By George! - A Blog!

Spring has sprung—judging by the crowds of shoppers at our nurseries and by the gorgeous colors of bedding plants on the benches.  Stay calm and take your time to buy your plants.

Take a look at the roots, as well as judging the vigor of your purchase by the size and color of the green tops or the number of flowers.  It’s the roots that do the work of quickly establishing a transplant.  With a small bedding plant or a vegetable plant you can quickly discover how healthy your purchase is and how long it has been in its container.  Turn the plant upside down and tap it out by banging on the bottom.  Be careful not to make a mess and dont pull the plant out by its stem because this will invariably tear the roots.  Put it back with just as much care and inspect another.  You want roots that fill the container.  They should be spreading  all through the soil and they should be white and plump.  Brown roots that are flattened tell you that the plant has been there too long and probably has been over-watered, killing those roots that are now brown or black. 

With larger plants, such as roses or young trees you’ll have a tougher job and it’s a good idea to ask the salesperson to do the inspection for you.  There should be cooperation; after all, how can you be a good customer without looking at the merchandise ?  Sometimes a citrus tree or a rose bush in a five-gallon container  has been re-potted recently and hasn’t had time to fill the soil ball with roots. Your inspection should discourage you from buying half a plant when the roots are only in the middle of the container and theres’ a pile of loose soil on the ground.

There should be a balance of size and vigor between the roots and the foliage. Too heavy a foliage could mean that the plant has lived in the nursery too long, getting good attention in a sheltered place, whereas a small amount of leaves (especially if there’s a thick stem )suggests a similar history without good care.

If you’re buying bedding plants, or geraniums, buy buds rather than flowers.  Flowers, gorgeous as they may be, are on the way out and are perhaps already fading, whereas buds are the future.

I prefer to buy a fruit tree that is dormant instead of one that is in flower and has a lot of new growth because the good care and attention given in the nursery will most likely not be present in its new situation, where winds can be drying and damaging.  And speaking of winds, drive home carefully and slowly. Forty miles an hour maybe alright for traffic safety but to a tree such speed provides  a gale, even if the sun is shining.  So, lay the tree down on its side rather than standing it up, and wedge the container so it doesn’t roll around when you turn corners.

It is, or nearly is, a good time to set out tomatoes because they can tolerate soil that is a little cool, but it’s too soon to set out peppers  and much too soon to set out eggplant.  There’s a trick to use the warmer surface soil for tomatoes because you take advantage of their tendency to  grow new roots along the stem.  Those bumps that you sometimes see on older plants that are laying down in the nursery are not diseases or pests, but potential power. If you lay the plant in a shallow trench in your garden it  will have its nursery roots in cooler deeper soil and a mass of new roots will develop in the warmer surface soil.  Presto! a more powerful more productive plant.