all right so we are going to transplant rosemary it's fresh rosemary from my aunt's garden and fresh citronella that looks a little sad because i probably perhaps could have chosen to do this this morning or last night but i didn't so there you go and so the citronella is the mosquito plant it's actually part of the geranium family hi gorgeous gorgeous darling joins us and rosemary is awesome for a lot of different things like grilling or italian and what i want to do is to just tell you like where i'm going to put the citronella to give you some ideas about well why would i take the time to transplant some of these things and so let's take a little walk thanks for the sweetheart i'm going to put my hand in front so you don't get dizzy it does all sorts of crazy stuff and you can kind of see the house in the background the house the house so what i decided to do is i want to have natural mosquito repellent at the stephen suburban homestead and so what we did was when our neighbor gave us some free plants she gave us some society garlic which is great for lots of different bugs and then i planted mint which a lot of these things have double purposes you can obviously have mint especially if you're a southern girl like me you can have mint juleps and you can have mint tea and then we planted some lemongrass and when you kind of touch on these things too bad you can't smell on periscope it does smell like what you think it's gonna smell like kind of lemony and look at how crazy this thing has gotten on our deck hello thanks for joining irma and um i'm probably going to split this and transplant it around and let me even give you a view of this whole deck so the idea is to have the garlics which we actually have the society garlics planted all the way down and then have another set of mint hi alfonso high frederick and have the mint and have this new citronella kind of fill in the holes you can see where there's still some grass hey we're trying to get rid of mosquitoes if you're from a humid area it's really hard to get rid of mosquitoes except with those chemicals so we're planting mint garlic citronella and lemongrass and there's my water catchment system i'm joy at the stephen suburban homestead and let's just get to the rosemary and the citronella clippings so on the homestead steven's suburban homestead i oh look there's a towel i went on pinterest and i found how we could do this so let me go ahead and start i'm gonna flip the camera say hi and then hang it on this cool thing do you see this kind of thing hanging from my fan it's a really cool uh holder so hi joy here steven suburban homestead if y'all want to comment uh looks like alfonso already did sometimes you have to follow us which means you would go to the swipe to the right or you would swipe up into the right so who's that hello ellie ally okay so on pinterest it said for the citronella and for the rosemary that you would just put it in water so i do have some little jars that i say jardine aren't they cute it's not your traditional ball um little jardine it's just water and then i will put in just a pinch of epsom salt welcome and what the pinterest thing said was to make sure it had three leaves at the top so we clearly have enough here and you want to clip the stem my aunt clipped it really long so guess what i get more clippings and then it said to clip off the extra leaves because the the nutrients that are in this jar you want them to go into rooting so out of this space whoa okay here we go out of this space is where we a root will supposedly pop up and so you just want to have a few leaves there's actually even some new growth on here so that's exciting i'm gonna clip one more off it needs a little bit um the leaves to get the sunlight or uh you know for the uh gosh what's it called y'all come on all my scientists what chlor anyway you know what i'm talking about where it turns the sunlight turns um the green it keeps it green and growing so just stick it into the water all right i'm gonna take another one because we have so much of it it's so great my aunt was so generous with this um citronella is great in a lot of different regions but it will freeze so if you happen to get north unlike me i'm in the houston area you'll want to probably plant it in a pot um if you happen to be in the hill country where i got these from she aunt peggy had them in a pot and she had them kind of in the shade where they were getting ambient sunlight because uh that she needed to be able to water them often and that hot sun of the hill country it would probably just scorched it texas has really hot sun because we're closer to the equator that is a fact i did not make that up ha ha uh anybody here from texas online or on here or where are other regions or anybody who's ever grown citronella it'd be so fun to hear from you especially if you've done this before and you know what you're doing on the stephen suburban homestead i do videos to kind of help you hey okay yay oh hey i'll find some good um i like to explore and sometimes i notice when i would do things people would be like where do you find the time where do you find the ideas and so i thought well i'll just do some videos because to me it's second nature to be curious and to be uh not afraid to try something and totally fail and look like kind of like an idiot to your husband um but to others maybe it seems a little more scary so that's it for citronella you saw that i trimmed off the extra leaves there's actually four clippings in here what the pinterest said that's our joke around our house we always uh say like the pinterest or the google it says that the roots will come up within a week to four weeks depending on your temperature since we're humid here and we're still a little warm i believe that this should work pretty well here's another tip actually i probably have one more in here i could use whenever i've done seedlings like this like cuttings welcome is it salad um whenever i've done cuttings like this like my tomatoes i actually um took like 25 cuttings of our spring tomatoes and ended up with only after all said and done hardening and planting them in the ground all that i only had four tomato plants that actually are growing now four is good but that tells you if you want to transplant for free which is one of the benefits of this you know grabbing some stuff from your neighbors and not having to pay that you want to over st over seedling them or however you call it uh actually no great question okay so there's something called hardening so you want the roots to grow a little longer so you want to keep them inside another week to two weeks again just a tiniest pinch of epsom salt let me grab a little real quick i'm not going to move the camera just hang out for like 10 seconds you can get epsom salt at walgreens or wherever look it's just a little crystal it's actually not salt so pay really close attention to this this is ep some salt epsom and it helps the roots grow and it helps the plants green up so when those roots come out you want to let it go for another week or two to build stronger roots then i take them and plant them in dirt inside and i do a really saturated dirt when i take them things out that have just developed roots i mean super saturated to the point of like wet like swampville for about a week then i start to let it go where you're only watering like every other day or so keep in mind we're houston we are uh very humid so if you are up north or if you're in a region where you don't have a lot of humidity that first week when you put your seedlings from the water that have roots into dirt you want to make sure it doesn't dry out for us it's not a problem yes very humid i know it's like 100 degrees here today too again anyway i hope it's nicer for the rest of y'all elsewhere then after about a week or so in the dirt you will have some dye unless you're just super duper green thumb and then you take them outside to where i was talking about that ambient lighting you might want to put them under a deck or somewhere under a tree or something you know where it's mostly shady for about a week because especially if you're in a hot area you go from inside temperatures to outside it's called hardening then after that week you can take the plant and put it in the ground wherever you want it and i know this sounds like a spa environment but when i do new plants even stuff i buy from the store into the dirt that first week i actually will put like a little umbrella over them or i'll makeshift like a little no i don't mean covering it like touching it but like i won't let the full six to eight hours of sun hit a new seedling that i've planted because it in houston it'll just burn it up now again elsewhere it may be different okay so citronella we're done with this one we'll put this in a sunny window uh not to wear like it's 100 degrees though i mean a closed window just where it can get that ambient lighting i hope i'm using the word ambient right anyway i just make up words all the time anyway okay so let's talk about rosemary plantings i really didn't think it was possible but aunt peggy had beautiful rosemary and we um had a huge like five foot okay maybe four foot around diameter bush and then in houston in texas you might remember even in oklahoma we had about 30 inches in about six weeks 30 inches of rain and rosemary and many other things like an esperanza tree for instance i know apple trees a couple of things you have to do your research especially like xeriscaping they hate to be waterlogged and we lost a beautiful what looked to me like 10 year old rosemary bush it says you know rosemary or maybe you don't know it doesn't grow quickly so we lost the whole thing so aunt peggy gave me this and because he didn't like to be waterlogged i actually put it in some super soppy uh soil because i thought well it needs soil rather than water but i was wrong and that's okay i'm wrong a lot and i'll get over it and so i took big stems on the pinterest it said to take little stems because they're greener they're not as woody and the woody stems actually take longer to grow the roots and you have less likelihood of them actually surviving so luckily i got a nice bush where there's actually like 10 or 12 of these and now that i'm looking at it and chatting with you this is not an appropriate size vehicle for the small ones it's too wide of a mouse i'm just gonna grab a smaller one real quick you don't want them to be completely immersed this is actually a candle holder oh it has wax in it hang on i'm almost there uh there we go so i'm gonna get this candle holder for these little shoots because it will allow enough water in here and it has a little bit smaller rim because you don't want the whole thing and you'll see let's start we cut the little shoots and if you want to see like the full article or you don't have time to watch all this just go to my pinterest page it's steven suburban homestead it's actually not the page it's a board and you can see now we're going to clip this off and don't throw this away that you can dry this we'll talk about that at the very end and so you have a little bit here you can see my finger so it's like an inch and a half of stem not so woody see it's a little bit pliable and then you have this you actually want to go a little bit further it did say again just like on the citronella that you want to take off these because this is what's growing and has nutrients and you can also kind of take your fingernail or if you don't have fingernails i keep going the wrong way sorry i just peeled off some of that bark because that will open up the possibility for more roots i don't know why all this works i'm not a scientist i'm just a homesteader okay so let's put the water in here and again i it did not say on pinterest to do this but i have had so much luck with epsom salt i'm just gonna put a few greens in just like six because it's such a small piece it's actually a like a one tablespoon to one gallon ratio if you're doing um a whole like gallon of water to water some plants with the epsom salt it's just really wonderful it's actually magnesium not salt so that is going to be how we do we just clip several of these and i'll do this at the same time where i'll start to peel the rosemary and i'll do it a little bit not so gently so that i can peel off that bark when i do it then we just pop it in and i'm going to do a lot of these because again i just talked about this with the citronella earlier if you weren't here that when you do transplants you are inevitably going to have many of them like maybe even a 50 ratio die it's just a fact of life because it's rough i mean we're scraping them and we're cutting them and we're bringing them out of their element these guys came from the hill country of texas welcome uh man so you want to save these also save these you can use them in sketti or like on a grill or something and we'll dry those later if you have a dinner if you don't have dinner plans you could probably put them in something today okay so the more of these you can do the better and then when um if i'm not going to use all of this obviously because these are too short see the difference or this is a 50 longer uh they're too short to get them to grow so what i will do is i'll just peel the rest of these after the broadcast and then i'll just dry it so there's we hardly waste anything on the homestead we just there's so many uses for these things people throw so much away but we just if you have the time i realize not everybody has the time if you have the time then it's really fun to make your own stuff and think about all the money you save if you dry your own herbs my gosh some of those herbs are like four dollars a bottle uh the other thing is we have chickens and our chickens love fresh herbs again we're just stripping these and what we're doing is we're trying to get them to grow roots so we strip and then let me see i'm just kind of peeling so they go from brown and i'm peeling off the outer piece it's kind of greenish all right so i'll probably in this so you don't get too bored i'm going to go ahead and do like six or seven more of these and then let's talk quickly again in case you came in late we put these in the water for a week to six weeks the differential is going to be your temperature so where we are hot and humid houston they're going to grow roots faster and we also have brighter sun photosynthesis that's the word i was looking for the photosynthesis works a little i think a little faster in the sunnier uh regions up north you may have to wait a little longer but don't don't be discouraged um actually on the pinterest pin i found they said summer was married they just had it and they just left it in there because they were doing a test it took months to grow roots i'm a little impatient for that but we'll try it um so with any seedlings you want to put them in the water first let them grow roots once the roots are appearing they're just like little bitty white almost like hair like strands let them grow in the water a little longer like another week or two then you would gently plant them into very wet soil inside let them get used to the soil for a week or two then you would take them out to a shaded area outside to get acclimated to the temperature where you are and you would let them you know stay for a week or two and then you would plant them in the ground i guess the other caveat since it is the middle of september is again if you're i'm in zone nine i bet in zone eight and seven you'd be okay to plant these things outside in the ground now but if you're any zone higher than that i recommend leaving them in a pot because i know citronella will freeze and any kind of small seedling that goes to your freeze is you know probably not going to make it so i would just keep it in a pot over the winter until spring or until your last frost and then you could plant it in the ground if you'd like or you can just you know take it back outside so luckily we're in a zone where we don't have to worry about that very much okay so that's how you would do almost any seedlings i just happen to have the citronella for mosquitoes natural mosquito repellent and the rosemary because i love it and look at just from those few strips look at how much rosemary i took off of there i will take this and i will put them on a cookie sheet i'll do all of them i will put them in our convection oven which you do not have to have convection but it's a little faster and more energy efficient you can do it on the lowest setting of your oven and you could just put it in for i think i do like 20 minutes at a time and i look and test and see when they're crunchy the reason i use the oven which again uses energy i know is because i have tried four different ways to dry herbs in houston and i cannot do it because it's too humid it ends up rotting or losing its flavor or getting too much dust from sitting out so if you live in an area that is probably less than 50 humidity you could lay these and just on the counter you could lay them gently in a hanging rack i have a beautiful one that i won't be using for herbs and they would dry in about a week so there's lots of options we try to do the energy efficient way but you know if you live in houston you're just not going to be able to dry herbs in my opinion not in the summer spring summer or fall months perhaps in the winter all right so joy here at the stephen suburban homestead i love that you're here i love that you're excited about trying to propagate it could be any herb it could be any plant almost any plant excuse me um i advise you to not only watch videos or go to google or but you can go to pinterest and whenever we're working on a project here i research on pinterest and google first and usually pin it so you can kind of see what we did last month i have other videos on youtube and on our facebook page all under stephen's suburban homestead and we'll keep doing these fun videos i just whip out the camera when i know i'm already going to be doing something i might as well share it with other stay-at-home moms or other gardeners or homesteaders so i just love that you tuned in and that you're here and i appreciate you hi thanks for watching and i will see you i hope you follow us okay bye