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Picking a Healthy Plant

When it comes to getting started with your garden, you have two choices ; planting seeds, or purchasing complete plants.  Both have their own benefits.  If you plant seeds and care for them every day, you’ll find it’s a much more rewarding experience when you have a full, healthy plant.  However, this technique is a lot more dodgy.  I can’t 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 concerned in making it healthy.  However, i have found during the past that many incompetent nursery employees will totally ruin the future of the plant by putting certain chemicals or fertilizers in.  I have evolved to this incompetence by learning to pick 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 sound superficial, but the most important thing you need to check for on your potential 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 healthily and has no sicknesses or pests, you can nearly always tell by how nice it is.  If a plant has grown up in improper soil, or has damaging bugs living in it, you can tell from the holey leaves and shriveled stems. 

If you’re reading the nursery shelves trying to find your dream plant, you wish to exclude anything that currently has flowers.  Plants are less traumatized 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 got to choose from are flowering plants, then you must do the inconceivable and sever all of them.  It will be worthwhile for the future health of the plant.  I’ve revealed that transplanting a plant even though it is blooming leads to having a dead plant ninety percent of the time. 

Always check the roots before you plop down the cash to buy the plant.  Of course if the roots are in completely awful condition you’ll be able to tell by taking a look at the rest of the plant.  But if the roots are just a little flabby, then you likely won’t be ready to tell just by looking at it.  Inspect the roots very closely for any symptoms of brownness, rottenness, or softness.  The roots should be a firm, quite well formed infrastructure that holds all the soil together.  One can simply tell if the roots are before or past their prime, depending on the root to soil proportion.  If there are a ridiculous quantity of roots with tiny soil, or a bunch 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 form of the roots or any irregular features with the leaves, you must ask the nursery employees.  While often these things can be the sign of an unhealthy plant, sometimes there’ll be a logical reason for it.  Always give the nursery a chance before writing them off as horrendous.  Of course , they’re ( usually ) execs who’ve been dealing with plants for a long time. 

So if you choose to take the straightforward route and get a plant from a nursery, you just have to remember that the condition of the plants has been left up to someone you do not know.  Generally they do a good job, but you should always check for yourself.  Also take 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 ).  Usually the process goes smoothly, but you can never be too sure.