Category Archives: Propagation

Gardening, Native Plants, Propagation

Garden Update

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It has been a busy spring: work, life, and a sick kitty conspired to stretch us thin. Things are finally settling down, in time for us to enjoy the lead-up to summer.

The swallowtails have arrived, just in time for the Dame’s Rocket. This is a lovely plant, but invasive in some areas — check before you grow!

A bunch of other things are starting to bloom or just hitting their stride.

The Harsh Paintbrush has been going for a couple weeks now. I grew these from seed two years ago, and am very pleased that they are solidly perennial.

The slugs tend to munch on them when they’re starting to res-route; the copper around the pots eliminates that problem. I’ll be trying to plant some out this year — we’ll see whether I can keep them safe in the spring in the ground!

I also started some baby paintbrushes from some of the plants that bloomed last year. It’s gratifying to have their propagation down — maybe not to nursery standards, but quite solidly enough for home use.

I scarify the seeds in a ziplock back with some damp coconut coir for 6 weeks, then I sprinkle them in a 4″ pot filled with a coir/perlite/vermiculite mixture with a little vermiculite over. They sprouted in just a few days under grow lights in the basement.

About a month on, I use a fork to pull out chunks and stick them in 2″ pots. Then I sprinkle some native yarrow seeds over: these will act as the host plant, since paintbrushes are semi-parasitic. Yarrow sprout fast enough that they catch up nicely, and then they can grow up together.

Unfortunately not everything was so successful.

The native penstemon were getting off to an amazing start after the same scarification and planting regiment as the paintbrushes… but they had a mold attack very early on, and it pretty much destroyed them. I might get one.

Lesson here: plant them more thinly, and maybe don’t use vermiculite over them; I feel like the vermiculite made it worse.

The planting notes for this species do mention that they are susceptible to damping off… so I will be much more careful next time!

One other note on damping off:

I was a good girl and bleached all my pots this year, and it made a big difference (penstemon aside). The only things I had any problems with were my first batch of chocolate cosmos (note to self, they do *not* like being wet — keep them on the dry side until they hit their stride), and the penstemon.

So, lots of success and a few failures this spring.

More notes later! I will resist putting everything in this one catch-up post 😉

Native Plants, Propagation

Planting Notes: Giant Red Indian Paintbrush from Seed

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I tried growing a bunch of PNW native seeds in 2022-23. I got the seeds from Inside Passage.

I had good success with Castilleja miniata (giant red Indian paintbrush).

My basic protocol was to fill a sterilized 4″ pot with a soil-free mixture of 2 parts coir, 1 part perlite, 1 part vermiculite. I then planted the seeds and put the pots outside under a hardware cloth cover to get scarification over the winter.

Based on the UW native plant protocols (available to the public here: https://jbakker.shinyapps.io/Protocols/ ), I planted the seeds on the surface and sprinkled a light layer of perlite on top.

Note that you should be able to do scarification in the refrigerator; I’ll be experimenting more with that in the 2023-24 season. For my first attempt, I wanted to keep everything as “natural” as possible.

When I checked my native seed pots in mid February, I had some sprouts starting! At around this time, I brought the pots in and put them under grow lights in the garage (about 50F).

By 3/7 they had 2-4 true leaves, and I split them into multiple 2 and 4″ pots (scooping out small clumps of seedlings with a fork and transferring them as intact as possible), and added native yarrow seeds.

Most paintbrush species are hemiparasitic: they can do their own photosynthesis, but they get a boost from their neighbors. I had encountered a reference indicating that they could be grown with native yarrow, which is convenient because yarrow is an extremely fast sprouter.

The yarrow sprouted in less than a week, and they really started to take off.

2″ pots of Paintbrush seedlings surrounded by host yarrow, 1 month after yarrow seeds were added.

I up-potted into 4″ and gallon pots over the next two months. I moved them back outside sometime in April, probably late April.

I got my first bloom at the beginning of June!

This was a lovely surprise, because I had thought that I would have to wait until the next year to get any blooms.

As it turned out, most of the Paintbrush plants wound up blooming, probably because of the boost they got from their time under grow lights through early spring.

Another unexpected and pleasant surprise was how long the flowers lasted. That initial flower was still going strong 3 weeks later. I think it lasted a good month.

The other paintbrush plants started blooming in late July.

Some paintbrush plants are biennial, some are perennial. I think these are perennial, so I will plant them out in a meadow area this autumn, and hope they come back next year.

One more planting note: these are listed as full sun, but we really don’t have full sun available; the best I could do was 6 hours of direct sun, with shade the rest of the day.

That probably wasn’t optimal, but it was enough to get blooming plants!

Let me know if you have questions! If you decide to give them a try, good luck!