It came to pass on Sunday, after the emergency transplant of Madagascariensis 1, I bethought myself that trees are supposed to be about the same height above and below the surface, and Za 7 was clearly taller than its little geranium pot. Therefore, presumably, it needed repotting.
Step 1: buy pot
Here you can see the new planter on the right. Potted trees need depth more than surface area, so I got the same style that I have for the lemon trees, except smaller and a more peaceable colour. This is 8" x 8" on the surface, and 10" to the water reservoir. It's self-watering, of course, so the soil doesn't go all the way down inside.
Why is the new planter beside a bowl and a milk jug? Because I was perplexed by an optical illusion. First of all, this is my new graduated jug, the old one having sprung a leak, and I'm perplexed and annoyed that when I did the graduations, I ended up with 4.25 L instead of 4.0. Clearly, I must have under-filled the measure by 6% each time, somehow. Anyway, when you look at it this way, the bowl on the left looks bigger than the jug, and the planter looks like maybe the jug plus the bowl, right?
In reality, the bowl is 2.89 L, the jug is 4 L, and the planter is 10.5 L just for the soil part, so not counting the water reservoir. And even knowing that, and looking at them jointly and severally for a long time, I can't see it with my brain. I can only know the math.
Whatev'.
Step 2: pasteurize growing mediumThis time I got smart and went looking for a meat thermometer where it might actually be found, namely, the hardware store. Heaven forbid the food store should sell cooking things, you know. Now I seem to recall that in the instructions for pasteurizing soil, it said each batch should be no more than 3 or 4 inches deep. Conveniently, the bowl pictured above, which is my biggest oven-safe dish, is 4" deep.
Great. But wait... All my reserves of soil and manure are frozen outside. I brought the manure in on Monday, same day I bought the planter, and let it thaw overnight. And I bought a $5 bag of good quality soil rather than trying to dig, thaw, weed and amend the cheap old stuff I have. Nothing too good for a baobab.
Good. Well by the time I have anything to pasteurize, it's Tuesday night, 48 hours since I resolved to do the transplant. Argh! I hate things not getting done. But I hate even more things being done badly out of haste, bad planning and stupidity, so I have to go along with the laws of thermodynamics. And with the fact that Tuesday is my Bible study night and I don't find it appropriate to forgo the work of the Lord for other pursuits. The Lord himself is very stern about respecting his Sabbaths, which is much the same. But I suppose you didn't come here for religious indoctrination.
So finally Wednesday night, I can get around to pasteurizing. I put on my Facebook status "Elise gets to bake cow dung tonight. Yay, baked cow dung!" Curiously, this got no reaction at all. Not one. Now mind you, everyone writes Facebook statuses for the purpose of getting attention, so you can't really expect your friends to react to your status too often. Still, you'd think at least one person in 66 would question why one should bake cow dung. But no, not one reaction. Have I become predictable? Or worse, have I given my Facebook friends the impression that I'm trying to be interesting, thus making them roll their eyes at my would-be witty statuses?
Existential questions indeed.
Be that as it may, I pasteurized the dung first. I filled the 2.89 L bowl. The manure was moist from being outside, but I added a couple cups of water for good measure. The role of water in pasteurizing feces is the same as in nuclear reactors: it helps moderate temperature changes. So too much is a nuisance, but too little could be a disaster. Then, I covered it with two layers of foil, stuck the meat thermometer into it, and away into the oven.
Initially, I had pre-heated my oven to 180 F, being the desired temperature of soil pasteurization. An hour later, I came to realize that dung apparently has a very high heat capacity, and it would take hours to get it up to temperature at that rate. So, I cranked it to 350 F. This solves my not wanting to be up till all hours problem, but poses the risk that the outside will get too hot before the centre gets hot enough.
In short order, therefore, the temperature got to 190 F, at which time I took it out of the oven. But, as any cook knows, hot things will keep on cooking unless you cool them down. So the temperature kept rising. I lifted the foil to let out some steam, and finally the rise stopped just short of 200 F, the temperature where allegedly, toxins will be produced. Then, very slowly, the temperature started to fall. To achieve pasteurization, I'm told I need to maintain the temperature between 180 and 200 F for half an hour. This was easy enough, as it took more than 30 minutes to cool that far; but in hindsight, maybe the outside layers cooled faster than the inside and failed to pasteurize properly. Then again, the heat transfer from inside out would have slowed the cooling of the outer layers.
You never know, I guess. Which is why if you're going to try this at home, you should stick to 180 F in the oven. That way you'll know what temperature your soil actually reached, and for how long. It will take hours, that's all.
Second, if you're going to try this at home, you'll find out as I did that cow dung in the oven smells exactly like it sounds. Luckily, I and everyone on my floor take considerable precautions to prevent the transfer of smells (typically marijuana smell) into or out of their apartments, and it mostly works.
Ok. But 3 L of cow dung isn't enough. I needed to pasteurize a batch of soil as well. I considered putting the manure in the freezer to cool it faster so I could dump it into the planter without melting the plastic. You never know. Still, baked cow dung in the freezer seemed too atrocious to consider seriously. Specifically, I figured the steam would escape from the manure and condense on the inside of the freezer, and I'd have manure tea in my freezer forever. So instead I dumped it (haha) into a metal mixing bowl, then filled the baking dish with soil. But the soil was very dry, having just come from the store, so I added a liter of water. Then foil, thermometer, and away again in the oven.
This time the temperature shot up faster than I expected. I suspect I didn't have enough coolant. When I took the dish out of the oven, it was 190 F and rising. And it didn't stop rising. Once again I considered the freezer and ruled it out, and instead I hit upon the idea of more coolant. So I poured a cup of cold water into it, then another. This did stop the cooking process, but did not significantly lower the temperature, which was fortunate. So at this time I went to bed, confident that my dish of soil would maintain pasteurizing temperature long enough to achieve my ends.
As of this morning, therefore, I had 3 L of baked cow dung and 3 L of baked dirt on my stove.
Step 3: profit
In this picture, obviously, we see a length of tubing from the hardware store, a roll of gauze, and an elastic band.
And here I've used the gauze and the elastic band to create a filter at the end of the tube. Why? Because Za 7 seems to benefit from being watered from the bottom rather than the top, so I want to insert this tube into the dirt and so be able to water the bottom of the planter rather than the top. The gauze is to prevent dirt backing up and roots getting into the tube. Though I suspect that roots will get through the gauze easily enough.
I used a ladle to fill the pot with manure, soil and perlite, and a wooden spoon to stir it all together. I filled by layers, of course. I used 3 L of perlite, because baobabs normally grow in sandy soils that drain quickly, and I suspect the deaths of Digitata 1 and Za 1 had to do with the soil being too dense and too wet. Perlite is great for providing aeration, lightness, and moderation of changes in humidity.
And some bone meal, of course, which I then stirred in with a fork. No one eats at my house but me, so I don't feel too bad about using all my cooking utensils to stir dung, dirt and ground-up bones.
This concluded my Thursday lunch break, still with no transplanting of baobabs being achieved.
Step 4: transplant
Finally, after work, it was show time. Normally I'm not fussy about digging holes, but like I said, nothing too good for a baobab. So I used a geranium pot identical to the one occupied by Za 7, as a template for digging the new planting hole. Yes, still using a fork and a table spoon.
I turned Za 7 over in my hand and the dirt came out of the pot in one coherent mass, as is desirable. And:
As is NOT desirable but exactly as I thought, there were lots of roots at the bottom. So first of all, I was right, and perhaps more importantly, we can see that Za 7 has a good root system, which Digitata 1 never achieved. This looks promising.
Voila, Za 7 in its new digs.
At the time of writing, nearly two hours after transplant, the top of the stem seems to be sagging a little, but that's not necessarily any cause for alarm. It's night time, that's all. There was almost no disturbance to the roots other than being exposed to air and light for a minute or two. It's now absorbing different nutrition through its roots, but unless I messed up considerably, it should be only good things. So, I will go to bed, confident in the near-certainty that when I get up, I will still have a beautiful live baobab in my winter garden.
Inshallah...
