Cranberries, Potting Soils, and a Too-Tall Houseplant
Ellen and C.L. talk about cranberry recipes that go beyond the traditional “cranberry sauce.” They discuss potting “soils” and their composition, and give a listener advice about a Dracaena fragrans (aka corn plant) that has gotten too tall.
Click here for Ellen’s Cranberry Chutney recipe.
:31 What’s For Dinner: Cranberries
8:23 Eat/Drink/Grow: Potting Mixes
24:26 Love Letters and Questions: From Bailey, a tale of the too tall dracaena
When the cranberry harvest is happening on Cape Cod it’s a beautiful sight!
See C.L.’s too-tall Dracaena fragrans (aka corn plant) on the left? It was nearing the ceiling last winter, so this summer it got rejuvenated.
First, C.L. cut off the top 8 inches.
Next the leaves were removed from the bottom half of the stalk. That area was dusted with rooting hormone powder.
The cutting was then placed in a pot of fresh potting mix and kept moist but not wet for the next two months. This rooting top was placed in a bright window but not in direct sun. Now it has been moved to an even brighter location and it’s growing well. (Note: C.L. put the bottom stalk in the compost. Yes, she could have just cut it down to a foot or two high and let it branch out at the top, but how many corn plants does one person need?
i was looking forward to the cookie recipe….sniff…(love the ‘cast!)
When comparing the negative impacts of peat versus coconut coir for potting mixes, you raise a good point about how far the coir needs to travel to get to your garden center. Distance, however, is not always a good metric of a product’s shipping related carbon footprint. A bottle of wine flown or trucked from California to New York, for example, has a much higher carbon footprint (five to eleven times) than a bottle of wine shipped from France to NY…by boat! (https://www.livescience.com/3041-carbon-footprint-wine.html). Since most coconut coir comes from Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines, one might assume (I have not confirmed this) that it is arriving in the U.S. by sea whereas peat will be trucked south from northern states and Canada. Thanks for all the work you do getting folks excited and informed about gardening! – a fellow Master Gardener volunteer from Minnesota.
Thanks for listening and caring! Hard to compare wine to coconuts, but impossible to compare peat to coconut coir since the former is a limited, irreplaceable resource (not to mention a carbon sink) and coconut coir is a totally renewable source of fiber.