the little blue shack: On the potting bench

When I first started gardening I bought most of my plants as seedlings from nurseries or from our local Bunnings hardware. This was convenient and made it really easy for me to make up a quick garden bed as the fancy took me. There were some down sides though. I would often select what looked to be the healthiest and the biggest of the seedlings (maybe with a degree of greed I have to admit) which would often turn out to be rather poorly performing plants. On removing them at the end of the season, I would often find an undersized root ball, the exact shape of the punnet cell it had originally come from. I believe this is probably because the plant was already root bound at the time I'd bought it. Often these punnets come with unexpected "extras", sometime caterpillars I've missed seeing under a leaf, or an additional tiny weed that spreads like wildfire on the days I'm not in the garden. And all this comes with a heftier price tag then the huge number of plants I can potentially get from a packet of seeds. My last pet hate with purchased seedlings and the one that has really turned me off buying them is the tiny styrofoam balls that help make up the filling of the potting mix used in their punnets. This stuff never seems to go away. Yet again just a couple of days ago I turned up soil out of a pot to top fill a garden bed and this white menace was everywhere. Things don't look so organic when you're trying to stop the chickens from gobbling these little seed look alikes.

Like most gardeners I turned to producing my own seedlings, from bought seeds, from seeds collected from plants that worked in my garden, from volunteer plants that pop up and from strikings of plants already existing. At first my hubby built me a rough potting bench against the back shed. But time has proved it a little too high for me to work comfortably at (maybe because he's six foot 5 compared to my 5 foot 6), and instead my hive of activity now centres around the old outdoor table. I thought that I should start to share what I'm anxiously waiting on sprouting, what's sitting there waiting anxiously for it's own garden spot, the stories behind the successes and the failures in a regular little update. It also might encourage me as a sort of confessional, to finally plant out some of these poor things that have patiently waited way too long to find a more permanently suitable spot.

Hibiscus cuttings still in their tubes, stacked into a bigger pot to keep them upright.

Lately I've been almost obsessed with growing anything I can get my hands on, just to try, so it's a real mixed bag. I've got what I think are called Spraxis in a punnet, struck from seed which I took from one that just popped up out of the ground near my front door one day, they look kind of like a dutch lily leaf and the flowers are dainty, gold with a red freckle. After the flower comes a seed pod, and well, I couldn't help myself, the seeds went into a punnet and the rest they say is history. Near them, some chillies or maybe capsicum, or bell peppers, in all honesty, they been there so long now I'm no longer sure, but they did come from one of the above I had growing at one point.
I have a large hibicus near the back door, and somewhere in my dreams this will need to be cut down and transplanted to make way for a deck, plus it needed cutting back, so I had about 30 cuttings, of which about 8 or so are now in small pots, another 10 are alive in tubes but still not showing enough root for me to believe they are ready for bigger things, and the rest are compost. Do I know what I'm going to do with either of these things? No, no idea. Just thought I'd give it a go because they were there and I could. I have ginger, lots of ginger, about 2 dozen in old herb pots, struck from the leftovers of last seasons ginger. I want to put these into the garden in the retained area around my levelled wicker bed area, but the area's not fully retained yet and the chickens keep digging it up, meanwhile they are quickly outgrowing their little yellow pots. The yellow pots remind me that I should mention that I kept my pots and punnets from previously purchased plants and reuse them (until they fall apart). I also like to keep same things in same coloured pots where possible, a habit I started when I couldn't really recognise what I'd actually planted. I've also got red pots with loquats grown from my own loquat fruit seeds, and green pots with cape gooseberry seedlings from last seasons crop.
So what's on your potting bench these days?