Storage And Planting Of Ornamental Plant Seedlings

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Gardeners are often faced with the question: what about the planting material of roses, peonies, and shrubs bought in early spring? These seedlings appear in stores at the end of January - early February, and the temptation is too great to buy seedlings earlier, while there is a large selection of plants.

Most often, we buy plants whose root system is placed in moist peat. When the peat dries up, it looks like a piece of asphalt and the plant can die. Therefore, when buying such material in a store, first of all, inspect it: remove it from the box and check the condition of its root system.

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It is best if the plants have not yet awakened: the buds have not started to grow and the suction roots have not begun to grow. If the plant has dormant buds, then the suction roots should be white, and the lump with the soil should be wet.

At home, you need to take the seedling out of the box and carefully open the package with the roots. If the plant has large and long roots, then when packing them, they are bent in half and covered with peat. In any case, the peat must be removed, especially you need to be careful if the roots have white suction roots. For this I put a plant with a lump of peat in a bucket of water. It will be useful to add a growth stimulant such as Energen to the water (0.5 ml is half a bottle in a bucket of water).

When the roots straighten out, you need to remove the seedling from the water, shake off the remnants of peat and lay the roots on a piece of transparent plastic film, on which a new soil mixture has been poured in advance. The roots must be carefully straightened.

Top with soil mixture and wrap the plant in the same way as a child is wrapped in a diaper. I put the roots in a diaper in a cardboard rolled into a cylinder so as not to damage the earthen lump later. Now such a seedling needs to be placed in the refrigerator door.

Once a week, you need to check the soil of the seedling and water it if it is dry. If leaves appear on the plant, then a transparent plastic bag should be placed on top of the stem so that the leaves are in a slightly humid environment. You cannot tie the bag, otherwise the leaves will rot. So you can save the planting material for roses and peonies.

In the first half of March, I take my plants to the site and plant them in the greenhouse (it is made of cellular polycarbonate - the soil there warms up by the beginning of March) very carefully so as not to destroy the lump of soil. The distance between the plants is at least 30 cm. I cover the seedlings from above with dense spunbond. Two weeks later, in cloudy weather, I take off the spunbond and begin to teach the plants to light. I return the spunbond for the night.

When the first leaves appear on the same plants in the open field, in cloudy weather I carefully take out new plants with a lump of earth from the greenhouse and plant them in a pre-prepared planting hole and cover them with spunbond.

Rose seedlings, when planted in the ground, must be planted so that the graft is 7-10 cm below the soil level. It is necessary! Otherwise, in a frosty, snowless winter, the vaccine may freeze out.

Shrub seedlings cannot be deepened. I water with growth stimulants and cover with spunbond. At the end of May, you need to accustom plants to sunlight: I take off spunbond for several hours in cloudy weather. At the beginning of June I shoot spunbond at all.

From the beginning of June to the end of July, I feed such plants with liquid manure every ten days, alternating it with liquid fertilizing with mineral fertilizers.

Sometimes there is a lot of planting material and it does not fit in the refrigerator, so you can plant the seedlings in spacious pots and put them on a glassed-in balcony, if the outside temperature is not lower than -5 ° C, covering them with thin spunbond from the sun. I water such plants only as the soil in the pot dries up.

I bring the soil from the site, I have been preparing it since the fall. I do not trust purchased soil. She killed many plants in it. I mix the rotted compost and the soil from the greenhouse, adding a little coconut substrate and vermiculite.

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I immediately plant the purchased shrub saplings in spacious pots and keep them at the dacha in a cool room: in the basement caisson or on a cool veranda.

If I buy the plants in early March, then I immediately plant the seedlings in the greenhouse, removing the peat soil from the roots, rinsing them in a bucket of water and straightening the root system. Very often, gardeners place purchased seedlings in the refrigerator without checking the clod of earth. The peat dries up, becomes dense like a stone, and the plant dies. Planting seedlings in a permanent place with such a soil should also not be, because peat is an acidic soil, and even during a drought, plants will suffer, they may even die.

I plant bulbous plants (lilies) in high pots. First, the lily bulb, like any store-bought bulb, must be disinfected. For diseases, you need to hold it for 20 minutes in a dark pink solution of potassium permanganate, and then hold it for another 20 minutes in a solution against pests (Intavir, Aktara, etc.). I place the onion strictly in the middle of the pot.

I sprinkle it with earth to the top of the onion, and pour wet river sand (previously washed) on top. When tubercles of future roots appear on the stem of the grown lily (above the bulb), I cover them with earth, without adding 2-3 cm to the very top of the pot. Lily bulbs form two types of roots: under the bulb are perennial roots, and above the bulb - annual roots that feed the plant in summer and die off in winter.

If the bulb is planted near the bottom of the pot, then the perennial roots formed under the bulb will have nowhere to grow. If it is planted closer to the top of the pot, then the annual roots formed this year will not be able to grow and develop normally. Therefore, the lily bulb must be planted in a pot strictly in the middle.