Time to tidy up a few loose ends I left dangling about my efforts in the greenhouse, as I spent this morning working in there. First of all, the Lamium orvala basal cuttings. I wrote back in April or thereabouts about how I had taken cuttings, following instructions in an ancient Telegraph article by Carol Klein. She emphasised how they must be done while the stems are still solid at the base, before they have become hollow with age, as they do. Because it was such a wet and mild spring the Lamium in my garden was ahead of Carol Klein's timing in the Telegraph, and I was left scrabbling around to find short stems that were still solid, but I found enough for two pots, eight cuttings in total. I used ordinary multi-purpose compost and stood them in a heated propagator with a plastic cover.
What I did not own up to at the time was that within half an hour of dibbling my cuttings into the compost, they had wilted atrociously. I assumed that I must have done something wrong, and that they'd had it. Perhaps a largish propagator with a lid was not suitable, and they needed to be in plastic bags where the humidity would be higher. However, within another hour they had perked up again. I didn't know that soft cuttings could recover from wilting like that. As the days and weeks followed, they remained green and turgid, and eventually I could see roots through the drainage holes in the pots, and some of the cuttings began to make new top growth.
Today I tipped them out of their pots, and slightly to my astonishment, all eight out of the eight cuttings had struck. They make their new roots from the very end of the stem, not up its length, which is maybe why it's important that the stem should have a solid base. A couple had thrown out second stems, again from the base of the cutting. So there you go, it appears to be as easy as that, and if you have one Lamium orvala and a greenhouse, in a couple of months' time you could have half a dozen if you wanted, without shelling out an additional £4.50 per plant in a 9cm pot, or whatever your friendly local nursery wants to charge you, assuming that they have any.
Next, to the root aphid. The RHS replied quite promptly to my email asking what to do about it, and I have been far slower acting on their advice, which was that an insecticide drench would be effective, such as sold to treat vine weevil grubs. The brand name you are most likely to see is Provado. I drenched my young Geranium maderense a couple of days ago, and today moved them on from 9cm to one litre pots. While I was at it I treated some pelargoniums and a dwarf pomegranate I knew had root aphid, because I'd found it when setting out to repot them, and some of the other over-wintered pelargoniums, but lost track of which pots I'd done and which I hadn't, which was not clever of me. The treatment remains active in the plant for four to six weeks in the case of normal aphids and whitefly, and up to four months against vine weevil grubs. It is horribly expensive, and I have not quite decided if it is sensible to treat everything on a precautionary basis, to try and eliminate reservoirs of infection, or stick to having the treatment to hand to zap pots I know are affected.
A new development is a fresh outbreak of vole activity in the greenhouse. I've had trouble in the last two winters, but summer is a first. It, or they, dug a hole in the rootball of an unfortunate shrub that has been waiting to go out for far too long, and excavated several pots of Dierama, eating the fleshy roots of some of them, and leaving others scatted across the remnants of their compost. I set two mousetraps, baiting them with peanuts, and covering them with old plastic supermarket fruit boxes to try and keep birds off them, since the manager at my old job once caught a dunnock inside a polytunnel. It took me a long time to remember how the mousetraps worked, and I was terrified I would catch my fingers. This morning both plastic boxes had been overturned, and one trap had sprung but the other hadn't gone off, and didn't even when I poked it with a stick. The peanuts had gone, though. I shall have to try again, and work out what I did wrong with one of the traps. I hate it when I do catch anything, on the other hand I don't want voles rampaging through the greenhouse.
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