My favorite method of collecting houseplants is "that's a cool leaf. Let's stick in dirt." And after two years of proplifting, about half of my succulents and tradescantia were from leafs on the floors of box store garden centers.
Just repotted this last night. They were formerly leaf litter. And now they're so cute :]
YES MY ECHEVARIA SERAPHINA LEAF PROP IS GROWING A PLANTLET
I wasn't able to buy this plant because the big box store I found it at doesn't take mobile pay so I proplifted a couple leaves, and then when I came back next week there were none left so this is my only chance qq
Would you mind writing up a guide or sharing existing resources re: anarchogardening? Thanks!
SUPER LONG POST!
A NOVEL REALLY.
I'M SO SORRY, I'M AUTISTIC AND I LITERALLY TEXT IN HUGE PARAGRAPHS EVEN. MY FRIENDS HATE ME FOR IT
Ok so Honestly there's no real guide I could give. But, Well, ok so story time ! This isn't really a guide but I guess it's my origin story:
I just started out with these Bee bombs you can get from gardening centres, they're small clay pellets full of native bee favourite flowers. I'd throw them down any place I thought could use some beautiful flowers. So this whole damn country really. That's arguably where I started. No intentions except to help our comrades (the bees 🐝)
Some time After that I realised all the many, many plants I have grown in my house and in my garden (especially the ones not doing very well) could probably do with being relocated as a last hurrah attempt since they were near death anyway and I needed room for more plants. A constant issue of mine.
Outside my local library there's this corner that backs onto the playing fields round back. This corner had benches in a sort of maze shape and was surrounded by various unique bushes and lavender, marigolds and a few other plants clearly put there by a gardener to make a nice natural area.
After the council shut down my beloved library I would walk past it still when I walk my dogs. Sometimes picking some flowers from the now neglected area for my herbal smoking blends and sometimes throwing down handfuls of various seeds I kinda collect. Just to see if I can add to this area.
Most of them took and bloomed in the spring, getting out of hand actually. Growing and taking on a life of their own. This was pretty cool. Then I saw the trellis up the wall. I need a trellis for my morning glories mostly. But I can't just Steal a 10×12ft terrace, but my climbers were falling over themselves. Plus at one point I had morning glories on my windowsill and they grew around my curtain pole. Not very practical but wow they looked very cool. So I took them down to that library trellised wall and just half buried the pots in the ground and wove them in and out of the trellis fully expecting them not to survive. (I've transplanted them once before From my room to my garden but those morning glories didn't recover from the shock) But these ones did! They covered this trellis. It was beautiful. They went to seed and I collected many seeds and since then I've planted them and ransom other plants everywhere really, in 3 cities. I've never been back to check on them unfortunately. I did most of those when I was homeless and jumping trains to random places with 2 friends I was made homeless around the same time they were with (I don't recommend jumping trains unless you need to btw. And if you do , DON'T get off at Reading Central (UK). Not unless you want to be fined £879.10! An amount I'll never forget)
I moved a bunch of plants from my room in pots onto the easily accessible roof of the library too but that was stupid and very exposed, they didn't last a week! Stolen, removed by the police idk. Lost some cool blood grass and passion flower that way. Still bitter about it
Anyway, I have a habit of taking cuttings and runners from my plants and repotting them. (Infinite plant glitch) Which is how I've ended up with so many ornamental pineapple plants, Hops, Mints (including a chocolate mint flavoured one! Smells exactly like mint chocolate ice cream!) oh and I have way too many cacti and succulents from this way too.
So what do you do when you have too many plants? You go and replant them any place you can! Especially in abandoned building sites! That's where my succulents in particular have really taken over. Nature will always take back what's hers, I only assisted her. As her Seed Thrawl if you will.
Ok so now I'm going to admit to a variety of crimes. So , this anonymous grocery store has this garden centre small shed like building near me that they obviously lock all the plants in at night but it was open one night . At like 2am so some employee fucked up but won't be coming back. Man, I stole so many fruit trees it's not even funny. I was drunk (ok on other drugs too) and I loaded up a large trolley and just fucking ran across the car park like Harry Fucking Potter at platform 9 3/4, and was gone. I got a lil paranoid of getting caught with my hoard of plants the next day. So I just went around (in the dead of night) and planted most of the redcurrants and blackberries and raspberries and apricot and goji berry and something called Aronia (some kind of berry thing, ooh and blueberry plants too!) in every place I thought might be suitable for the plants to grow, but also rather inconspicuous too. So the blackberry bramble bushes I planted among already established bushes of the same type on a main road for example. The blueberry bushes in the acidic soil on this patch of nature surrounding one of those electrical boxes etc
Man, I kept tabs on these plants when I walked my dogs and I started seeing local kids picking the berries and also Nepalese families especially doing the same (spoke to many of them, they used to go foraging in Nepal their whole lives and were happy to find all these strange fruit plants growing everywhere. I really wanted to reveal that it was me who did it but I didn't need the clout or the risk of doing so)
At first I was a little annoyed because I didn't mind people taking the fruit but I thought everyone was exhausting the fruit which meant no seeds and future die off. But wow, even the kids knew to only take some and wait for more to grow. That's probably when it hit me that people weren't greedy really, and nobody that didn't want or need them were taking any. Just regular people, being happy, taking what they need, teaching their kids to forage. Naturally I became a vaguely illegal plant planter.
So I started prop lifting from garden centres to grow roots on the leaves I was propagating (was doing it before this but I REALLY went hard on it now)
I met this girl who told me how to get away with taking cuttings from botanical gardens (the prestigious places with rare plants and overpriced ones in the gift shop). I was planning to go to Kew gardens with family soon anyway. Idec, I stole cuttings of some rare and beautiful plants and didn't damage the host plants. Conservation in mind. Such a rush. Ugh . You don't know true ecstasy until you smuggle dragon fruit seeds out of a botanical garden's security checkpoint.
I kept some of these, planted some others. I won't go into details about how I stole from those botanical gardens for obvious reasons. As a seasoned shoplifter and with the aid of that girl's tips and genuinely preparing like a bank heist, all I'll say is it was easy if you wear a small bag full of certain tools and room for small plants under your hoody.
Now the grafting. I learned how to graft genetically similar plants together like a botanical Frankenstein from a YouTube channel called Jsacadura. I thought it was so cool and I practiced on my mum's two different apple trees. I was so excited! It worked!! I later read on some book from ZLibrary (I can't remember which book, sorry. I've downloaded over 1500 books from there onto a dedicated tablet because I apparently hoard everything) and in this book I learned that you can graft the rootstock of a cannabis plant onto the above ground vine of a Hops plant. I had both of these. Both for smoking. I hated beheading my 2 foot tall baby cannabis plant and was so worried! But it took a long while to heal and I couldn't tell if it worked until it continued growing or shriveled up to die. But it fucking lived! The thing about this hops plant with cannabis roots... Was it looked like a legal normal hops vine... BUT IT NOW HAD CANNABINOIDS IN THE FLOWERS!! actual magic. Can't even believe it but sure hops and cannabis are closely related. And this alchemist shit worked out! Bit of a tangent but it's crucial to understand how and why I got into grafting. Now there's some apple trees down my local park...
I was going to air layer one of my mum's apple trees because it got root rot. She had them in pots with no drainage holes 🙄 (to air layer you shave off bark at soil level of the trunk revealing that light brown inner Cambrian layer that is like the tree's vascular system. You always graft onto this layer btw) . After it's shaved you can tie a bag or container like a plastic takeaway container around it full of dirt. A big ol' dirt bandaid if you will. It'll grow roots from the part you shaved after a couple weeks. OH WRAP THE CONTAINER IN TINFOIL OR SOMETHING. ROOTS LIKE DARK AND DO NOT LIKE SUNLIGHT. Then you cut the original rotten irrelevant roots away with a saw , below your new roots and BOOM. new tree basically, from a single branch of a dying one. Yeah! Science bitch!
It should be noted that you can only really graft in the spring when the sap is flowing and the plant is actively growing. If you can't easily peel the bark from a branch then chances are it's not ready.
Over time I got a few small trees from this method. All clones genetically because they all came from one plant originally. Not a seed made by two parents.
So I started my clone army, didn't execute order 66 or anything but I did have enough now to warrant risking some being a loss by grafting them onto those park apple trees. There's a chance it won't work even if you do everything right. I really thought someone would peel off the graft sight coverings/bandages/grafting tape but lichen grew all up the tree and covered the tape so maybe it helped camouflage it. I did all this in the dead of night again, using a quick flash of my phone light to see what I'm doing and quickly turning it off again and working from memory. No idea lf this is illegal but most things I enjoy doing is so idk. Precautions. These grafts all survived but 2. So 5/7. Some cunt later knocked one of the trees down crashing into it on his dirt bike , the bastard tore up the field too. It's bad enough the dirt bike cunts keep me awake often ugh. One down though I guess, I see it as the tree taking HIM out as a thank you to me for the new bioprosthetic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These events seem close and linear from how I write but this all started just before and then during the pandemic. So ~5 years (jfc time sure is a thing that just continues to go on huh)
It's kinda how I stayed sane really during the height of COVID. I've toned it down a bit but sInce I started this I still kinda plant random cuttings everywhere, just for fun and idk help get fruit to anyone that would be delighted to be able to gather fresh fruit when they want without the expense of grocery store fruit. Also no pesticides etc. I just like doing it tbh, I'm not really thinking I'm feeding the homeless or anything. Just an added bonus. I give everyone I meet a cactus or pineapple plant because they keep reacting so well to cuttings being taken and/or asexually reproducing anyway. People think I'm quirky and being nice but I just need to offload my Frankenstein children to make and buy new ones.
I think that's about the jist of it. I currently have a few projects in the works. Frustrating things really. Like trying to get my lychee seeds to grow and my Syrian Rue for the harmala alkaloids. Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds too for the Lysergic Acid Amides. But wrong climate in the UK :( . Oh but I've grown two avocado trees from seed now! They're both maybe 3 foot tall. I have a new plastic greenhouse now and they love it in there. I also have so many physalis plants that I get fruit from. Idk how but there's two varieties and they just keep growing all over the place. I swear I put some seeds in one pot and they haven't flowered, fruited AND seeded AND spread to germinate. They're not even that old. But I'll plant them at that library plant corner maybe. Haven't checked on all these plants in a while, so I probably should.
So that's my story, I haven't told anyone any of this before. I hope you and anyone else can take something valuable from this!
I honestly have no books or resources on Anarchogardening ! I checked ZLibrary but shockingly found nothing. You can try though (singlelogin.re) [DON'T GO ON ANY OTHER SITE CLAIMING TO BE ZLIBRARY. THOSE SITES ARE SCAM SITES TRYING TO GET MONEY OUT OF YOU. ONLY SINGLELOGIN.RE)
The roots grew roots, so it's time to plant! I can't wait to have a giant monster of a sweet mint bush in like two months.
I, uh, may have just proplifted this sprig off of a mint plant at Home Depot when I went to buy some basil a week ago. I can't tell if the fact that this mint has only been in the water for a week speaks to the characteristics of mint, or the efficiency of water propagation with fertilizer in the water, but either way, it sprouted roots real quick!
