Picking a Healthy Plant

When it comes to getting started with your garden, you have 2 choices ; planting seeds, or buying entire plants.  Both have their own benefits.  If you plant seeds and care for them every day, you will find it is a much more rewarding experience when you have a full, healthy plant.  However, this strategy is a lot more dangerous.  I will not tell you how many seeds I’ve planted and never seen any trace of at all. 

If you choose to buy the plant from a nursery and install it in your garden, it decreases a lot of the work involved in making it healthy.  However, I’ve found during the past that many incompetent nursery employees will totally ruin the way forward for the plant by putting certain chemicals or fertilizers in.  I have adapted to this incompetence by learning to select the healthiest plant of the bunch.  Here I am going to discuss some of the techniques I use in my screening process for plants. 

It may appear superficial, but the most important thing you need to check for on your potential plants is how nice they look.  So far as plants go, you can truly judge a book by its cover.  If a plant has been treated healthily and has no sicknesses or pests, you can nearly always tell by how nice it’s.  If a plant has grown up in improper soil, or has harmful bugs living in it, you can see from the holey leaves and wilted stems. 

If you’re browsing the nursery shelves trying to find your dream plant, you want to exclude anything that currently has flowers.  Plants are less injured by the transplant if they do not now have any flowers.  It’s best to find ones that just consist of buds.  However if all you have to choose from are flowering plants, then you need to do the inconceivable and sever each one of them.  It will be worthwhile for the future health of the plant.  I’ve revealed that transplanting a plant while it is blooming results in having a dead plant ninety % of the time. 

Always check the roots before you plop down the cash to get the plant.  Naturally if the roots are in completely terrible condition you will be able to tell by looking at the rest of the plant.  But if the roots are just a touch flabby, then you probably will not be ready to tell just by having a look at it.  Check the roots extremely closely for any symptoms of brownness, rottenness, or softness.  The roots should always be a firm, quite well formed infrastructure that holds all the soil together.  One can easily tell if the roots are before or past their prime, depending on the root to soil proportion.  If there are a ludicrous amount of roots with tiny soil, or a handful of soil with few roots, you mustn’t buy that plant. 

If you find any abnormalities with the plant, whether or not it’s the shape of the roots or any irregular features with the leaves, you need to ask the nursery staff.  While usually these things can be the sign of an unhealthy plant, often there’ll be a logical explanation for it.  Always give the nursery a chance before writing them off as horrendous.  After all , they’re ( generally ) execs who have been dealing with plants for a long time. 

So if you make a decision to take the straightforward route and get a plant from a nursery, you just have to remember that the fitness of the plants has been left up to somebody you don’t know.  Generally they do a good job, but you should generally check for yourself.  Also take all precautions you can to avoid transplant shock in the plant ( when it has trouble adjusting to its new location, and thus has health Problems in the future ).  Sometimes the process goes smoothly, but you cannot ever be too sure.