Picking a Healthy Plant
Monday, September 14th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
When it comes to getting started with your garden, you have two choices ; planting seeds, or buying entire plants. Both have their own benefits. If you plant seeds and care for them each day, you’ll find it is a much more rewarding experience when you have a full, healthy plant. However, this method is a lot more dodgy. I will not tell you how many seeds I’ve planted and never seen any trace of whatsoever .
If you decide to buy the plant from a nursery and install it in your garden, it reduces a large amount of the work concerned in making it healthy. However, I’ve found during the past that many amateurish nursery workers will absolutely ruin the future of the plant by putting certain chemicals or manure in. I have adapted to this incompetence by learning to select the healthiest plant of the bunch. Here I am going to discuss some of the systems I use in my screening process for plants.
It may sound superficial, but the one thing you need to check for on your prospective plants is how nice they look. So far as plants go, you can truly judge a book by its cover. If a plant has been treated healthily and has no illnesses or pests, you can almost always tell by how nice it looks. If a plant has grown up in improper soil, or has dangerous bugs living in it, you can spot from the holey leaves and wilted stems.
If you are browsing the nursery shelves looking for your dream plant, you want to exclude anything that currently has flowers. Plants are less injured by the transplant if they don’t now have any flowers. It’s best to find ones that just consist of buds. However if all you’ve got to choose from are flowering plants, then you must do the unthinkable and sever all of them. It is going to be worthwhile for the future health of the plant. I’ve discovered that transplanting a plant even though it is blooming ends in having a dead plant ninety p.c of the time.
Always check the roots before you plop down the cash to buy the plant. Of course if the roots are in completely horrible condition you’ll be able to tell by having a look at the remainder of the plant. But if the roots are just slightly out of shape, then you possibly will not be able to tell just by looking at it. Inspect the roots extremely closely for any symptoms of brownness, rottenness, or softness. The roots should be a firm, quite well formed infrastructure that holds all the soil together. One can simply tell if the roots are before or past their prime, depending on the root to soil ratio. If there are a ludicrous quantity of roots with little soil, or a handful of soil with few roots, you should not buy that plant.
If you find any abnormalities with the plant, whether or not it’s the form of the roots or any irregular features with the leaves, you need to ask the nursery workers. While often these things can be the sign of an unhealthy plant, occasionally there will be a logical explanation for it. Always give the nursery a chance before writing them off as horrible. In fact , they are ( customarily ) pros who have been dealing with plants for a long time.
So if you choose to take the simple route and get a plant from a nursery, you just have to remember that the fitness of the plants has been left up to somebody you do not know. Usually they do a good job, but you should generally check for yourself. Also take every precaution you can to avoid transplant shock in the plant ( when it has trouble adjusting to its new location, and therefore has health Problems in the future ). Usually the process goes smoothly, but you cannot ever be too sure.
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