gejala pokok | symptomatic trees

After worrying like crazy over the floppy sunflower seedlings, I took some good advice from heathrjoy & ecrane3 from dave’s garden forum, and from mscratch at the gardenweb forum and decided to bite the bullet, and transplant them.

I was really nervous, ’cause the last transplanting experiment I did totally failed. But decided that if I didn’t do anything now, they’d just get worse. So here’s a inch-by-inch account of this second attempt:

1. Did a web search on transplanting sunflowers specifically and found these:
   • What seedlings really want - some basic information about growing seedlings.
   • Found this cool video on how to prick out seedlings.
   • Repot at your own risk - *gleep*!
   • Transplanting sunflowers - pretty handy and quite detailed. The advice was based on the assumption that I’d be transplanting from a germination site to the garden. Since the only ‘garden’ we have is a balcony, I can only transplant from small pot to bigger pot. but I reckon the information should still stand, except the only wild animal I have to worry about is the cat!

   

   Who, me?
   

2. Bought soil (organic hummus mix), new pots, and a packet of new seeds in case this fails terribly.
3. Washed the pots with soap and water. Set up the mat and mixed the soil with a little bit of peat moss and some vermiculite in a bucket. Loosened them with a small garden fork thing, then added them into the pots, close to the top. I did have a sieve, but wasn’t sure how to use it *blush*, so I just used my hands until i found a big, fat earthworm in the soil! After that, it was the fork and gloves for me…

   

4. Next is the scary thing. Trying to get the seedlings out from the original pots without killing them, and repotting it. First I used a chopstick, but the soil was not really budging. Then i tried with a small plastic spoon as a spatula, and thought I felt some roots breaking (!). Finally, resorted to my hands, and gently eased them up in clumps.Instead of trying to loosen the soil from the roots like I did the last time, I potted them with the clump of soil together. And there were a couple that were very close together and I didn’t think I could separate them without doing some serious damage. So I just potted them together. These were easier to handle than the statice because it was just so much bigger and the root system was already quite advanced! Quite amazing really… considering they’re just short of one week old.

   

5. Then I dug a deep hole (with fingers again), and with the help of mukaketupat, eased them in and added soil around the root clump and the stem. I planted them a lot deeper than they were in the original pots, but not quite to the top ’cause the new pots are not tall enough. Watered them really generously from top and bottom. Wasn’t sure if I should stake them at this point, so I tried one.Ten seedlings (and one whole hour) later, this is how they look:

   
   Still kinda floppy, but can you believe it, it’s much better than before!

6. The only florescent lights we had was in the toilet, so I plonked the pots on top of a step ladder so that they can be as close to the light as possible. Left them there the whole night with lots of prayers…And this morning:

   
   They’re actually starting to get straighter!

   
   This is the one I tried to stake with a chopstick. It was totally keeled over before, but now it’s looking quite good.

So I think I’m pretty happy Will move them out to the balcony tomorrow for some proper sunlight. Hopefully they’ll keep getting stronger and stronger, and then I might start thinking about transplanting the other ones!

Yay!