Rooting rosemary

It’s full summer here, and any plant robust enough to stand the heat and low humidity is thriving.

In these hot days, rosemary is shooting roots very fast, by simply putting cuttings with relatively soft stems in a jar of water. Just make sure to replace the water every 2-3 days to suppress the green algae grow. Woody stems take longer to shoot roots but they do so eventually, but the best type of cutting are where the branches split - apparently that’s where the growing hormons are concentrated.

Speaking of hormons, I’ve put a few dozens of rosemary cutting directly in potting soil after covering the stem with proper store-bought growth hormons, but the results are poor - most of them just whither away and die. The jar system is much more efficient - not only it is FREE, but you also get to sort the cuttings and plant only those that have grown a healthy bunch of roots, like the magnificent speciment pictured above.

It’s funny how I treat the α6000 as a point-and-shoot camera. Just organize a scene, don’t think even for a second of the low-light conditions, pick your depth-of-field / IOS ratio and BANG, shoot. ISO 2500? Pffff… nothing. I also over-expose 90% of the time by 1/3-2/3 stop - in this lens the over-exposed areas do not create any artifact, you only get a brighter scene, a bit like real-estate shoots that over-expose everything just to get a brighter feel of the house intended for sale.