be a nice one to have there right? The garden centre was selling small plants for $15 per piece. That is like plain old thievery if you ask me going for one of these plants that literally grows everywhere here in the area in every bush, forest, and communal garden.

That calls for a big no to me. But since every thing just grows and grows, isn't there any other way to get some seedlings, cuttings or branches from this bush?

Scrolling the big wide world of interwebz

See the Rhododendron ponticum which you see here in all of the photos grows here in the wild, and there must be some kind of way to propagate them.

Digging a little bit deeper into the info I learned that this was a more time consuming process than I initially had expected. It doesn't work like when you propagate you basil, take a cutting, toss the stem end in a bucket of water and just wait for a couple of weeks. This stuff is fragile and it doesn't work like that.



Rhodondendronhoeve.nl


This is the best way to do this and it is called layering. You take a branch that is hanging to the side and bury it a tiny bit in the ground with just a piece of the branch. You can even scratch it a bit then this means there is a sort of a wound that will start to form roots.

After a year (!!!!!) this branch is ready to be used and to be cut from the mother plant. Crap...so this takes a year and the corner of my garden looks ugly now.

That is the moment when I was really looking around in my area and I could see that these bushes were literally everywhere. Also when taking a better peek underneith a couple of the bushes in the forest, I would see they would have these side branches hanging over the floor covered by leaves.

When lifting up the leaves, I could see a nice little root system formed to the side branch. Victory, these plants had already layered themselves

'Honey...??'

'Do you think if I cut a branch from a bush in the forest that it means that I am stealing from the forest?

I needed my conscience to be clear on this one. But we both agreed that that wouldn't mean I was demolishing the woods, more that I was helping them to expand ;)

So I took a couple of cuttings that looked perfect and put them in a big bag to carry home. Sure ..I also brought the dog as my decoy in this one.

It did feel like I was doing something terrible though the whole time.





After a happy planting session, some decent watering over the next couple of weeks and hoping for some good sun...The only conclusion there was left to be made was that these plants had totally died on me.

My experiment had failed even though I did everything right in the way of planting them. Was this the forest ghoul coming to bring my karma back from stealing from the woods?

Hmmmm, I am not sure. But I know they are growing and blooming everywhere now, just not in my garden.