PBS Forum

Quote from: Too Many Plants! on Today at 11:16:12 AMSo...if my water, and my DG soil are above 6.0 ph, then adding composted chk manure would help lower the ph?

In terms of soil pH, 6.0 is reasonably acid anyway. A shift of of 1.0 from neutral -7.0, is quite a lot.
Just be aware of soil pH but also what any addition will do. Chicken manure, for instance, will add P, but not much else in comparison.

Quote from: Too Many Plants! on Yesterday at 03:34:13 PM

Quote from: Uli on Yesterday at 03:10:33 PMAgapanthus are very greedy plants. Any general fertilizer will do the job. Or composted horse manure.

Hmmm... I wonder if they would appreciate composted chicken manure?

Manures generally contain very little plant nutrient and very often what they do contain is very biased in terms of N-P-K - have a search online and you'll find numbers.

In the UK extensive poultry farming is causing major problems with phosphate pollution of water courses where numbers of birds has soared in an area (Severn and Wye valleys in particular).
Poultry manure from intensive units finds a raedy market in areas of the UK with phosphate-poor soils, partiuclarly in East Anglia.

Manures add greatly to humus content of soils - their main plus point, but also decrease pH.

In my experience -
A. aurea is uncommon in cultivation. The real species is very attractive and a modest size.
A. namaquensis seems to be confused with A. polyphylla. The real species is like shawii but with twisted leaves. The latter is a fabulous plant - winter-grower, small, freely off-setting and with fantastic scent to the flowers - epigeal bulbs but otherwise like a small shawii.
A. spiralis seedlings do not have curled (spiral) leaves. There seem to be a few, quite different, clones in cultivation, possibly including what are actually A. namaquensis.

@Uli is almost certainly correct - the leaves should be slightly hairy, slightly sticky and angular - to me they smell of turpentine and all you need to do is very gently brush aginst them to smell it - if I reach past it and there is the slightest of disturbance of the foliage, I can smell turpentine. Flowers on my clone here have a good citrus scent, better/stronger than "slightly".

It may be a common(ish) plant in cultivation, but it is so for very good reason. It is even generous with seed too. One of my favourites.

The problem with any detailed cultivation guide for any plants is that they are almost always just the experience of one person in one location.
In the case of SA bulbs, probably a majority of people growing them outside of SA are growing them in climates that are totally unsuited for growing them outdoors, in the soil, for instance.

At the very least, every grower is different - for instance, on average, I over-water everything, so I have always used composts for dry climate plants that are very largely (but not entirely) mineral, but I would never consider trying to grow anything in any single aggregate, such as hydroton (it looks very like many different expanded clay media sold in the UK under numerous names).
More than that, very moisture sensitive plants are grown in clay pots here as even after heavy watering, they dry out fast. Not everythig likes that though - as a generalisation, Ferarria here, my greenhouse, my climate, my cultural regime, do better in plastic pots.

If you take a look at the very recent SABG newsletters you will find details of light levels too.

Kites I would have thought would work, but................

Maybe 6-8-10 years ago bird-shaped kites that had a very fast and random flight pattern - a very clever, but presumably simple design, as most clever things are - were very popular over crops that are (wood) pigeon magnets. I don't recall seeing one for quite some while, near certainly not since before C19, and perhaps they only persisted for a year, maybe two?

I haven't heard a gas gun for umpteen years either (although I seem to recall mutterings of banning them due to noise nuisance).

If anything is effective and cost-effective, it tends to hang around.

Over the years, what to hang in gardens/vegetable plots has changed.......

The most ancient of "guaranteed to work" were probably the foil cases/trays used for shop-bought pies and the like. The next idea was probably empty PET bottles, followed by PET bottles with some water in them (not much). The idea of using CDs has been around for ages (remember all those freebie AOL junk mail CDs?).

It is all fantasy. If it works at all, it doesn't for very long.

The other idea was to bury bottles  so that their tops were just proud of the ground - the sound from the wind blowing across the tops would frighten/discourage various things.

I presume that people are pining for the gamekeepers' gibbet? Equally as effective.

I knew a bhuddist who thought the same and used one of the mint oils liberally as they could not kill anything.

Until they opened some chest drawers and found clothes, blankets etc. in tatters.

Mint flowers are always very popular with insects......................

Quote from: David Pilling on June 20, 2024, 05:30:55 PMDo plants like banana water? Gardening experts weigh in

I used to work with a Nigerian who had lots of fingers in various Nigerian pies..............one was a soap factory. 
They made soft soap (usually used as shaving soap amongst other uses, and the potassium salt, rather than sodium salt, of fatty acids), using banana skin ash.

"Blue curls" is just a name attached in the horticutural trade. Are they all the same cultivar or clone across the whole world? Unlikely. They are everywhere in Europe, so there are many, many, many thousands of plants in trade.

A. fragrans - I have not waded through the taxonomic treacle to discover current opinion, but Drimia and Ornithogalum are/have been other genera used for the plant.
It is offered by SA seed merchants and their websites may offer more information.
So far as I recall, I have never seen any description that indicates that the flowers are scented, despite the name.

If you like scented flowers in Albucas - polyphylla (winter-growing) is fabulous, and shawii and humilis are very, very good too.
A 4+ inch pot of polyphylla in flower will scent an entire greenhouse of 10+ cubic metres/yards.
All 3 are small-growing, polyphylla offsets very freely and shawii is very easy from seed. Humilis offsets reasonably freely.
Shawii foliage smells slightly of pine/turpentine if held close to your nose; also very pleasant.

I assume that Eire still operates peat (turf)-fired power stations?

The limitation to peat alternatives in horticulture is that they all compost/rot, so are unsuitable for use as any significant proportion of a potting compost that is destined to be in a pot for more than a few months (depending on how damp the compost is in very large part).

One of the longer-lived alternatives is coir - I have been using it for something like 30 years. If it is kept very damp or wet (and warm) that can compost-down to a black sludge within a year but can last several years if the pot is growing someting that is kept "dry".

Has anyone any idea what growers of the commoner carnivorous plants - the ones that naturally grow in bogs - are using? The problem is that the pots need to stay permanently at least very damp. I suppose they could go to entirely aggregate potting media.

Babianas go dormant late spring, so delivery seems right.

All bulbs are best in soil or compost.
In a pot, fill to around 20-40cm of the top with gritty compost, settle the bulbs a few mm into this, top the pot up with grit.
Leave until September before giving them their first water.

I was still at school when plant communication got reasonable coverage (so pre 1977).

They fixed lie detectors (basically conductivity sensors) to a single plant and a selection of people, some of who had been asked to rip a plant to pieces, well away from the study plant. The people were asked individually to stand close to the study plant and all that had destroyed a plant got a response, and one person who had not also elicited a response.

After some investigation, the "odd one out" was found to have cut his lawn earlier that day.

Or so the article claimed.

More recently, a TV programme showed broadly similar experiments with trees in woodland.

I have one bulb in flower, one in bud at the moment, grown as rubrocyanea from Silverhill seed. I'll wait for the second to open so that I can compare before commenting about them.

Iridaceae, Strelitzia42, Goldblatt and Manning, gives detailed descriptions and how to tell rubrocyanea and regia apart. I'll copy this here when I have a moment. Unfortunately, the book has a pic' only of rubrocyanea.