Top-dressing Clever Girl

As promised, here is an experiment that grew from a conversation I had with one of the employees/Plant Wizards of Pesche's greenhouse.

The problem: I recently acquired a Cyathea cooperi (Australian tree fern) in a ten inch pot. I will be attempting to keep it alive indoors this winter. Internet research has yielded unto me that Cyatheas are very heavy feeders, often receiving monthly emulsions of things like blood and bone meal when grown outdoors in warm climates. Being a prehistoric plant covered in sharp scales and feasting on blood and bones, Boyfriend settled on a name for our tree fern: Clever Girl.

But what to feed Clever Girl? I refuse to pour out repugnant, smelly emulsions in my apartment. And being in a pot, the concentration and administration of said grossness would need to be adjusted. Also, pot culture also lacks a much of the soil bacteria that tree ferns enjoy, and how would I account for that with fertilizer? The good folks at Pesche's had an interesting suggestion: Espoma's Biotone.

Biotone is a fertilizer medium that helps transplants survive. It contains small amounts of all the aforementioned gross things, including the bacteria. Now, I couldn't figure out exactly what kinds of bacteria tree ferns need, so this could be as pointless as fertilizing with Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator (it's got what ferns crave! bacteria!). Nevertheless, Plant Wizard seemed pretty confident about it, and I trust him. I have never used this product before, and so I am not endorsing it in any way. Yet.

Here's what it looks like. It stinks a wee bit.

Plant Wizard and I also realized that, being a fertilizer medium, Biotone could be applied as a top-dressing. Now we're back to the fun stuff.

LADY, WHAT IS TOP-DRESSING? WHY DO I CARE?

Top dressing is a technique used to deliver fresh, un-compacted, nutrient-rich soil to plants that are too big and heavy to repot. You should care because you've probably got some miserable dracaenas laying around the home or office, in huge pots, that haven't had a soil change in fifty years. You make me sick.

Here's how to top-dress!

Step 1: Assemble your tools. You will need a toothpick or skewer, a disposable spoon, an empty container, and (depending on the size of the plant) several cups of your medium-of-choice. I used about 1 1/2 cups of Biotone, as per package directions.

Step 2: Using your spoon, scrape the first couple of inches of topsoil off your plant. Don't break up any roots, if you can help it. Dump the loose soil into the container.

scrape scrape

Step 3: Check the loosened soil and the exposed soil surface of your plant. Bugs? Fungus? Bad smells?

Step 4: Take your skewer and give the exposed soil a good stabbos. This will aerate the old, compacted soil.

Step 5: Pour on your potting medium and spread it out evenly. Make sure you're not burying any stems, vines, or new growth, and never bury the crown of ferns or rosette-forming plants.

Lovely! Top-dressing accomplished. You can top-dress your behemoth potted specimens every spring as a substitute for potting-up, and you might consider simply repotting if you can lift them. Technically, repotting is different from potting-up in that it constitutes pruning the roots, changing the soil, and then putting the plant back into a container of the original size. Repotting is ideal for plants that we intend to grow slowly or plants whose size we intend to control (i.e. bonsai and large indoor plants). Potting-up means placing a plant into a larger container where it will have room to grow larger. For the purposes of this blog, however, I often use "repotting" to mean repotting and potting-on, because I am reproachably lazy.

Anyway. Updates on Clever Girl will be provided.

*Jurassic Park photo: http://thepensblog.blogspot.com/

Products Endorsed by Nature Assassin...

...whether they like it or not.

First things first, I'm a fern nerd. Hardcore. From the strange and metallic microsorium thailandicum to the hairy desert chelianthes tomentosa, from the ground-up blechnums to the epiphytic platyceriums, I love and grow them all. With this in mind, here are a few products I could not do without.*

1. Seaweed fertilizer. Though it is not universally so, the majority of ferns that can be cultivated indoors are acid-loving plants. They have a great deal less use for phosphorus and potassium than the average houseplant, and thus your run-of-the-mill fertilizer can often be damaging to ferns. Furthermore, they are particularly susceptible to fertilizer burn even in normal concentrations, and so you'll never find me pouring MiracleGro on those babies. Seaweed fertilizers will provide just about all the fertilizing your ferns will need, provided they are given yearly soil upgrades. I use Maxicrop USA's Organic Liquid Seaweed plus Iron, with great results. Though they claim their methods are non-polluting and renewable, I'm not sure if this company's harvesting techniques are completely sustainable; unfortunately their website contains no such information. A quart of this stinky elixir should run you about $11 at your greenhouse. Next time I think I might go for the standard-iron variety, but all in all I'm incredibly pleased with this product. As a sidenote, I always use filtered water and dilute this product to half-strength, even though it is already mild. What can I say, I'm not an aggressive fertilizer.

2. Fafard's potting mix. I mix my soils according to each plant's needs using perlite, pumice, peat, pine bark fines, sharp sand, and charcoal, but I often like to use potting mix as a base to save time. Fafard's mix is neither too dry nor too wet, the latter being the more common problem with potting mixes. As compared to big-name varieties, Fafard has four things I prefer 1) a shorter and simpler ingredients list 2) no awful time-release fertilizers 3) less odor (indicates health and sterility) and 4) a much greater proportion of partially-composted bark fines. The more bark fines, the slower the soil will degrade into compacted and nutritionally-scant soup. You can always keep watering your ferns if your medium is quick to drain; you can't un-water a soggy medium.

3. Ferns for American Gardens, by John T. Mickel. This book is great. I love spotting a fern on a hike or in a garden shop and looking it up in this book. The focus is less on fern care and more on the history and native lives of these plants. Probably available at your local garden store or botanical garden, and certainly available online. John T. Mickel, be my valentine.

*Photographs not mine. Furthermore, I am not getting paid to endorse these items. That'll be the day!