This week’s Fantastic Friday post comes from way back in March of 2011. Four years later, my geranium slips are rooting in mason jars, and I’m as crazy about them as ever.. The Man of Steel, now four years older after celebrating another birthday on March 8, is as kind and quiet as this post made him out to be.
My husband is a wise man. He has yet to say a word about the four, count ‘em, four mason jars sitting in front of the east windows, hogging daylight.
He hasn’t commented about how the jars are crammed with geranium slips or how the wintered over geraniums, from whence the slips came, now look like skinned rats in their flower pots.
He never complained about the dozens of gallon milk jugs in the basement full of last summer’s rain water, some used to water the potted geraniums through the winter and much it now slowly evaporating from the mason jars chuck full of geranium slips.
Yes, Hiram is a wise man. He knows better than to editorialize when I go on one of my heritage horticultural tears. This month’s tear is all about Grandma Josie Hess’s heritage geranium, the sainted family flower given to Grandma Josie by her mother, Cora Newell. Grandma Josie gave slips to her children (including my mother), who gave them to her three children, one of whom (that would be me) has become slightly obsessed with propagating the sainted plant.
To tell you the truth, I’m pretty pleased with myself for remembering to cut down the wintered-over geraniums this early and setting the slips in water. Usually I think of it in late April when it’s too late for either the old plants to recover from pruning or for the new slips to root before it’s time to plant them outdoors. But this year I thought of it in March. A minor miracle considering how forgetful I’ve been this winter.
Come to think of it, Hiram hasn’t said a word about my minor memory miracle or my more normal forgetfulness. At least I can’t remember if he’s made any comments about either one.
In any case, my husband is a wise man. Almost a saint. Right up there with the sainted family flower.
Quiet.
Lovely.
Hardy.
Enduring.
Patient.
Faithful.
No wonder I love them both so much.
You are a wise woman.
Every year I have them I see my geraniums dessicated and leafless in the winter, looking pretty ugly and then the bed be dormant for several years until I grow geraniums again.
The multi-year missing geranium cycle is not due to rotating flowers, planting herbs this year (which only occasionally happens), the bed being overtaken by the yearly self-reseeding parsley (only due to the walk up the porch halting the invasion), or any other reason. I just never get around to buying new ones.
You probably even got the Mason Jars at yard sales instead of buying them.
Wise indeed.
P.S. Do geraniums self-root in water, or need a preparation added?
The Mason jars actually came from my mom. She had oodles of them. Most of them went to her grandkids. I just cut the geraniums off below a joint and plunk them in water. They self-root within 3 weeks or so. Just use shoots that are green and supple, not woody. And change the water weekly.