Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Quick Tips to keep a flowerpot garden


  1. Plastic flowerpots are not suitable for gardens that are directly exposed to sunlight for too many hours, or during the hottest hours of the day. These get overheated and can damage the roots very badly
  2. You can install hanging pot racks and cultivate some species there, creating a tropical atmosphere
  3. Places near windows are ideal to cultivate flowers and aromatic species. The fragance will spread through the house
  4. Do not use soil extracted from the garden, as it has too much clay. It could also carry some plagues. Use only potting soil that you can buy at any store
  5. Mix the potting soil with round gravel: this combination will help with the airing and water retention
  6. Before pouring in the potting soil, you should add first some gravel, little pieces of broken ceramics, etc, so the draining holes do not get stucked
  7. Be careful, in small ground spaces like flower pots, the watering and fertilizing must be done much more carefully than in an outdoor garden
  8. The water evaporates much faster in terra cotta pots, so we have to water more often than with other kinds of pots
  9. An automatic watering system is really necessary, specially if you get absent for long periods of time
  10. A quick method to know when it's time to water your plants is by introducing your finger into the soil and see if it's humid
  11. There are some really useful humidity meters in the market if you look for something more accurate
  12. The smaller flower pot are watered wit more frequency than the large ones
  13. The main mistake when cultivating plants in a flowerpot it's the excessive watering that ends up rottening the roots
  14. Many plants have a season where the watering should be minimum or none. Cactuses are a good example, as they don't have to get any water during winter
  15. For flower pots and hanging pots, you can use liquid fertilizers every 15 days since the ending of the winter to the beggining of auttum from only once a month during the rest of the year
  16. An overdose of fertilizer causes more damage to the plants than using non fertilizer at atll
  17. Another way of oxigenating the ground is by adding a few earthworms in the pot
  18. Every one or two years, change the flower pot for a bigger one, according to the species


No comments: