gejala pokok | symptomatic trees

I haven’t updated about my seedlings for awhile, cause I reckoned they just need to be left alone to grow. But some of them have started to act a little strangely.

They’re all planted at the same time, are generally left to grow in the same place, with the same amount of watering, sun and air. So why is it that some of them are growing like crazy, while others just kinda hang about, looking depressed, stunted or dying?

Here’s the very first plant I grew from seed (minus the statice that didn’t survive transplanting), the celosia:

Look at their difference!! They were both transplanted at the same time, from the same initial pot, and have been left side by side at the windowsill. Haven’t added any fertiliser or sweet words to either of them.

I don’t know why one looks like it’s turning into a proper plant, and the other one is just stuck at first true leaves stage. Either way, it makes me smile lots when I see the happily growing one. Hopefully it’ll serve as some kind of encouragement to the other pot. I have one more flower box worth of celosia, transplanted from a different batch earlier on. It looks even more stunted than this one

Same story with the petunia. Came back after the weekend at Bali, and one of the three tiny pots seem to have grown lots. It looked quite a lot like the one on the left initially, but better in colour (not so bleached). Now it’s looking pretty bushy

My marjorams are the worst! Out of hundreds of teeny tiny seedlings, it looks like only one will survive. I’m going to give up on the one that looks like it’s about to cough itself into a dry death soon. Sigh… But at least the one that is surviving looks pretty damn strong!

Gosh, so embarassing… I am a bad gardener!
Next is my baby nepenthes, which is thankfully doing better.

It was in the studio under fluorescent light and a humidifier for a few weeks, and was generally doing well. Spotted it coming up with new leaves, and decided to take it outside. And yes indeed, a new true leaf has emerged into a pitcher! And I can see two more coming up. Yay!

Soooooo cute it is! Smaller than my thumb

The original bigger nepenthes on the other hand, still stubbornly refuses to pitcher. It keep shaving small tendrils that bulb out, but something is missing. Not sure what. Maybe it’s too much direct sunlight. Found some mushrooms sharing its soil too last week. Took them all out. Maybe the mushroom was just being greedy, sucking up all the nutrients. Hmm…

See. One little tendril struggling hard to be a pitcher. It’s pretty much at the same spot, but the smaller nep is underneath it, which means it doesn’t get direct sunlight for as long. Should try and move it to somewhere else…

And finally, the sunflower seedling that tukang kebun brought over - from the same batch that I killed but she managed to keep them going, even if they germinated belatedly - is very very super ultra happy. And it’s blooming! I could just see the bud today. So excited!! Can’t wait for it to slowly open up.

First plant to flower from seed

no pictures for this post ’cause i left my camera somewhere else. but thought i should jot down what’s been happening anyway, garden log style

1. sunflower seedlings
tried to revive them by taking them away from the scorching sun on the balcony into the studio under florescent lights. then made chamomile tea as an natural fungicide and poured them on all 4 pots.

also had a brain fart idea that they might be under-nourished so tried putting a diluted transplanting fertilizer solution on one of the pots (schultz starter plus — which i am sure is actually not meant for seedlings and i am an idiot). all i did was accelerated the dying process (DO NOT DO IT!).

took a couple back out to a shady spot on the balcony. nothing worked. they all just died. at different rates. the cotyledons yellowed, shrank and dried up, followed by the first pair of true leaves.

the only one that’s still kinda surviving is the one i placed under a florescent lamp, 24 hours a day. and i think all i’m doing is just slowing down its impending death. so i am letting it out to the balcony today, to enjoy some real sun, and finally letting go. *sob* *sob*

on a brighter note, i now know a little more about natural fungicides and pesticides. going to try a new batch soon. and going to take some of heathrjoy’s and ecrane3’s good advice, and hope, hope, hope for the best!

2. transplanting the petunia
decided to transplant the petunias on sunday cause they were flopping over one by one. not having good garden vibes last week. not sure what the problem was, but think it is probably a mixture of over-crowding and lack of proper soil (used a horti ’soil-less’ seed starting mix). don’t think it’s damping off, because the stems look alright, but i might be wrong.

they’re the tiniest little things and a real bugger to transplant. not possible to dig underneath with a fork, ’cause the fork is just waaaaay to big. so i resorted to using my fingers and pinching them as lightly as possible near the leaves to tease them out of the soil.

wish i had a picture to show you, but maybe another day. it’s a real nightmare, and i think i killed as many as i managed to transplant. they’re now in small metal pots, with more space between them. just had a check on them, and a majority of them seem to be fine. going to keep fingers, toes and knees crossed!

3. sundew is on the way!
turned out i was having a dyslexic moment, and took down the wrong number despite checking 3 times. david from petpitcher rang back, and we’re going to collect the little plant and byblis seeds today. yay! can’t wait

meanwhile, i have a tray of wheat grass on the go for my mom. a little late for mother’s day, but hope it turns out fine. don’t think i did the pre-sprouting preparation for enough times, but the tray has been a seedling charm. wish me luck!

got some great advice from heathrjoy & ecrane3 on dave’s garden forum again

first, i was led to this really comprehensive page on ‘damping off‘ (which is going up on garden jargon soon). checked all the signs and symptoms, and it doesn’t look to be the issue.

then i went a little crazy on my web search, and found all kinds of stuff that could happen to sunflowers. it’s a little like reading up on medical websites; suddenly it can seem like you’ve got the symptoms for all kinds of stuff, inevitably going towards cancer. not a good thing to do, trust me. here’s a couple:

• i kisan - sunflower disease management
• sclerotinia in sunflowers
• field problems affecting sunflowers

several agricultural and crop websites later, i gave up, and just decided that i really don’t know what’s the issue.

luckily, ecrane & heathrjoy passed on some actually realistic and usable information. decided to cut back on watering, and bought some chamomile tea — which works as a natural kind of anti-fungal, as does peroxide & cinnamon — boiled a huge pot, and watered them onto the seedlings.

too soon to see if it’s working yet. so far, one of the seedlings has its leaves (cotyledons and true leaves) pretty much chomped off, but the rest seems to be hanging on.

gah….

hope it keeps up the good fight!

one of the less badly affected seedlings.

it has been hot for the past couple of days, and then a sudden short storm last night. took most of my seedlings in, but left 3 out of 4 pots of my sunflower outside. big mistake.

this morning, had a closer look at the seedlings, and i think they’ve got some kind of diseases! almost every true leaf has a blackened tip, with a yellowy patch. what’s going on? what can i do? is it a fungus? is it something else? shit shit shit.

i’m really panicking. hope someone at the gardening forums can help me. only just this morning i was feeling really good about how they survived the transplant.

now this

can’t seem to find anything on the web. maybe they’re black spots? or one of these many, many different kinds of sunflower diseases? or a list of these common houseplant problems?

really hope against hope that someone can help me!

i’m going crazy. i used to have a life. blissful hours of vegging out in front of the telly, going places, seeing people - all the things that makes a person normal.

but the past few weeks, all i’ve done is spend hours, hours, checking on my little seedlings, getting all stressed out and turning into an anxious wreck, panicking over transplanting needs.. even my web search habit has changed drastically.

i used to read socio-political blogs, blogs on poetry, arts stuff, news. but now? all i read are gardening blogs. all kinds of gardening blogs. gardeners who rant, gardeners who rave, gardeners who love their gardens, gardeners who hate other gardeners… it’s a mad, mad world. and it’s not even been a month yet since i started this obsession.

now i have more than twenty pots of seedlings in multiple sizes needing light, shade, water, coaxing conversations, all kinds of attention. i’m really afraid that i might not get out of this bubble. and i’m so totally, crazy in love with this.

oh dear.

so, back to more important things

my sunflowers are doing great! there’s true leaves showing, and none of them have keeled over or died yet. which is super cool. here’s a latest picture.

they’re still under florescent light in the toilet, and i think i might have to invest in some table lamp thing soon. i can’t keep one toilet occupied by pots and trays forever. also a little worried that they shouldn’t be under constant light, so i’m going to give them a rest tonight and switch it off. hopefully they will still be happy and standing tall tomorrow. please, please, please…

so since the sunflowers are alright, decided to transplant the balsam and the sage as well ’cause they were getting a little leggy. also the phlox, ’cause it doesn’t look so healthy sitting in that big pot.

same exercise: take out the gardening mat, mixing up the soil (regular hummus mix, with a little bit of peat moss and vermiculite, and layering the bottom of the pot with coconut fibre), putting it in the pot, carefully pricking out the seedlings with a chopstick, then spoon, then fork (works the best if seedlings are quite tiny), putting them in new pots with more space between each one so that they can grow, tamping down the soil around the roots and stem gently, water from below, and under the florescent light they go (just for the night).

very, very anxious that they might suffer the same fate as the statice, but this morning, they seemed fine! no flopping over, no looking like they’re shriveling up slowly but surely, no signs of impending death.

yay!

the phlox, as of an hour ago.

the sage with new leaves still growing fine. though this particular one suffered from my clumsy fingers. one of the cotyledons snapped off when i was trying to loosen it from the soil. but with a lot of hope (and pillow talk :|), hopefully it’ll turn out fine.

and finally the balsam. notice the one that also suffered from my clumsy fingers - with more dire effect. i snapped off not only one of the cotyledons, but severed the other one as well. boo hoo! may the others survive in lush-fullness.

that took more than 2 hours and a very cramped back. ah well, they’re worth it

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!

okay… maybe i jinxed my seedlings with over-optimistic post yesterday. today, my sunflowers are flopping over, and i saw at least two of my celosia that completely keeled over. what is going on???

my sunflower seedlings

is it the cat? i caught him trying to eat the sunflowers today, and shouted at him a lot. he hid under the rug the whole day after that. maybe he hurt the stem? maybe it was me? i totally forgot that i wasn’t supposed to touch the stem cause they’re so big. i tried to readjust them, but maybe i made it worse?

help!!

they grew so fast. germinated within a day, yates ‘yellow empress’ variety. i’m really upset. i don’t want them to die. hope someone from the garden forum would be able to help me.

haven’t had a chance to post up pictures of the marjoram, balsam, petunia & sage that germinated early last week. took some photos today, they are looking strong and good and getting taller and taller!

these are the balsam. they’re growing a little leggy. i borrowed some of tukangkebun’s horti seed and potting mix for this. doesn’t seem to have that much difference from the soil mix i used. but i wonder if this means i’ll have to transplant them since it’s a ’soil-less’ mixture, meaning no nutrients for the plant.

the petunias are growing mad. i think they’re the spreading kind, which means they need more water than the usual. i used the same horti mix, and now really regret it because how on earth am i going to transplant such teeny-tiny little things?? apparently they grow quite slowly, and take some time before true leaves show. so i’m going to take the time to figure out this problem.

marjoram. just marginally bigger than the petunias. i mixed a hummus-y soil with some peat moss and vermiculite for this. which hopefully means i wont have to re-pot them cause they’re soooooo tiny also. they’re a little crowded i think. but it might be too soon to thin them. not sure. but they seem happy..

there’s ‘true’ leaves coming out! the sage was actually slower than the rest in germinating. used the same self-mixed soil, and it’s growing a little leggy also. crap. but maybe i can re-pot them soon.

more little phlox popping up! the fine hairs are actually from the cat, who was trying to catch a mega huge ant crawling around the pot. i hope he’s learnt his lesson about not chomping on the plants or digging them up. he’s been quite good so far, except for the lipstick plant incident =|

and the latest addition, the “yellow empress” sunflower! sown on 19th april, and looking very very happy. except i might have burnt them by putting them on the window ledge where they’ll get direct sun. keep forgetting that they’re only tiny. put them back in the balcony now, where it’s more shade than sun, but still light enough. as long as no more storms come along.

i think i might have to add some soil to the balsam and sage, cause they’re getting really long and a little wriggly, trying to reach for sunlight. but i’m not sure if that’ll suffocate the roots. hmm… another question for the forum.

oh, and balcony was getting way to cramped for new seedlings, new pots of plants etc. so had to try and sort out some spatial problem. got this trolley from ikea (i know i know…), but it was not super expensive (RM45) and can be pushed around to catch the sun or avoid the rain. quite handy

also bought my very first gardening book, “an encyclopedia of garden plants & techniques“. this is quite scary, considering i just started this whole plant thing on 1st april. help, help…. but i’m loving this!

oh, and found a handy tripod site by a malaysian gardener! awesome if you want to plant cactus here, this is where you want to go: kh man’s cacti & succulents site.