Sickly, sad-looking plants have a chance

As I am writ­ing this arti­cle, I have the Weather Chan­nel on mute which is show­ing a down­right omi­nous fore­cast of a mas­sive storm sys­tem with Ohio right in the mid­dle; although at this time (3 p.m. on Thurs­day) it is quite sunny out­side. Nonethe­less, after the astro­nom­i­cal dam­age of the freak dere­cho on June 29 I am not tak­ing any chances. Unfor­tu­nately that day did not peak with learn­ing a new vocab­u­lary word — who had ever heard of a dere­cho any­way? — but my car was actu­ally totaled by a 14-inch diam­e­ter oak branch that fell from about 75 feet above. Sur­pris­ingly, plants are a lot less likely to be totaled than auto­mo­biles. I also had some exten­sive dam­age to a few of my beloved End­less Sum­mer hydrangeas and some annu­als. I wor­ried I would lose them, and was elated that in a few short days the plants were all show­ing signs of recov­ery — even the flat of sweet potato vine that was directly under the largest part of the branch that totaled my car. Per­haps the botanists who hybridize these plants should take up auto­mo­tive engineering…

Any­way, one of the best nuggets of gar­den­ing advice I ever got helped me nurse these dam­aged plants through their storm injuries. My friend and fel­low Gazette Mas­ter Gar­dener con­trib­u­tor Dianne Geli­nas taught me that no mat­ter how sickly or sad a plant may look — it still has a chance. I learned this from her not by accept­ing it to be true, but by being dumb­founded after watch­ing her take plants I thought were cer­tainly fin­ished and sud­denly bring­ing them back to life. Talk about a green thumb. My favorite exam­ple was a rose­mary plant she got free from a nurs­ery that had given up on it for one rea­son or another. It was dry, free of leaves and bare bones. I laughed as she repot­ted it, telling her she was wast­ing her time. Two weeks later, I had trou­ble believ­ing it was the same plant. So, I applied Dianne’s stub­born con­vic­tion to my dam­aged plants. I cut back the bro­ken branches, gave ample water and waited. Sure enough they all sur­vived. Should you have any plants dam­aged by weather, I urge you to not give up on them. The first step is to prune off the dam­aged limbs, branches or stems. Leav­ing these bro­ken can infect the whole plant as well as over-exert itself try­ing to repair a bro­ken limb. Make the cut with ster­il­ized, sharp blades — a clean cut not only low­ers the risk of infec­tion to the plant but will heal faster than a cut made with a dull blade.

After real­iz­ing what won­der­ful advice I had received, I wanted to hear from other gar­den­ers on what was the best gar­den advice they ever got?

Another great friend of mine and Mas­ter Gar­dener, Susan Liechty had some won­der­ful tips to share, nei­ther of which I had ever heard — and can­not wait to try.

First, she said to take pho­tos of your gar­den and use those pho­tos to edit and rework how you would like it to look. For some rea­son it seems in pho­tographs we are more per­cep­tive to small details and more likely to notice a problem.

She also shared a great tip for fer­til­iz­ing — save old Parme­san cheese con­tain­ers and use them to sprin­kle fer­til­izer through­out your gar­den. Brilliant!

I also reached out to my absolute favorite blog­ger, Tamar Haspel, who writes a great blog called “Starv­ing off the Land” (starvingofftheland.com). Her best advice: “Lower your expec­ta­tions from your gar­den.” Although funny, she makes a great point. Maybe your first veg­etable gar­den will not pro­duce bushels of blue-ribbon wor­thy toma­toes, but do not let that dis­cour­age you. Gar­den­ing is a won­der­ful hobby that should, at its core, be fun. Enjoy it. Some years you might have only a few toma­toes — that is OK, next year you will have more.

Stephen Jones is an OSU Exten­sion Mas­ter Gard­ner volunteer.

Posted by Master Gardener on Jul 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.