Anyone taking dormant cuttings over the next few weeks?

wish I could grow cranberry but it likes moist and I live in semi-desert, my yard is gravel also so it is about 10 degrees hotter than my neighbors, our yard grows 20 fruits though I am adding some th

wish I could grow cranberry but it likes moist and I live in semi-desert, my yard is gravel also so it is about 10 degrees hotter than my neighbors, our yard grows 20 fruits though I am again trying some that failed before in a different location

I have always done mine in late summer/fall by laying branches on the ground cover with soil, where I want to snip it off.
Next year it's rooted and ready to be snipped off, then transplant to where I want more.

I'll be doing a few this year, of course I've said that before......
I found a very sweet wild apple along a public trail that I buried a few branches on last year. Have to go see how they turned out. Some from my hardy kiwi and honeyberry branches buried at home too.
There's also an elderberry patch at the cottage that seems to be dying out that could use moving but I haven't done anything there yet.

wish I could grow cranberry but it likes moist and I live in semi-desert, my yard is gravel also so it is about 10 degrees hotter than my neighbors, our yard grows 20 fruits though I am again trying some that failed before in a different location

The highbush is a viburnum, not a true cranberry. If you've got an area that can get 8 hours of sun but you can block some of the worst of the summertime afternoon sun, and you use a super-deep mulch (Back to Eden style), especially if you use a partially submerged bucket or several mostly buried bottles or clay pots for irrigating directly at the roots, you may be able to get it going. I had 3 in Yuma, AZ that survived for the 4 years we were there. They were right beside a foursome of deciduous trees so after a 90-degree sun at midday, they had only dappled light. I know it says they need full sun, but that wasn't working for me.

I have some tip layered canes from last season that are getting set and ready to be snipped and moved as part of my outlaw/renegade garden plan.

Some of the others (to include the apple mentioned) may benefit from air layering instead of tip cuttings.
I prefer it whenever possible because although it goes from spring through fall and for the odd plant a full year or to the NEXT fall, I get such a boost in size and time-to-yield from other methods. I've successfully done air layering on multiple six-foot branches on trees where I can use a protective cloth for the main trunk and cords to support the weight of the rooting ball, and I've gotten additional four- and five-foot branches up to an inch and a half in diameter off the same tree (basically, left about 1/4-1/3 of the ones that should have been pruned the previous autumn to layer in spring and then plant in autumn. It takes years off the production cycle because when they're transplanted, they already have a gallon or more of well-developed roots and you're starting with a sapling that's more developed than a smaller limb.

Sadly, not quite everything has the right type of stem/bark/cane to air layer.

O, tell me more about your outlaw/renegade garden, it sounds like what I called my wild fruiting/medical area, which I know call my food forest as that is a more common term that others tend to understand..

How big? approx. mine is 3/4th of a acre, is it all the same in type or are you creating different eco-systems in area's? Do you garden free style in spots or keep meadow's open in it or is it all planted out?

O, tell me more about your outlaw/renegade garden, it sounds like what I called my wild fruiting/medical area, which I know call my food forest as that is a more common term that others tend to understand..

How big? approx. mine is 3/4th of a acre, is it all the same in type or are you creating different eco-systems in area's? Do you garden free style in spots or keep meadow's open in it or is it all planted out?

What I do is pretty diverse in scope and intent.

On what I consider a selfish level, my primary residence is small and I'm kind of limited in what I can grow by space, even going vertical, because largely I'm restricted to a third floor deck (and there's only so much damp soil weight that's safe to add a woman and dogs to). But I reseed the areas that don't get sprayed with edible weeds and I periodically replace a wholly ornamental and any toxic ornamentals that don't have wildlife value with something edible when the landscapers have run through.

We also have several strips of woods nearby, and I have a pickup and pick up trash as I go around, and people who see me know I build bird boxes out of pallets, so I can run out with a pallet day 1, a bucket o' soil and compost day 2, and mulch day 3, and strawberries day 4, lay out the pallet, fill with dirt, plant a few, mulch, repeat until it's full, then add in some borage and native and (don't judge) the already-prevalent invasive "wild" strawberries around the edges. The pallet acts almost like cardboard and lasagna layering would to hold the weeds down, and being mulched they have better chances. Wildlife gets some, I get a few to pass around, and they're already established if something ever happens and we need to harvest the wildlife and protect them.

I like queen anne's lace, but it has more limited uses than some others, so I'll salvage milkweed and burdock, and plant it all around the ditches and woods edges. If things get bad, it won't be getting trimmed at all. I do the same with cattail, various wild and domestic cress cultivars, and some yams. I get the good green-brown tree trimmings mulch that I can pile up here and there, and mound over compost, and sometimes you can get squash and melons and basil to just self seed and grow on their own without inputs, and sometimes enough survive the wildlife to continue to grow.

On another arm, a lot of our woods in the area and even some of the parks where it's supposed to be "native" were cleared or had the underbrush removed, unbalancing what's supposed to be there. I move a lot of native brambles to the verges and open pockets, replace some of the greenbriar (only edible for short periods) with those, replant spicebush and redbud, and (not kind of me) replace any baby walnuts that try to spread with pecans so the jugalone isn't an issue in the future. I'll also go through the established pine and walnut woods with zone-hardy blueberries - a mix of the wild ones and more productive domestics if they can handle the clay under the leaves.

I throw on an orange vest and a white hardhat, drive my tan truck right through park gates or up to old abandoned buildings or neglected beds in some of the down areas of our town and cities and especially the bigger cities, and plant whatever I like - usually perennials, or edible ornamentals, but also some natives and weeds and self-seeding annuals and biannuals.

I usually put up dollar-store frames with contact-sheet covered paper printouts that say what something is with a couple of pictures and some information about what's in them.

Landscapers and park people and locals tend to think I and they belong, with the outfit and signs, so I've established some good berry lines on old fences, a few native trees, a bunch of the edible and medicinal weeds in patches. I mulch with good green-brown mix from the tree-trimmer services, then ring with the heavy sterile bark or crushed/broken stuff from demolitions, add a bench from pallets sometimes, and off we go.

The trees are more rare in the city lots, but there are places where blacktop or sidewalks are already cracked and I can crack it more, pry it up, use old salvaged stone or broken concrete (with a frame saying where it's from) to make a big reservoir, fill it in with good stuff that forms soil from above and below, and plant a really young apple or pear or cherry that I grafted to have 2-3 varieties on it and cut over 3-4 years to compact the roots, and then mulch it good with the soil-building mulch. Or there will be one of those strips against a building, and I can put in a self-dwarfing gooseberry or viburnum series, add in some tubers, and it looks like a planned lot. They just never find out who hired which company.

Sometimes I take those strips and turn them into cut-and-come-again gardens with chard and lettuce and cabbage, then peas and tomatoes, usually some edible flowers, almost always some marigolds, with taller perennials like sunchokes or blueberry that will spread out and be fine and spread out even if I don't make it back for a while, and hang the frames saying how to take them, how to cut them, how to use them, talking about the history of heirlooms, how to pull seeds, how to build a container. Somebody else is working around some of them, because there's a lot with tires built up and where they made a frame out of regular pallets cut in half but not really taken apart, and somebody's growing there and in the empty squares the city left after the last trees died.

In the parks I can do little patches inside downed chunks of trees, stick up signs on posts, and cover some of the wildflowers, and they'll usually self seed at least for a while, and they help with the bees, or I can do an herb and flower ring and a little line of fruit trees with signs talking about bees and how our crops and bees for them are European, and our native bees are tree flower bees, and at the smaller parks especially, nobody can find out who got permission or how, but it's so disorganized, they assume somebody knows and they'll leave them up. I may find and squash some landscapers for making mulch volcanos, but when I'm there with the camper shell on and regular clothes and the dogs, I can whip on some gloves and fix it.

So nothing huge in any one area, nothing's as big as yours. Most of it is there because after I stopped volunteering at the humane societies (just can't do it any more) and took a trip to Jordan, I was only more annoyed by the way we treat our natives and wildlife, I needed something to do with my time to tithe, and how maybe some ideas and free fruit will help somebody hungry in the city or encourage a grandmother to plant a few pots for her grandchildren. A lot of times, I'll leave some pots of earth, buckets, whatever, and some seeds in little tiny envelopes, and a sign that they're free, and sometimes people take them.

I've only had a few bashed up, and in one of them, the people who worked at the shop next door took it upon themselves and planted a bunch of veggies, and in another, people from one of the buildings around the alley were rebuilding it and adding buckets and wash tubs and soda bottle towers. That's positive, and every bit of food they grow, it's less dependence on the system and it's less encouragement to the system of spending 4x the fuels and carbon footprint to haul what Big Ag needs to make food, then haul the food.

Cats are actually harder on all of the neighborhood and city projects and the small parks with houses around them than jerks, surprisingly. Even the stupid raccoons and deer aren't as bad as the city cats. 🙂

Smiley's should be consistent - we make other foolish laws, why not a programmer law so all smiley key series make the same face?

Wow, o wow, that's awesome, and some really great idea's, would love to hear more about different projects you are working on over the coming growing season..

That's over YEARS, here in between two cities in the mid-atlantic and in AZ.

This year I am having a world of failure getting indoor seeds started (can't keep moisture consistent, get dry or get moldy soil, a few successful hardy seedlings I've scooped out and danced over but most so sad I just dump them in bare patches of lawns with the fuzzy white mold so the weeds can at least use some decent soil) so most of my projects projects stuff is going to get put on a back burner.

I've got a few air-layered trees and tip-layered canes that are moving to my woods or away to help encourage native wildlife in some parks, and I have some mulberry branches ready to be bagged or bucketed, and I'm going to wander around to see if anybody who doesn't use their yard but has a bird feeder somewhere would like to have a nice tree that will significantly cut down on mowing and increase the bird population in a few years.

I did locate a couple of egg chickens and a low-income coop here and there, and I'm renewing my attack on kudzu vines that I can get before the flowers, so they can eat it and some of the woods have a little bit of breathing room.