I don't know if anyone says "Heath Robinson" other than David Attenborough, but since I watch a lot of Attenborough, I get to say "Heath Robinson". It actually means something. Google it.
Anyway:
Here you see Hope, having completed its shower and drainage. Draining all the water took an absurdly long time because the drainage holes are tiny and were plugged. I suspected so, but left it overnight anyway before I did anything about it. That's dumb. In the morning there was still standing water above the soil, so I poked the drainage holes with a pin, and thus flooded my bathroom with run-off. That was dumb...
That being done, though, I still needed to dry the ground, not just drain it. On closer inspection, almost all the plants in the winter garden are over-watered; except maybe the lilies and the dormant peony. (I have a gripe about the peony, but that's for another post.) I think I've explained this about lemon trees before, but since I don't expect you to memorise my blog, I'll explain again. Lemon trees are heavy feeders but they hate water. Unfortunately, most fertilizers have to be mixed with water, so it's easy for lemons to be underfed, overwatered, or both. And now that I know about ion toxicity, there is another problem: as the water is absorbed or evaporates, the concentration of ions in the soil increases, leading to toxicity.
So you see, there are actually three contradictory yet concomitant problems: not enough nutrients → need water to mix fertilizer → overwatered → let the ground dry out → ion toxicity.
Hmmmm...
Well, to get back to my Heath Robinson thing, in the photo above you can see Hope after shower and draining. The little white thing is a space heater which I used to apply heat to the bottom, to help it dry. It's sitting on an inverted salad bowl, because experience shows that setting it directly on the carpet causes it to overheat rapidly through lack of air circulation. The tall white thing, obviously, is a fan. You may not know this, but one of the many very useful things I've learned in construction is, air flow is more useful in drying than heat. If you have heat, moisture, and no air flow, you get mold. If you have cold, moisture, and good air flow, you get drying.
In short, this is me trying to dry out the soil before Hope suffers from the excess water. If there are still too many harmful ions in the soil, that will bring me back to the problem of ion toxicity, so I sure hope I rinsed it enough. If not, the only remaining option will be to dump it out, knock off as much soil as possible, and repot it with new soil; but then it would also suffer from having its roots disturbed.
I'd like to believe that if Stalin could grow a lemon tree, so can I; but then again Stalin planted his in the ground somewhere in the Caucasus, not in a planter north of 60.
Anyway:
Here you see Hope, having completed its shower and drainage. Draining all the water took an absurdly long time because the drainage holes are tiny and were plugged. I suspected so, but left it overnight anyway before I did anything about it. That's dumb. In the morning there was still standing water above the soil, so I poked the drainage holes with a pin, and thus flooded my bathroom with run-off. That was dumb...
That being done, though, I still needed to dry the ground, not just drain it. On closer inspection, almost all the plants in the winter garden are over-watered; except maybe the lilies and the dormant peony. (I have a gripe about the peony, but that's for another post.) I think I've explained this about lemon trees before, but since I don't expect you to memorise my blog, I'll explain again. Lemon trees are heavy feeders but they hate water. Unfortunately, most fertilizers have to be mixed with water, so it's easy for lemons to be underfed, overwatered, or both. And now that I know about ion toxicity, there is another problem: as the water is absorbed or evaporates, the concentration of ions in the soil increases, leading to toxicity.
So you see, there are actually three contradictory yet concomitant problems: not enough nutrients → need water to mix fertilizer → overwatered → let the ground dry out → ion toxicity.
Hmmmm...
Well, to get back to my Heath Robinson thing, in the photo above you can see Hope after shower and draining. The little white thing is a space heater which I used to apply heat to the bottom, to help it dry. It's sitting on an inverted salad bowl, because experience shows that setting it directly on the carpet causes it to overheat rapidly through lack of air circulation. The tall white thing, obviously, is a fan. You may not know this, but one of the many very useful things I've learned in construction is, air flow is more useful in drying than heat. If you have heat, moisture, and no air flow, you get mold. If you have cold, moisture, and good air flow, you get drying.
In short, this is me trying to dry out the soil before Hope suffers from the excess water. If there are still too many harmful ions in the soil, that will bring me back to the problem of ion toxicity, so I sure hope I rinsed it enough. If not, the only remaining option will be to dump it out, knock off as much soil as possible, and repot it with new soil; but then it would also suffer from having its roots disturbed.
I'd like to believe that if Stalin could grow a lemon tree, so can I; but then again Stalin planted his in the ground somewhere in the Caucasus, not in a planter north of 60.
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