Landscape Construction -- Followup: Interlocking pavers

Just to follow up on the interlocking pavers from last term. Photos were taken after some significant rains, as you will well see.

Plant Propagation -- Week 2

We had a week off from plant propagation because of the holiday but I did get some pictures during the second week.
This week we worked on stem cuttings for deciduous and evergreens.
Marty found a nice piece of Cornus sericea 'Flaviramea'.

Here is a close up of an internode of the Yellow Twig Dogwood.

We found a nice specimen of Thuja Plicata and I went inside to get some cuttings from the cone of juvenility.

So now I have some cuttings from two plants.

Here I have trimmed my cuttings into 5 sections each with a few inches of bare stem and a couple inches of foliage (for the evergreen Western Red Cedar).

On the evergreens, I wounded a small strip on each side.

I made angled cuts on the bottom end to indicate "this end goes down" and flat cuts on the tops to ensure that I could tell which end goes up.

We planted them up with the same planting medium mix as last week.

Here is the bench for our class. Starting to fill up some.

Plant Propagation -- Week 1

Class started up this week at PCC. In my first day of plant propagation we covered the definition of plant propagation, its history, the big picture organization of propagation methods, and a high level view of the 4 aspects of propagation -- STEP: Skills, Timing, Environment, and Plants. The definition the class came up with for the class is:

Plant propagation is the deliberate reproduction of plants through sexual or asexual means in a controlled environment with a desired outcome.

I now want to know more about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
We looked quickly at the anatomy of a terminal shoot and a leaf.

And then jumped in to three methods of propagation by leaf cutting: leaf petiole, leaf section, and split vein.

We cleaned the pots with water, then 10% bleach, then rinsed with water.

We got a tour of the greenhouses.

The growing medium was 2 parts perlite to 1 part peat moss.

We did cuttings from three different plants.

And placed them under the misters in the greenhouse.