PROPAGATING MINIATURE PERENNIALS
One item in our Connecticut landscape that’s completely out of scale with its surroundings is the monstrous cold frame near the back boundary line. The cement-block wall goes down below the frost line, and up high enough to make room for winter storage of fairly good-sized plants. The discarded storm windows are hinged across the back and completely removable in summer, when they are replaced by light wooden frames of the same size with laths nailed a lath-width apart. The construction slants toward the south, to make the most of all winter sunshine; light shading is necessary in summer to protect tender seedlings and rooting cuttings.
The cold frame serves dozens of purposes and has more than paid for itself with plants it has protected or produced. When we plant perennial seeds in the cold frame, we throw a piece of burlap across the top and keep it moist until they germinate. Tender seedlings spend their first winter within its walls, and so do newly rooted cuttings. Questionably hardy perennials or any that we acquire in fall are held over until spring. Every year, it seems as if we take more out of the cold frame than we put into it!
Other, smaller, portable devices are equally useful for all kinds of summer propagating. Low square or rectangular wooden frames can be set over an area of prepared soil and the top covered with glass or polyethylene to keep the soil from drying out. An empty fruit crate from the grocer can be equipped with a glass or plastic top. A few cuttings can be rooted in soil in some shady spot with a clear glass jar inverted over them. There are many devices that keep soil moist and air humid while seeds germinate or cuttings root. How large or elaborate yours should be depends on how much propagating you want to do.
Seeds
Many hard-to-find miniature perennials can be easily grown from a twenty-cent packet of seed. You can also harvest seeds from your own plants; but only natural species will “come true.” Complicated hybrids will have unpredictable offspring, most of them not particularly desirable.
We plant seeds of most biennials and perennials in June, when the soil is comfortably warm and the seedlings will have the whole summer to grow large and lusty. Some of our own seeds that ripen in midsummer are planted as soon as we can harvest them; those that mature later are usually stored on a cool shelf in the cellar in plastic boxes or little pill bottles that keep them dry.
Soil for the seed bed is sifted to remove pebbles and debris, and mixed with equal quantities of sharp sand and peat or sieved leaf mold. To prevent “damp-off,” a fungus that chokes off stems at the soil line, soil should be sterilized if at all possible. Small quantities may be baked in the oven. Special easy-to-use fungicides are also available; follow label directions.
Rocks, water, and planting—an effective combination of all the elements of a rock garden. (Mr. and Mrs. Norman Cherry)