2024 Winter/Spring pruning and first cuttings propagated

2024-02-17T14:29:00Z

2024 Winter/Spring pruning and first cuttings propagated

Did a pretty heavy prune and propagation on 2024-02-11.

So one of my tea plants, Saint Frank has slowly gone dormant or died since I moved from Seattle to Eugene, OR. It was the more dominant plant when I lived in Seattle. But Julie, the other has gone crazy since we moved down here, but the plant has grown at an angle toward the sun and very planar, not really a bushy, three dimensional plant.

Propagation

To start I took all the "soft" wood off of the healthy adolescent plant and picked twelve to put in to rooting hormone and potting soil in reusable cube trays.

I'm not sure most of these will survive long enough to be put in the ground but they're on my balcony for now. I'm excited to think about putting at least 14 mature plants in to the ground in like 5 years from now. It's the first "real" step toward this hypergoal of Growing and Processing Tea I've made in a while.

I thought about taking some leaving some fresh tips to ensure that i have some tea to fry in the spring or summer, but you'll notice the mature leaves on Julie aren't super healthy. I need to "debug" this, I think they were just getting too much water, or the soil did not drain enough. Would love some feedback.

Julie

So i just took all the soft wood for propagation, basically cut back to the closest node, and i took out some cross-branches and generally tried to shape the plant to encourage bushing by removing woodier bits. A bit of Bonsai.

Saint Frank

Frank is so sad. I feel bad. It did not fare well with the more fair weather. At the end of fall it only had a single green tip, on this one low branch. Every other tip was gray and dead. so I chopped all that off. I hope that little bud wakes up in the sun without all that dead weight. Fingers crossed.