Roses and Ghost Berries

I know this isn’t really exciting unless you’re a massive plant nerd, but I grew roses from seed! I have baby rose seedlings, sprouted from some seeds I collected at my very first permablitz from the prunings of some heritage roses. I have no idea what varieties they were, so my babies are of unknown parentage, and I’ll probably have a long while to wait until I see the first flowers, but even so – how cool is that? Roses. From seeds. From rosehips.

There are people out there who don’t know that roses even produce seeds; one of my fellow permablitzers was quite surprised when I explained why I was collecting the rosehips. Although, to be fair, many of the newer varieties are too tightly petaled to be pollinated, or just plain infertile, so they don’t produce hips.

(image source: Wikimedia Commons; author: Anna)

In other news, I would like to just say that raspberries are amazingly tough.

There was a small mixup in one of my plant orders from the Diggers Club, so they very kindly sent me two free Willamette raspberry plants. Unfortunately, they sent them to my current residential address (an apartment) rather than my plants and packages address (my mum’s place in the suburbs) – so the package got sent to my local post office, and I got a package to pickup notice in the post. The post office then proceeded to lose my package; they couldn’t find it when I went to pick it up, claimed the notice was probably for a package I had already picked up, and said they’d call me when/if they found the missing parcel. As I didn’t realise that the package in question was the raspberries, I left it with them.

3 weeks later I got a phone call to pick up the package which they had finally found. Only then, when i picked it up and saw the “LIVE PLANTS” notice on the box did I make the connection. I opened the box, fully expecting to find dead sticks. After all, these plants had been in a cardboard box with no water or sunlight for at least 3 weeks. To my surprise, they weren’t dead. The poor things had started trying to sprout, sending these pale yellow-white tendrils outward, desperately seeking food and water. They looked like ghost plants.

I gave them some water and put them on the balcony in the hope that they might survive with some nurturing. They not only survived – a week later they were green and thriving. So I can only say again, raspberries are tough, and Diggers obviously grow super healthy, resiliant plants (an observation also borne out by other live plants I’ve purchased from them). A++ would buy from again.