The never-ending story

The never-ending story

Growing plants and trees is not hard, but keeping them healthy is the real challenge

SOCIAL & LIFESTYLE

The drive from Bangkok to the farm where my family does most of our gardening takes almost the whole day. Usually arriving there at night, I don’t get to see our plants until the following morning. As soon as I wake up, it has become my habit to don my gumboots and make a tour of the farm to check out how big the trees had grown during our absence.

Flourishing: once fully established in the ground, this flowering tree can be watered as needed.

During our recent visit, my heart sank when I opened the  greenhouse containing our collection of tillandsias and saw the plants looking very dry and brittle, almost lifeless. In the greenhouse containing Aechmea, Billbergia, Guzmania, Neoregelia, Nidularium and Vriesea, what used to be select specimens were now but a shadow of themselves. I did not have the heart to check on the plants in the other greenhouses.

Gardening is a never-ending process. If you are planting trees from seeds, first you germinate the seeds, transplant the seedlings into individual containers when the first set of leaves has matured, then wait a few months for the saplings to grow and be strong enough before you plant them in their permanent place. No waiting is needed if you purchase saplings ready to transplant, but do so at the start of or during the rainy season. That way they have a better chance of survival, even if you don’t water them every day and shade them from the heat of the sun. If there’s no rain, water your trees daily or every other day to keep the soil moist but not soggy.

One month after transplanting, give your plants a handful of nitrogen-rich fertiliser to speed up their growth. Water them thoroughly each time you apply fertiliser to enable the roots to absorb the nutrients and to keep the fertiliser from burning the plant. Repeat the process after six months, or at the end of the rainy season, increasing the quantity of the fertiliser commensurate with the size of the plants. Once your trees are fully established, or after a year or so, they can be watered as needed, but continue to fertilise them every six months.

Looked after: potted plants need closer attention than trees planted in the ground.

It is different with potted plants. Not only do you have to ensure that they are watered and fertilised, but that the planting material is replenished or replaced when needed.

Plants have to be repotted, using fresh soil and bigger pots, when they have outgrown their containers or when they have become root-bound. In the latter case there are more roots than soil in the container. The roots are coiled inside the pot, and the soil has hardened, so that no matter how you fertilise and water it, the plant deteriorates and may eventually die as it cannot absorb nutrients nor moisture from the soil. When repotting root-bound plants, trim off old roots and shorten long ones.

The roots of bromeliads do not grow long, so there is no danger of them being root-bound, but the planting material, usually chopped coconut husk, deteriorates with time and has to be replaced. They grow pups, which have to be separated from the mother plant and grown in individual pots when they are big enough. Also, older leaves dry up and have to be removed or they will look untidy and neglected.

Lucky are the plant enthusiasts, especially absentee gardeners like my family, who have reliable helpers to do the above even when they are not around to give orders. We have someone manning the farm, cutting the grass when it grows tall and turning the sprinklers on and off while we are away. Water has to be pumped every few days from an underground well and from a creek some distance away, and our man can be relied upon to do the job. It’s because of him that the trees have grown fast, but I wish he had a more tender spot in his heart for the potted and hanging plants dying for attention.

We had hoped that someday we would turn the farm into a showcase for plants, a place where students on field trips could learn how to grow trees, flowers and  vegetables, and where interested city people could experience gardening and cultivate a love of plants. However, we may have to rely on the next generation to make that dream a reality.

Meanwhile, we keep on collecting and growing plants for our own pleasure. Luckily for us, many of our plants are bromeliads, which have a habit of bouncing back from the dead. Most of the tillandsias which seemed to be dead were in fact alive, even if half of their leaves were bone dry. All we did was trim off the dead leaves and they were as good as new. Come rainy season, these survivors will give us pups to compensate for those of their kind that were gone to the point of no return. n


Email nthongtham@gmail.com.

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