Practical Gardening Guide: Selecting A Healthy Plant
When it comes to getting started with your garden, there are two choices; buying a plant or planting seeds. Both have their own virtues. If you plant seeds and tend them daily, you will find it is a much more rewarding experience when you have a full, healthy plant. But, this method is a lot more risky. 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 plant it in your garden, it reduces a lot of the work involved in making it healthy.
It may sound obvious, but the one thing youhave to 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 diseases or pests, you can almost always tell by how nice it looks. If a plant has grown up in improper soil, or has harmful bugs living in it, you can tell from the wilted stems and holey leaves.
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 have buds. However if all you have to select from are flowering plants, then you should do the unthinkable and sever all the flowers. 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 eighty percent of the time.
Always check the roots before you purchase the plant. Check 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 vast amount of roots with little soil, or a bunch of soil with few roots, you should not purchase that plant.
If you detect any abnormalities with the plant, whether it be the shape of the roots or any irregular features with the leaves, you should confer with the nursery staff. While usually these things can be an indication of an unhealthy plant, occasionally 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. Usually they do a good job, but you need to always check for yourself. Also take every precaution you can to minimize 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 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. Discover more
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