Baby Roses in the Basement

One corner of my basement workshop is set up as a place to nurture my fall rose cuttings and to hold over any resulting plants till it's safe for them to live outside in the spring.  It feels wonderful to work with green, growing things in winter, while the world outside is brown and dormant.  It's the main way that this gardener survives the downtime of winter.

My light set-up is simple ... a chrome-plated shelf rack from Costco, and each shelf is fitted with a cheap four-foot two-bulb fluorescent light fixture.  One bulb is cool spectrum, one bulb is warm spectrum.  This is not as efficient as the expensive grow lights, but it does the job that I need.

This year's crop of roses is very special to me.  They are some of the rare ones from my garden, along with plants from the collection at Monticello's Tufton Farm.  A few of these babies are destined to be traded with rose friends.  Most of them will be sent to rose nurseries, for use as stock plants ... with the goal of making them available in commerce in the future.  This is the best way I know to preserve these roses, and to do what I can to insure their continued survival.

In addition to the roses, I also have some baby fig plants.  These came from cuttings that I took last October at an abandoned service station in Louisa County, Virginia.  (I love figs almost as much as I love roses.)

There's a Magnolia seedling in there, too, that I found growing underneath one of my roses last fall.

In the next week or so, I will package up the Florida-bound plants and ship them to their new home at Rose Petals Nursery.  The rest of them will stay safely in the basement till the end of March.  That's when I plan to transplant them into six-inch pots and begin to transition them to their life outdoors in the garden.

"Preserving history one rose at a time" 

(This is the motto at Rose Petals, and it perfectly expresses exactly how I feel about what I do!)

Click HERE to go to my propagation photo tutorial.  It's really, really easy!