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Food & DrinkGood Growing

Tips for Keeping Your New Plants Alive

These spring starts should be transplanted into their summer home. With a little soil, water and fertilizer they’ll be ready to harvest in a few weeks. Credit: Erin France

April is the month for spring plant sales in Athens. Whether you’re buying tomato starts from a friendly neighbor or collecting vibrant coleus from University of Georgia Trial Gardens, now that you’ve got the plant home, what do you do? Here’s a quick checklist of what to prioritize when caring for your new plant prizes.

Repotting or Transplanting: With some exceptions, every new addition should get repotted or transplanted. Annuals, especially warm-weather veggies like tomatoes, should go in the ground in the next two or three weeks. Besides needing extra nutrients, seedlings also can become root-bound if stuck in their containers. Roots circle over themselves as the plant tries to out-compete itself for the last bit of nutrients. You can cut through some of the roots and detangle them slightly as if finger-brushing your bed-head hair, but root-bound plants generally are less healthy and produce less than others. Repotting large additions, like shrubs and trees, gives me a chance to get those plants out of the standard black nursery pots. Black pots and trays absorb the sun’s heat in the winter and give warm-weather winners like roses and hostas a leg-up on growing in winter greenhouse conditions. Keeping your temperate finds happy in the black nursery pots becomes much harder in the summer when staving off 100 degree days. Save the black nursery pots for the tropicals like jade plants, succulents and lemongrass that seem to really like the additional heat. 

Soil: If you’re buying bagged soil, be prepared to pay about $10–12 a bag for the decent stuff. You can mix in some of the lower priced bags to help your budget, but don’t buy the $1.50 bag and think you’ll be rolling in bounty. You will not. If you’ve got a larger garden project and are buying by the square yard, price also is something to consider. The lowest priced compost I ever bought by the truckload wouldn’t even grow a weed. If you’re planting in the ground, be sure to get a soil test ($8) done to address any pH or nutrient issues you might have. If you live in an old house with the possibility of lead paint, you might want to get a heavy metals test ($30) completed before eating any homegrown produce. Soil tests are available at the Athens-Clarke County Extension office at 275 Cleveland Road during business hours. Master gardeners generally are available at most local Saturday farmer’s markets to answer specific growing questions. 

Water: Most plants in most containers don’t need water every day. Generally, it’s better to let them dry out a bit before giving your plant a long drink. Stick your finger into the soil up to your first knuckle. If the soil is wet day after day, you may be over-watering. Container plants will dry out faster than in-ground plants. Plants in clay pots will dry out faster than plants in plastic or ceramic pots. Instead of worrying about when to water each pot, I stick dry-preferring Mediterranean herbs like lavender and thyme in clay pots, and more tender herbs like sorrel in plastic. Floppy, dehydrated sorrel leaves are the warning flag to water now before anything crisps to death. 

Fertilizer: Most non-organic fertilizers have some form of petro-chemicals in them. If you don’t care, that’s fine! If you care, look for the OMRI mark (that’s Organic Materials Review Institute) on the product. There are a lot of fertilizers touting labels of “natural” or “environmentally friendly” that are not. The OMRI label helps weed out most greenwashing without having to extensively investigate every option. Most farmers and growers I know prefer small amounts of fertilizer over a longer period, starting with a drink of fertilizer just before or after moving the plant to its long- or medium-term home. It gives the plant a little extra boost at a time when conditions are changing, and it could sustain some cuts to leaves or roots. After that, I’d suggest a little fertilizer when the plant starts flowering, and then a few weeks later when it first starts fruiting. I like fish fertilizer the best (Neptune’s Harvest is my favorite), though it is stinky, and the dogs try to lick the watered plants when I turn my back. Fish fertilizer contains smaller amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium than other options, resulting in less nutrients leaching into the surrounding environment.

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