 Hi there and welcome to a little garden on the prairies and happy Mother's Day. I figured since the date of airing of this video is going to be on Mother's Day that it was only suiting that maybe I talk about a few of my memories that I have of my mother and my grandmother and how they are so with me all the time when I'm outside in the garden and playing in the dirt. So I'm also going to show you quickly how to take some cuttings from geraniums so that you can propagate them and kind of multiply you know a plant like this into many more that you can spread into other containers or out into your garden. And I also want to share a little story as to why this particular geranium plant is so special to me. So in early January 2018 my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. And of course this was devastating news to her and to the family. She was a very young 72 years old at that time. Very active very healthy woman who enjoyed spending winters with my father in Arizona golfing and she loved hiking. She hiked the Grand Canyon twice I believe and in the summertime she loved to garden here in Saskatchewan. So the doctor basically said that there was no chance of recovery and it could be you know a few months to a couple years and sadly within three months my mom passed away. It was on April 2nd. So that week after my mom passed away when we were all gathering at mom and dad's house one of the family members was downstairs and came across a couple of her geranium plants that she had you know put away in the fall in the basement and this was something my mom did every year. She took her geranium plants pot and all just cut them down let them go dormant left them down in the basement and went off to Arizona for the winter and every spring she'd bring them up and bring them back to life and put them out into her yard. So this plant here is one of those geraniums that we found in my mom's basement and I've kind of followed that tradition with putting it outside all summer and in the fall just before it gets too cold and the frost hard frost come I just bring it into my heated garage cut it right down stick it in a dark corner and just leave it there. So geraniums are very you know tough plants. They're great flowers to grow here in zone 3 Saskatchewan so I like to take cuttings from this in the spring and kind of multiply it into different into more plants and share them with my daughters and my sister-in-law and just spread them around my garden so that I have a little bit of my mom everywhere I go outside. So I just want to show you how it's easy to take some cuttings off of a plant like this as you can see it has got some beautiful foliage. It's been in this ugly old pot for the last couple years. I think I did transplant it once since since I've taken it from my mom's house and it just keeps coming back every year. It's just beautiful so I'll just show you how to take some cuttings and we'll put them into some potting soil. So I'm going to just look for a couple spots here in the geranium. We have some good growth coming with a couple different little growth points here. This one here for example looks pretty good to be taking as a cutting so I'm going to just be using some shears. You can also use a sharp knife and just cut it straight across. So I've taken three cuttings here that I'm just going to pot up into this these little containers today. So what you want to do before you pot them up is to remove some of this growth from the main stem here. So any of these big long ones that are down low I'm just going to bend them and remove them. Just snap them off and these little guys here too can just be pinched right off. So there just to kind of shorten it up even a little bit more I'm going to cut it just below this one growth point here just a straight cut and then this can go into the dirt. This is the third one I took as you can see it's got a lot of pretty big leaves on it that we're going to snap off. I'll even take this big one off. Pinch off these little leaves cut straight here then they're ready to go into a pot. So these are just three inch containers that I have filled with some regular potting soil got them good and moist right now. I've seen on a video I was watching that they like to be planted next close to the edge of the pot. I don't know why but we're going to go with that. I'm just going to make a little hole here. Stick the drainium in so the couple of those little growth points are under the dirt here and then just to help kind of keep that moisture in and kind of create a little mini greenhouse effect I'm going to put some baggies over top of these. You'll see some moisture developing hopefully inside the baggie that's good get a little humidity going and these should be kept out of direct sunlight for the next two or three weeks while they develop a good root system. I'm planning that being it's the first of May that by early June these will be ready to be potted up into bigger containers or somewhere into my flower beds. So that is it for propagating drainium super easy. So I just wanted to take you outside for a little garden tour right now as well. As you can see by the video here it was a super windy day when I was trying to video and so as a result I had two voiceover. So I wanted to share a story about this rock here. It doesn't really look like anything special but it has a very special story behind it. But first let's take a tour around my garden and see what's happening. So this here is what I call my lasagna garden bed and I created this about three years ago and it's layers and layers of organic material. I used cardboard, lots of compost, lots of coffee grounds and kind of partially composted materials, sticks, twigs, grass, clippings, leaves and I just keep building and building on this every year and I use this to plant all my annuals. All the pollinator flowers that I want to use to attract birds and butterflies and insects to my garden. And I also try planting some perennials in here every year but every year if you make it. But in a month or so this will be full of color and all sorts of different flowers and hopefully bring a lot of friendly insects and pollinators to my garden. So I often wonder what my grandparents would think of my gardening techniques that I use these days. A lot of my techniques are permaculture type things. I don't do any rototilling, I don't do any digging. Everything is planted under straw or in containers. So this here is my two raised garden beds that I'm converting to container gardening just because I find it a little easier to maintain. So lots of tomatoes, beans, cucumbers will be going into these containers. Along with a few other vegetables that make good companions. I've already got some things planted here in containers. These are all my lettuces that I have started about a week ago. And I'm starting to see a few sprouts coming through. I will also be doing all my root crops in containers. So beets, carrots and turnips. And this is where I do the potato planting. So all my potatoes are planted under straw using the Ruth Stout method. So as a child on the May long weekend was always the weekend when we planted the garden at my grandparents farm. And their methods were the very traditional type that I'm sure anybody my age would have used when they were younger. And it was basically a huge field of beautiful dark soil. They rotted tilled it up every spring and rotted tilled it under every fall. And you know it was a very strict method of growing. The rows had to be very straight and everything had to be spaced out just so. So you know it was it turned out well. My grandparents had a beautiful garden. And but it was a lot of work for them to keep maintained a lot of weeding, dealing with the weather and just every year was all about survival. So you had to grow enough food to be able to preserve and can and freeze over the winter to get you through to the next year. But for me gardening has been more of a hobby and something that I really enjoy doing. And my garden seems to be expanding a lot as well. Every year I get a little bit more containers and do a little bit more growing. So as I said I just want to share a story about this rock and how it came to be in my yard. These large rocks are not native to our area at all. We don't have huge rocks like this at all. But this rock actually came from about 300 kilometers away from my great-grand parents homestead located in a little town known as La Verna Saskatchewan, which is right on the Alberta border. And this rock was actually the doorstep into their home. And when my grandmother got married and moved to farm, not too far from here, she actually got this rock removed from her parents doorstep and brought it to their farm. And it was a doorstep in front of their house for many, many years. And then when my grandparents sold their farm and moved to town, my mom wanted to keep that tradition of the rock being on the farm and got my dad to load it up into the bucket of the tractor and drove it to their farm. And she used it in a similar way that I have here just as a kind of a focal point in her flower bed. And when my parents retired and moved to town and sold the farm, shortly afterwards, my dad and mom showed up in our yard with the tractor and this huge rock in the bucket. And they just said, I already want it. So at that time, we weren't really prepared. I said, well, just put it up against this post here for now. And then we'll find a place for it. So the rock has actually never moved from its original placing here in my yard. And I've kind of just decorated around it with some flowers and an old cream can. And it sits at the edge of my flower bed. So I think it looks great there. And I'm really happy to be the fourth generation of having this rock in our yard. And hopefully one day one of my three daughters will pick it up and move it to their place and keep the tradition going. So I hope you enjoyed listening to some of the memories I have of my mother and grandmother and to all the mothers out there on earth and in heaven. I wish you a very happy Mother's Day. Thank you for watching.