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Choosing A Healthy Plant: Essential Gardening Tips
By Frank | April 14, 2008
When it comes to getting started with your garden, there are two choices; planting seeds, or buying entire plants. Both have their own good points. If you plant seeds and tend them every day, you will find it is a much more rewarding experience when you have a full, healthy plant. But, this method is a lot more chancey. I can’t tell you how many seeds I’ve planted and never seen any trace of whatsoever.
If you opt to purchase the plant from a nursery and install it in your garden, it reduces a lot of the work involved in making it healthy.
It may sound obvious, but the one thing youshould check for on your prospective plants is how nice they look. As far as plants go, you can truly judge a book by its cover. If a plant has been treated well and has no pests or diseases, you can nearly always tell by how nice it looks. If a plant has grown up in poor soil, or has harmful bugs living in it, you can tell from the holey leaves and wilted stems.
If you’re browsing the nursery shelves looking for your dream plant, you want to exclude anything that currently has flowers. Plants are less traumatized by the transplant if they do not currently have any flowers. It’s best to find ones that just consist of buds. However if all you have to pick from are flowering plants, then you should do the unthinkable and sever all of them. It will be worth it for the future health of the plant. I’ve found that transplanting a plant while it is blooming results in having a dead plant ninety percent of the time.
Always check the roots before you purchase the plant. Look at the roots very closely for any signs of brownness, rottenness, or softness. The roots should always be a firm, perfectly well formed infrastructure that holds all the soil together.. If there are a huge amount of roots with little soil, or a bunch of soil with few roots, you should not purchase that plant.
If you uncover any abnormalities with the plant, whether it be the shape of the roots or any irregular features with the leaves, you should ask the nursery employees. While usually these things can be a sign of an unhealthy plant, sometimes there will be a logical explanation for it.
If you decide to take the easy route and get a plant from a nursery, just remember that the health of the plants has been left up to someone you don’t know. Generally they do a good job, but you must always 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). Generally the process goes smoothly, but you can never be too sure.
Or how about indoor plants? Growing orchids has to be one of the most beautiful plants to own. And caring for orchids may not be as difficult as you think.
Topics: Flora & Fauna |
