BRUTAL BUT HAS ITS BENEFITS
Root Pruning
“Root pruning” sounds like such a brutal way to treat a plant. Yet it’s a periodic necessity once any potted plant has grown as large as you want it to. Potted plants — like other plants — grow, and while a fifty foot tall weeping fig (Ficus benjamina) is a glorious sight on a Carribean island, my living room ceiling won’t allow such growth. Root pruning slows stem growth as well as makes room for new soil and new roots.
Root pruning — and stem and leaf pruning — of my own weeping fig “tree” has kept it, after 15 years of growth, only a few inches high! This bonsai gets its roots, stems, and leaves pruned twice a year, one of those times this week.
Weeping figs, Puerto Rico and windowsill
How often to root prune any potted plant depends on how fast the particular plant grows, or tries to, and any quirks it has about being root pruned. Read more
BORING TROUBLES NO MORE
First Evidence: Limp Leaves
Complaints. Complaints. I’ve been hearing so many complaints about squash plants, how they looked healthy, then all of a sudden flagged and took a turn on the road towards death. I can help you deal with the problem — but mostly for next year. The best time for action was earlier this season.
Young zucchini, early in season
An insect called the “squash vine borer,” lodged in the stem, is responsible for your squash’s wilting. The saga of how that insect got there began in early summer, Read more
OTHER CREATURES ALSO LOVE APPLES
With more forethought, Adam might not have bitten the apple and I might not have planted apple trees. For my part, I hadn’t realized that apple trees had so many pest problems.
But Adam did bite the apple, and I did plant apple trees and we each have dealt with the consequences. I could have resorted to the season-long drench of pesticides recommended to kill every pest. Instead, I decided to research potential pest problems, then see how little, if any, pesticide I could use and still harvest an acceptable crop of high quality apples.
Home grown Esopus Spitzenberg apple
