Papyrus abuse

Thursday 17 July 2008 - Filed under Plants

One of my favorite plants, this papyrus, was giving up on me. I had plugged the hole in a large pot to keep the water from draining and kept it well watered, moved it around trying to make it happy (too much shade? too much sun?), considered cutting it back to the ground to see how it would respond. This papyrus just didn’t look happy, and no matter what I did, it leaned further over to the side.

My garden resolution this year is to act swiftly to move things to a new location if they’re struggling, and I’ve been half successful following through. The best I could come up with for this poor guy was to move it into the bog, next to another identical papyrus that looked much happier, even though I really wanted pots of papyrus surrounding my patio. This was my quickest plant turnaround ever. I put it in the ground, and it looked normal again. What I realized I had been doing each time I watered was washing all the soil away from the base of the plant and compacting the potting soil down, and it simply didn’t have enough soil around the base to support the stalks. This week I learned to plant stuff at the right depth. Send me back to gardening 101.

2008-07-17  »  megan