tomc
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 2661
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 2:52 am
Location: SE-OH USA Zone 6-A

Re: Help with the sun

Poke your dirt with something and check. :)

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DDMcKenna
Senior Member
Posts: 152
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 1:10 pm
Location: Florida, USA, just north of Daytona Beach

Poor baby has been poked to death!
I have these large "mechanic" hands with callouses so thick I can't even feel things right.
But I little of the dust-size soil sticks to the tip of my little finger.
I am terrified of her staying to wet and getting some disease
I think I'm "aerating" the soil pretty good they way I poke all around the edges.
Sometimes, I can feel her roots and it feels "unnatural" to touch them.
But that course soil is no match for my pinkies wet or dry.

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DDMcKenna
Senior Member
Posts: 152
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 1:10 pm
Location: Florida, USA, just north of Daytona Beach

I have decided Juni is going to sit in the sun for nine hours again today. We're expecting another very dry day, possible below 50% humidity, and hot sun, 95 degrees, all day without any storms. I think she needs an opportunity to dry out real good because I'm afraid I haven't gotten her "completely" dry before I have watered her in the past.

It seems very difficult for me to judge just how damp her soil is. I poke holes all around the edges of the bowl with my pinky and it always feels cool and "dampish?" It's difficult to say with my very callous fingers. But the wooden sticks I use seem to produce the same results, just a little soil sticking to the end that was pushed in the deepest. I feel like I'm moving all the soil around a bit by poking it so much but I don't know if there is anything wrong with that from what I've read.

Getting the watering correct is only part of the challenge. I'm almost ready to buy one of those electronic moisture detectors but I am afraid that it won't be accurate in this very course soil. It would seem that it would read differently each time you checked it because it would always contact a different amount of soil verses gravel in the mix. But then there are other issues too.

The hard part is all the conflicting information out there. For example, I read here that those green slow-release pellets are used only when repotting which I assume is once a year or two. But the instruction card that came with the fertilizer said to apply a spoonful once a month. And the liquid fertilizer seems really hard to judge. The directions with the stuff said one teaspoon per gallon of water. Well, that seems pretty weak when you compare how much water I use to flush and soak Juni real good when I do water her. I use a quarter teaspoon in a quart and a half of water and it seems like that is almost nothing.

For an old mechanic like me, growing a tree like this seems to be an interesting challenge.



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