container garden by a 6-year-old

You wouldn't want to discourage him, but...........
I couldn't have stopped myself from doing a bit of 'watch and learn' here. Those poor plants!

know what you mean - I winced while watching that bit - he may have been enthused by watching others, but obviously didn't take notes of how to get a plant out of a pot - talk about "with a vengeance"!

Reminds me of when I do a 'robust' untangling of potbound conifer roots. That can get pretty brutal...

I've seen garedening programmes where the gardener was a bit brutal in potting; they said that the plants can take it, but then, we can all take a bit of bruising, but sure we'd all rather avoid it if possible ...

Think of it like painful physio, tangled roots can girdle and debilitate or eventually kill a shrub or tree.

Have you read this?

http://www.viewzone.com/plants.html

Just read this, SS. It's amazing what you can learn on this site! I have heard of the music effect through a friend who puts ailing houseplants on top of the stereo and swears they recover better there than anywhere else in the house, listening to loud rock music! Who can tell? Maybe they just like the attention.

I try to be gentle with roots: when I repot plants, especially if they've become a bit potbound, I rub the dirt away with fingertips and thumb to loosen rootlets to encourage them to grow outwards in the new pot. Years ago I had a rubber plant; I was doing this to it when I felt something that shouldn't have been there - buried deep in the tangle was a tiny plastic-mesh pot that it had obviously been grown in; rather than remove it when it was big enough to pot on and sell, they'd just put the pot in as well. The roots had obviously grown out around it but surely it was still a constriction: took me ages to tease the roots apart so I could snip the mesh off, a bit at a time and hope I didn't hurt the plant too much.

What a brilliant article! thanks for passing iton, Sev. *s* this is going to make cutting back plants a bit more of an issue! We had some severely overgrown elders at the charity centre: I kept meaning to ask their permssion before cutting them back, never remembered to when it came to it, but now I can hope that they understood my intent to do so.

lol it's only recently that Homo Sap has become "intelliegent" enough to accept that it's not the ruler of the universe! People generally still don't accept that animals have feelings (not *rea*l feelings, the sort that *we* have) and that fish don't *really* feel pain when they get a metal hook in the mouth; they're never going to accept that plants have any right to be treated with respect!

I remember reading reprots that plants at one end of a room reacted to leaves being pulled off another plant at the other end, and that a tree that had been invaded by pests sent out chemical warnings and the trees downwind of it began to produce more tannin as defence even before the pests got near them.

Sev. please post that link in a separate blog so that more people have the chance to find that marvellous artcile - and pass it on!

Glad you liked the article Oji &Fran, it doesn't manage to sound too melodramtic and suggest the ridiculous as absolute fact. I don't really do blogs Fran, feel free...

oh, okay!

Oh ouch those poor plants, its really lovely to see a child so enthusiastic about planting, but wow cringeworthy technique. I don't think I could have stopped myself from a bit of instruction.

I hope someone took him aside after filming stopped and explained that that wasn't the way to do it, or at least not the best way! I suppose the whole vid was him doing his own thing and they didn't want to break the flow, but *wince*