- Handling Plants from March Plant Sales
By Bill Meyer
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- Often garden clubs have early
plant sales as part of their fundraising efforts. In these sales, members
buy hostas that are already leafed out despite the fact that the hostas
outdoors in the ground are barely poking their noses out of the soil.
These plants have been pushed by professional growers who have greenhouses
where they can control temperature and lighting to an extent not possible
for most gardeners. While hostas are easier to grow than most other
plants, there are some steps that can be taken by the average gardener to
assure maximum success with these "early birds".
The best way to handle plants leafed out in March is to
keep them in as bright light as possible indoors if the temperature is
below 40F and move them out when it is higher to filtered sunlight. Keep
them watered and use a little fertilizer. When the weather warms enough to
plant them out, choose a spot that doesn't get hot sun in the summer.
That's all you need to know. The rest of this article is for those
that want to know why.
A hosta is a simple little machine that comes out of a
seed and sets a root, then uses the water and nutrients that come up that
root to produce a leaf. Then it uses food manufactured by the leaf to
produce another root. If conditions are favorable, each step is bigger for
the first year. If it is big enough when it goes into dormancy, it will
come up doing this as batches, producing whole divisions. If it isn't big
enough, it will resume the one leaf, one root rate.
Smaller, younger plants are different from older more
established plants, so we'll look at them a little differently. A very
young plant that is still in its first year is in a cycle of continually
producing leaves one at a time and each larger than the last until a
maximum size is reached. Some plants that have had their first dormancy
continue to behave like this, while others that were more mature going
into dormancy may wake up into a mature plant growth pattern. In a
mature-plant pattern, the hosta will put up a larger set of leaves then
grow for a while and put up another division later if conditions are good.
To keep things simple in this article, we'll call these two stages young
and older.
Young plants are more flexible than older plants
because each new leaf represents a steady increase in growing and they
move forward constantly with little resting. Their growth pattern is like
this --- one leaf, one root, one leaf, one root. Older plants burst forth
with a full division of leaves and appear rest for a long period before
venturing into growth again. Their growth pattern is like this - one or
several complete leaf divisions, all roots for those divisions, one or
several complete leaf divisions, all roots for new divisions. If a young
plant has a setback, it just sends up the next leaf, which will be smaller.
If an older plant has a setback, it can be catastrophic as it may lose
three-quarters or more of its growth and have to change directions in the
middle of a strongly established cycle, and will get much smaller.
Now, let's stop for a minute and think about what
happens when we interrupt this process. We are risking interrupting it
when we carry plants around that were raised in greenhouses during a time
of year when they would not be growing outdoors. The way we can
interrupt these plants is by changing their environment drastically. We
move them to different places with different temperatures, lighting, and
care.
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- To get the best results from plants purchased in
this manner, we need to do two things:
1. Avoid disrupting the plant's growth cycle as much as we can. Be careful
to never let the plant dry out or get exposed to frost. Also, don't forget
the plant in the car where sunlight coming through the glass can burn away
leaves, or more than a day of darkness in the trunk robs it of the ability
to photosynthesize. Fertilizer is a plus, so treat it to a little Miracle-Gro or
something similar. In short, keep it growing and don't let it stop. Young
plants are more easily interrupted, while older plants are more tolerant
but have greater consequences. The plant has the same goal for itself that
we have for it - to get as big as it can as fast as it can, but it is
dependent on our care to do this.
2. Allow leaves to develop at cool temperatures as they would naturally.
When a hosta in the ground emerges, temperatures are generally very cool.
They are so cool normally that nighttime frosts are a danger for the first
month or so. These are not the sort of temperatures that we find
comfortable indoors, so a hosta at this point in its growth cycle does not
enjoy too much warmth. If the leaves are made in too-warm conditions they
are flimsy, weak, and over-expanded. These leaves will not hold up well,
and may collapse by midsummer, resulting in serious (but later) disruption
of the cycle. Move plants outside whenever it is over 40F and keep them out
of direct full sun.
To end up with the biggest plant the following year, we
need to keep the cycle flowing smoothly through the whole season. This
applies to all hostas whether they've been started early or not. Any
transplanted hosta faces difficulty if leaves are exposed to more sunlight
in their new location than in the location where those leaves were formed.
A change in this direction often leads to leaves being destroyed slowly and the
plant forced to backtrack and become smaller to survive. Plants started in
greenhouses are normally grown under shade cloth, and will suffer in full
sunlight, particularly if moved to a very different soil than what they
were growing in. Always transplant to more shade than the plant previously
received if it is already leafed out.