Plant progress

[igenlode]

(testing blog image hosting)

Happy, healthy young apple seedlings... and the ink-bottle for my fountain-pens!


A tangled tray of 'salad' waiting to form flower-buds (believe it or not, I did do some thinning-out, by the unorthodox route of removing the stronger specimens of each species!)


Results from the fine-as-dust seed that was left in the bottom of the packet, which I suspect will produce a different species mix

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In further news, I have finished typing "A Family Man" and started work on the provisionally-titled "Meg Shoots the Phantom" -- which is definitely going to need a better title at some point!
It looks as if the latter story really is going to be a short one for once, which I think is partly due to the script-like presentation I've consciously adopted (present tense and third-person 'objective', hence no long digressions into backstory or characters' thoughts about other characters) and partly due to the constraints of the original model: as an alternate finale, my version needs to fit more or less back into the space occupied by the current scene. Even as it is, it's going to be a bit longer, I suspect...

Comments

[watervole]

If they're apple seedlings, plant them out asap. Trees establish best in situ as tap roots get damaged in pots.

[igenlode]

I'm not really going to be in a position to plant them out in the open soil until they're a couple of years old, I think; they'll probably end up joining one of our local 'Millennium Wood' patches of native trees, but they need to be big enough to hold their own alongside bare whips in the process. Bigger, separate pots is definitely a possibility though now I've established which ones are going to live and which ones have died...

[watervole]

Whips will outgrow established pot trees every single time.

The bigger the tree, the more it will struggle to settle in when transplanted. I've seen trees 10ft tall that took five years to start growing when put in place and even 20 years later, they aren't that big.

People have this mania for planting trees -a touching belief that nature can't do it unaided. Seed and natural regeneration produce much better results. All that is generally needed is to fence the area for a couple of years to keep out deer and rabbits.

Why not try for a bonsai apple tree?

[igenlode]

Oh, whips are definitely the way to go for quickest and best results -- we had a graphic demonstration of that with the woman who got landscape gardeners to put in an 'instant' holly hedge with five-foot pot-grown hollies that never established properly (and eventually died when stressed in a drought) while in a couple of years bare-root whips had thickened into a very nice young hedge elsewhere.

Not many deer or rabbits round here! Fencing off an area tends to produce chiefly sycamores and horse chestnuts, though (the latter probably attributable to the squirrels).

I have a bonsai giant redwood outside which I grew from seed picked up during a visit to an arboretum in my teens, but it's shockingly neglected and I'm rather surprised it's still alive. I'm afraid my bonsai phase has long since passed -- all that feeding, root-trimming, pruning and training is too much like hard work :-(

[igenlode]

Hmm, those images on Keapr don't seem to get retained very long :-(