For many plants, the best time for repotting is early spring just before their active growing begins. We’re now in the middle of winter, but because I have missed this window of opportunity to repot for a couple of years, I have a back log of trees to repot.
Especially for my Wisterias, I would like to repot them just before bud swell, so I’m starting to pot early with some of my other trees so that I’m not rushing the whole lot at the same time.
That’s why this is potting session 1. In this session, I potted up my Clementine Mandarin and Valencia orange, moving them from their nursery bags. I got these from Aldi when they were marked down to $10 each. Bargains, considering grafted citrus trees are sold between $20 to $30 dollars nowadays and more if they’re dwarfs. These are just regular grafts, but since they’re cheap, I’m more than happy to experiment growing them in pots. These went into two self-watering pots that are wider on the top, which should be ideal for citrus having their feeder roots on the surface. I got these from Reject shop for $16 each. Because these pots are a little wide on the top for the current roots, I have transplanted a couple of strawberries, and sown some vegetables and flower seeds on the rim to try eliminate problems with overpotting.
I’ve also up potted my Gorgeous crabapple, but have discovered a few curl grubs, and the root system have shrunk compare to when I first bought it a few years back, so the larger pot I’ve moved it into is actually too big for the root system. I’ve sown some lettuces around it too. I hope the tree would survive, I think I should give the top a hard prune as well to balance out the root prune by the grubs…
The goji berries is potted back in the same pot with fresh potting mix. I ran out of potting mix when I first planted the goji berries, and I had mushroom compost on hand at the time, so I used mainly mushroom compost, and it obviously didn’t like it much, hopefully it’ll do better with the repot.
That’s all I had time for on the weekend. I had planned to do the fig as well, but ran out of time, so I’ll do it in the next session. Hopefully soon…
Subtropical Food Gardening ~ 