Plant Profile: Jade Plant

Common Jade Plant

The jade plant (Crassula ovata) is a mainstay in my plant collection.


Jade plants are easy to care for succulents, and they make great house plants.


There are many different types of jade plants, I have three in my collection.

'Gollum' Jade Plant

In addition to the common jade in the first picture, I have Gollum (a cultivar) which has unique rounded leaves.

I have also heard this variety called E.T. fingers or baby toes.


The other type of jade I have is a miniature jade (this one didn't have a tag when I got it).

It looks very similar to the regular jade plant, but it's much smaller (as the name would suggest).


Keys to success with Jade Plants
In my experience, there are two main keys to successfully growing jade plants; watering and light.

Miniature Jade Plant

First, and probably the most important, is watering.

Jade plants do not like to be over watered.

Consistent over watering is fatal to jade plants.

If the plant is over watered on a regular basis, it will start to rot at the base.

Be sure to always check before watering, and water only when the soil is dry.

It's better to err on the side of under watering this plant. I put my jades outside during the summer and only water them if we're in a drought. Water sparingly in winter.

Second, jade plants need a lot of light in order to grow strong and thick. They will start to grow weak and leggy if they aren't getting enough light.

It's best to place them next to a south facing window inside the house.

Jade plant leaf tips turn red in full sun

When jade plants get enough sunlight, the stem of the plant will grow thick start to look woody.

Also, the leaf tips will turn red, making these plants even more beautiful.

Jade plants will benefit from being moved to a full sun location outside during the summer.

However, they are sensitive to sunburn, so it's important to move them into the sun gradually over several weeks.

Sun burned leaves will brown and the damaged area will die; most likely the leaf will eventually drop off. Severe sunburn may be fatal to the plant.

Sun damage on jade plant leaf

Soil
General potting soil is adequate for this plant, but it's best to use a well draining soil. If you tend to over water plants, put this one in a clay pot. Clay pots will help to wick the water out of the soil, allowing it to dry out faster.

Propagation
Jade plants are extremely easy to propagate. They can be propagated from stem or leaf cuttings; in slightly moist, well drained soil. I have found that summer is the easiest time to root jade plant cuttings. Many times a leaf will break off and start to grow roots in the soil without any help from you.

Pests
Healthy jade plants don't usually have problems with pests. Mealybugs, scale and mites can become a problem if not treated early. My jade had mealybugs one winter, I treated it by dabbing a cotton swab in rubbing alcohol and using that to remove the bugs. After several weeks of doing this daily, the mealybugs were gone.

Be careful using other common pest treatments, especially spraying anything on this plant. Jade plants are sensitive to sprays, which could end up causing more damage than the bugs.

Other tips

• Pruning the leaves will keep the plant compact and allow the stem to grow thicker. Pinch off new growth to encourge the plant to grow fuller.

• The leaves will wrinkle and become spongy if the plant isn't getting enough water, eventually shriveling and dropping off. This can also happen when it's overwatered, so be sure to check the soil to ensure it's dry before watering.

• If the base of the stem is mushy and rotting, you can save the plant by cutting off the stem a few inches above the rot and rooting it. Allow the cut area to dry for a few days before attempting to root the plant.

• If you put your jade plant outside during the summer, be sure to bring it in before any chance of frost.

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This Weeks Flower Arrangement

I have finally achieved a fall arrangement with the help of my next door neighbor. She graciously donated the sunflowers for this weeks arrangement (since mine decided not to grow this year).

It was a bit of a production to get the sun flowers from her garden. First of all, they are covered in bees and wasps during the day, so we weren't going to go near them. We ventured out after dark with a flashlight and started cutting the flowers... only to discover that the bees and wasps were still hanging out on the flower heads and stems. Eeeek!!

She is much braver than I am, so she knocked all the bugs off for me (how nice is that!?). I am pretty much terrified of wasps... so the flowers spent the night in the garage just in case.

But despite all that, here is this weeks arrangement...

This weeks arrangement includes...

• Sunflowers (large yellow and orange flowers)
• Rudbeckia flower (small dark flowers top/middle and right/middle; also flower with orange and yellow petals on bottom/center)
• Mexican hats (small flowers with dark foliage and protruding middle)
• Castor Bean seed pods (bright red pom poms top/right and center)
• Loosestrife 'firecracker' foliage (dark purple foliage bottom left and in the center)
• Hardy Hibiscus foliage (dark foliage at very top and bottom around vase)
• Blackberry lily seed pods (blackberry looking pods at top)

Don't forget to join in the fun!! Please share a link to pictures of your own flower arrangement or current blooms! I would love to see what's blooming in your gardens! You can post a link here in the comments, or you can post a picture directly to my Facebook page.

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Sun Dried Cherry Tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes

I love cherry tomatoes. They are one of my favorite sweet treats from the garden.

I eat them in salads, use them in tons of recipes, and I love to snack on them while working in the garden.

But this time of year, I have more cherry tomatoes than I can eat.

What do I do with this overabundance of sweet cherry tomatoes? I make sun dried tomatoes with them.

It's super easy to make sun dried tomatoes and they will last all winter in the fridge (if I don't eat them faster than that).


Here's how I do it...

Cut cherry tomatoes in half

After washing the tomatoes and remove the stems, I cut them in half and place them on a cookie sheet, cut side up. I usually cover the cookie sheet with aluminum foil for easy cleanup (which causes bad photography). I also spray the foil with cooking spray before putting the tomatoes on the sheet just so they don't stick.

You can get a lot of cherry tomato halves on a cookie sheet.

Place cherry tomato halves in oven to dry

I place the cookie sheet in a preheated oven (200 degrees F). It takes several hours to dry the tomatoes. This batch took about 4 hours.

Note that the larger tomatoes will take longer. After the first two hours,  I check mine every hour and remove the small ones that are done. (Otherwise the smaller ones will burn before the larger ones are done.)

Dried cherry tomatoes (excuse the bad photo cause by the foil)

 
You will know the tomatoes are done when they look and feel leathery. They should no longer hold any juice and should be slightly chewy when you try one. You don't want to cook them until they are crispy, this is overdone (but still edible).

Closeup of dried cherry tomatoes

Once they are cool, I store my sun dried tomatoes in a container in the fridge.

You could also freeze or can them to preserve them.

You can use just about any type of tomato to make sun dried tomatoes. The larger the tomato, the longer it will take to dry. 

There are tons of recipes on the internet for sun dried tomatoes, they are such a yummy and healthy snack.


What do you do with your abundance of cherry tomatoes?

Latest Harvests

A few weeks ago, I shared what I've harvested so far this year. I did a better job of recording my harvests last year, but this year it seems time is flying by.

I am very thankful to still have a vegetable garden this week, because we had our first hard frost last week (very early for us!). It was a mad rush to save the vegetable garden and it took forever to cover everything. A few plants had minor damage to their leaves, but most of my vegetable plants didn't receive any damage, I'm thrilled about that. (my husband is amazing and dedicated his evening to help me save the garden!!)

I'm still harvesting okra, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers and kohlrabi... but here's the new stuff I've been harvesting so far in September...

Sweet Bell Peppers

Grapes right before harvest

Grapes

Yellow Zucchini

Squash (not sure what type)

The next few weeks are going to be extremely busy, there are tons of vegetables still coming. I'll be preserving like crazy over the next few weekends. Hopefully we won't get our next frost/freeze until I'm done harvesting most of the stuff out there. The longer it waits, the happier I'll be. It's a lot of work to cover everything and it would be great not to have to do that again this year!!


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This Week's Flower Arrangement

We had our first frost last week, but most of my flowers made it through without too much damage. I'm very happy about that! The zinnia flowers look pretty bad, but I deadheaded the damaged ones and hope to have another blast of color from them by the weekend.

This week's arrangement is a bit of a hodgepodge of things. I had a few flowers that were broken off that I needed to cut, plus I thought it would be fun to include some seed pods this week. So here is this week's arrangement...

Hodgepodge flower arrangement

Here's what is included in this arrangement...

• Petunias (white and also purple flowers)
• Gladiola (red flower spike top/left)
• Obedient Plant (light purple flower spike top/right)
• Marigolds (orange flowers w/yellow center)
• Canna lily seed pods (top center spike)
• Blackberry lily seed pods (blackberry looking pods all around)
• Artichoke foliage (silverish foliage on left and top right)

Don't forget to join in the fun!! Please share a link to pictures of your own flower arrangement or current blooms! I would love to see what's blooming in your gardens! You can post a link here in the comments, or you can post a picture directly to my Facebook page.

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September What's Bloomin'

Wow, this summer has flown by!! I can't believe it's been over a month since I posted pictures of what's bloomin' in my gardens.

It's getting to be that time of year where the blooms aren't as prolific in the gardens. But I have managed to find a bunch of new blooms to share with you. Here are some of my favorite September blooms...

Purple Okra

Celosia with Marigolds

Petunias

Sedum

Brugmansia

Gladiola

Orchid Peacock

Sedum

Brugmansia

Sedum

Each week during the summer, I create a new flower arrangement with whatever is blooming in my garden at the time. Check out some of my latest flower arrangements...

Flower Arrangement from September 13th
Flower Arrangement from September 6th
Arrangement from August 30th

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Debugging and Cleaning Potted Plants

Last year, I wrote a blog post about overwintering tropicals as house plants. In this post, I included the steps I usually take to debug my plants to prepare them for the long winter inside the house.

Recently some of my Facebook friends shared different ways they debug and clean their plants to bring them indoors. I like experimenting and trying new ways of doing these things. So, this year I've decided to try out some new techniques for debugging and cleaning my house plants.

The first thing I changed this year is that I've decided to start early and do it in small chunks. I used to pick one weekend to do a marathon cleaning, debugging and bringing in all my plants at once. This was always an exhausting and stressful weekend.

Not this year! For the past few weeks, I've been trying to debug, clean and bring in a small group of plants at a time. I'm loving this, it's much less stressful for me (and easier on my back!!).

Getting ready to bring the house plants back inside

The second change I've made is the way I debug the plants. Since I won't be using the bug fogger to debug them all at once in the garage, I had to try something that would work on a few plants at a time.

I found a large plastic tub in the garage and I filled it up with water and a small amount of Ivory soap. To kill the bugs on the plant I soak the whole plant, pot and all, in the tub of water for about 10 minutes.

The soapy water will kill any bugs that are on the plant or in the soil. I'm hoping that it will also kill any aphids, scale or mealy bugs on the leaves. The bug fogger does not kill these common house plant pests.

Soaking plants to kill the bugs

If the foliage isn't covered completely by water, I've been using a spray bottle of soapy water to wash the leaves. After soaking, I pull the plant out, scrub the pot and rinse the whole thing well with the hose.

We haven't had much rain lately, so most of my plants were bone dry before soaking them. This is great because now I don't have the added step of watering all of my plants before bringing them in. One other added benefit to soaking the plants is that all the dead leaves and other debris in the soil will float to the top, making it easy to discard.

Debugging and cleaning house plants

So far, I really like this new method of soaking the plants. When I first read about it, I thought it sounded like it would be a lot more work. But as it turns out, it's not. I used to scrub the pots and rinse the plants before bringing them in anyway, this way they get a good watering out of the deal. I feel like my plants are cleaner too.

I have a few plants that are too large to soak in the tub, for those I will use the bug fogger. I like use the foggers in my garage in the fall to kill all the spiders anyway. After fogging the plants, I am going to scrub the pot, use the spray bottle of soapy water to clean the foliage, and give the whole thing a good rinse.

House plants back inside

Thanks to my Facebook friends for the ideas. I love hearing about other people's ideas and learning from them. Networking with other gardeners is a great thing!!

This Week's Flower Arrangement

Fall is quickly approaching and the flower choices for my arrangements are getting slimmer every week. This week, I wanted to focus on annuals again because we're supposed to get our first frost tomorrow night.

That means that the annuals might be done this week, which makes me extremely sad. Hopefully we'll just get a light frost (if any) so the annuals can survive a few more weeks.

Anyway, here is my flower arrangement for this week. (Hopefully this won't be my last one with annual flowers!)

Flower arrangement with annuals

Here's what included in this week's arrangement:

• Gladiola (large spike of pink flowers on top left)
• Marigolds (orange puffs and also small red flowers w/yellow center)
• Zinnias (large round pink flowers)
• Petunias (white and also light purple flowers - they smell wonderful!)
• Variegated Wandering Jew (variegated foliage hanging out at bottom)
• Canna lily leaf (tip of dark red leaf sticking out the top in back)
• Coleus foliage (dark colored foliage barely visible in center of arrangement)

As usual, please join in and share a link to pictures of your flower arrangements and/or current blooms! I love seeing other peoples flowers! You can also share a photo on my Facebook page.

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Free Houseplants Giveaway - and the winner is...

I meant to draw the winners names yesterday, but the day got away from me. Sorry to keep you all waiting!!

Thanks again to all who entered the contest for free houseplants, it was fun reading all your comments and seeing all the wonderful plants that people named as their favorites. I wish I could fulfill all of your wishlists!

I drew two names as winners! As promised, each winner will get a small box full of cuttings and divisions from some of the plants in my collection. I'm excited to start packing those boxes!

The first winner is...

Megan!

Megan's said...

"I'd be interested in any spider plants, cacti, and jade. My cat ate most of my spider plant before I moved it to a safer location. I also love cacti and jade because they're kitty safe and I can keep them outdoors in Los Angeles weather!"

The second winner is...

Nk!
NK's said...

"...my favorite houseplant is my hoya KQ, (about to bloom for the VERY FIRST TIME) and the highest on my wishlist is pretty much all other hoyas, especially serpens and chelsea. I love succulents too, and anything strange."

Congratulations to both of you!! I'll be in touch and plan to get the boxes sent off to you later this week.

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Canning Tomato Sauce

Last week, I told you about my adventures in trying out canning green beans for the first time. In that post, I mentioned that one of the things I wanted to try next was canning tomato sauce.

Well, good news, I got that one checked off the list...

Wow, I thought canning green beans was a lot of work! I started with a ton of tomatoes. I'm not sure how many because I never weighed or counted them... I wish I would have kept track.

Once we cut all the tomatoes up (my husband helped me with this part, thank you!), we had three large stock pots full and cooking on the stove. Sheesh, you sure need a lot of tomatoes to make tomato sauce!

Washing and cutting before cooking the tomatoes

 
After cooking the tomatoes for a short time, we pureed them in the food processor and strained out the seeds and peels.

That was a lot of work too, it took forever to strain! I'm not sure, but I think I strained it too much. The remaining juice was not very thick.

Puree the cooked tomatoes and then strain the juice

The instructions said to cook the "sauce" until it thickens. I cooked it down by at least 1/2 and it was still not what I would consider thick. (I wonder what I did wrong.) I think if I would have waited for it to thicken, I would have ended up with one quart of sauce. After well over an hour of waiting, I finally just went with it...

Cooking the sauce down to "thicken" it up

Next, we had to process the jars in boiling water. I wonder if it would have been faster to use the pressure cooker. This boiling water business took a long time.

Processing the jars in boiling water

After the processing time was complete, I let the water and the jars cool a bit before removing them. Then I let them sit out overnight to cool completely. They were all sealed when I got up the next morning.

Final product - 4 quarts and 1 pint

I would like to try canning tomato sauce again, but I have to figure out how to get the sauce to thicken up without losing over 1/2 of the volume in the process. That was a LOT of work for only 4 quarts and 1 pint of sauce. I was thinking I would get at least 6 quarts out of the deal.

Any advice? Should I use a different method for straining so I get more pulp next time? Is there something else I could add to the sauce to thicken it up?

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Weekly Flower Arrangement

This week's arrangement was inspired by the coming change of the season. I'm feeling a little blue that fall is coming and the weather will be turning colder. So to try to cheer myself up, I decided to try to embrace the good things about fall and make this week's arrangement with fall colors.

It turned out much brighter than I planned, but I like the result. I was hoping to have some darker colored sunflowers, but none of them grew this year. So my "fall" arrangement looks pretty summery, but that's ok.

Fall colors flower arrangement

This arrangement contains the following:

• Sunflowers (giant yellow flowers)
• Marigolds (orange puffs and also small red flowers w/yellow center)
• Purple cone flower (pink flowers w/brown center)
• Gaillardia 'Goblin' (daisy like flower with redish-orange center and yellow tips)
• Rudbeckia (flower w/dark center and yellow tips - top/center)

Please join in and share a link to pictures of your flower arrangements and/or current blooms! I would love to see what other people are doing with flower arrangements!

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Canning Green Beans

I used to be afraid to try canning. I grew up in the city, all of our canned goods came from the grocery store. I never had a Grandmother or aunts who canned, at least not that I remember. I never even remember eating anything home canned until I was in college.

Two years ago, we had so many peppers and cucumbers that we didn't know what to do with them. I was ready to give them away, just like I've always done with overabundance, but my husband didn't like that idea. He wanted to try canning them.

We had no idea how to do it (he's a city kid too), so we went to the source of all knowledge... the internet.

Last years canned peppers

Our first year of canning was a success, we preserved enough peppers to last us over a year. We didn't end up with many cans of pickles and they hardly lasted us through the winter. We were so happy with our success, that last year we canned even more pickles and peppers. Yep, we're hooked!!

Some of last years canned pickles

This year, I wanted to try canning more things besides just pickles and peppers. I've been thinking about trying green beans for a while now. The one thing that has deterred me was the fact that you need a pressure cooker to can green beans.

I don't know why but this scared me (well, one reason is because it's an investment to buy one). Canning pickles and peppers is super easy, but canning green beans sounded much more difficult! After two large harvests of green beans, I decided what the heck... and I went out and bought a pressure cooker.

Well as it turns out, canning green beans isn't that much harder. You start out doing pretty close to the same steps as canning pickles and peppers. You have to spend time washing, cutting and prepping everything.

Green beans fresh from the vine

You also need to heat all the equipment, but don't have to be as fussy about sterilization. The biggest difference is the extra time it takes at the end to pressure cook the cans (especially when you're reading and re-reading the instructions the whole time).

It took about 15 minutes to build up the pressure in the pressure cooker - then another 20 minutes for the cans to process in the cooker. After that, it took almost an hour for the cooker to cool down enough for me to open it and remove the jars.

The whole process, from the time I picked the beans to the time I removed the jars from the pressure cooker, took 4 hours. I started with about 2lbs of green beans, so a bigger batch would have required more prep time.

Pressure Cooker in action

I only got 6 pint sized jars out of my fist batch of canning green beans. Not much, but it's a good start. I should have at least one more large harvest to can before frost hits, maybe more (hopefully!).

Canned green beans

It will take a lot of jars of green beans to pay for the pressure cooker, but I'm trying not to think of it that way. I figure it's a long term investment and will pay for itself in time.

The pressure cooker came with a cookbook, and I plan to try canning other things this fall too. Next on my list of things to try canning... tomato sauce and salsa!

Fresh salsa

You know, I can see myself really getting into canning (ha, as if I don't already have enough hobbies!).

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