Re-potting
16 June 2025 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeMy sorrel has been obviously badly pot-bound for some time (I didn't realise it was only a year old!) and I decided to root-prune it -- I don't have a larger pot available as it is already in a big pot, and the very biggest ones are reserved for (and, at this time of year, full of) fruiting towel-tomatoes...
When I got it out of the pot, with some difficulty as the roots in desperation had gone through the holes in the bottom, it appeared to be utterly pot-bound in a tightly woven mat, and of course was far lighter than it ought to have been immediately after having been watered, since there was presumably no soil in there to speak of. However, when I sharpened a knife and started cutting into what I thought was the compacted rootball, it started coming off in concentric slices; initially I assumed that this was where the original tightly-packed rootball from the garden centre had expanded outwards into the rather narrow fresh layer of soil around the outside (even then I didn't have a pot for it much larger than the already-sizeable one that it came in). After a little while of this it dawned on me that what I was lifting off actually *was* the original pot -- the coir matting that was supposed to biodegrade imperceptibly into the surrounding soil and allow the plant's roots to grow through it! They clearly hadn't been doing any such thing, save at the bottom.
So I have removed that useless layer, plus a bit more off the bottom and around the sides, taken off a good few leaves to reduce the amount of transpiration going on, and replanted the sorrel back into the same pot with a surrounding layer of fresh compost, which ought to provide it with rather more water/growth opportunity than it had available before or indeed since I got it. Under the circumstances it's quite surprising that it did thrive for so long, though sorrel is tough.
I finally got round to pricking out the surviving rudbeckias from the overcrowded tray last week, but they haven't done well, with several having died off. Today I potted up the ones that I had previously pricked out into a separate tray, which had been doing much better there but have now definitely outgrown it. OIf course, this involved doing violence to their rootballs as I had done with the others, so we shall see how they survive... The overwintered rudbeckia now has a flower bud on it, and ironically enough I think there *might* actually be a couple of rudbeckia plants in the rudbeckia pot into which I had sowed a couple of batches of seed at the start of the season. I left a few of the seedlings in there that I thought just *might* be rudbeckias, as opposed to the ones that obviously weren't, and they have now grown big enough to resemble the parent plant rather more.
I also potted up the two catch-up tomatoes, one of which died as a result of transplantation (so of the original three we now have one, which is all I actually needed... inasmuch as I actually 'need' an extra tomato plant at all, since the five adult ones seem to be taking up quite a bit of room right now!)
I took out the overwintered corn-marigold, which had basically finished flowering and had had a lot of the strength sucked out of it by the blackfly, despite my best efforts. I have a couple of flowers showing up in that same pot which I think come from the 'buckwheat seed' packet of (apparently American) wildflower seed that I remember scattering in there on the offchance. One is a pink cornflower, and my ordinary blue cornflowers are all opening now as well :-)
When I got it out of the pot, with some difficulty as the roots in desperation had gone through the holes in the bottom, it appeared to be utterly pot-bound in a tightly woven mat, and of course was far lighter than it ought to have been immediately after having been watered, since there was presumably no soil in there to speak of. However, when I sharpened a knife and started cutting into what I thought was the compacted rootball, it started coming off in concentric slices; initially I assumed that this was where the original tightly-packed rootball from the garden centre had expanded outwards into the rather narrow fresh layer of soil around the outside (even then I didn't have a pot for it much larger than the already-sizeable one that it came in). After a little while of this it dawned on me that what I was lifting off actually *was* the original pot -- the coir matting that was supposed to biodegrade imperceptibly into the surrounding soil and allow the plant's roots to grow through it! They clearly hadn't been doing any such thing, save at the bottom.
So I have removed that useless layer, plus a bit more off the bottom and around the sides, taken off a good few leaves to reduce the amount of transpiration going on, and replanted the sorrel back into the same pot with a surrounding layer of fresh compost, which ought to provide it with rather more water/growth opportunity than it had available before or indeed since I got it. Under the circumstances it's quite surprising that it did thrive for so long, though sorrel is tough.
I finally got round to pricking out the surviving rudbeckias from the overcrowded tray last week, but they haven't done well, with several having died off. Today I potted up the ones that I had previously pricked out into a separate tray, which had been doing much better there but have now definitely outgrown it. OIf course, this involved doing violence to their rootballs as I had done with the others, so we shall see how they survive... The overwintered rudbeckia now has a flower bud on it, and ironically enough I think there *might* actually be a couple of rudbeckia plants in the rudbeckia pot into which I had sowed a couple of batches of seed at the start of the season. I left a few of the seedlings in there that I thought just *might* be rudbeckias, as opposed to the ones that obviously weren't, and they have now grown big enough to resemble the parent plant rather more.
I also potted up the two catch-up tomatoes, one of which died as a result of transplantation (so of the original three we now have one, which is all I actually needed... inasmuch as I actually 'need' an extra tomato plant at all, since the five adult ones seem to be taking up quite a bit of room right now!)
I took out the overwintered corn-marigold, which had basically finished flowering and had had a lot of the strength sucked out of it by the blackfly, despite my best efforts. I have a couple of flowers showing up in that same pot which I think come from the 'buckwheat seed' packet of (apparently American) wildflower seed that I remember scattering in there on the offchance. One is a pink cornflower, and my ordinary blue cornflowers are all opening now as well :-)