Final planter
Dec. 28th, 2018 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beehammerSo, the final planter is a pre-existing planter. It came with the house, and I had no real objection to the ring of oyster plants around the deeply-objectionable but difficult-and-expensive-to-remove chinaberry tree, so everything pretty much stayed as it was. I've kept it weeded, but beyond that I haven't really interacted with it. The oyster plants haven't exactly flourished under this neglect, but they've lived and produced pups and in a couple of cases even, I think, reseeded.
Unfortunately for them, I've decided to use the chinaberry tree essentially as a giant trellis for a skyvine and an orchid vine. For that to happen, the oyster plants need to rehomed. I somehow just assumed this would be like, digging up plants and putting them in pots and off we'd go.
What it is like is sometimes digging up plants and putting them in pots and off we go and sometimes pulling up three horizontal feet of base with three plants sprouting from it that will fit in no pot known to man. I have no idea what to do with these conglomerates, so I picked a patch of dirt along my backyard neighbors' shitty wooden fence and dug a hole. It's not far from where they were, soil and sun-wise, so I'm hoping they're not much the worse for wear after they've had time to recover from the transplant.
Also unfortunately, as I'm pulling out plants I'm discovering more and more just random fucking garbage the previous owners threw in there and assumed the plants would cover their sins. Pieces of broken clay pots, concrete chips from where somebody made a batch or broke something up and didn't feel like hauling it all to the dumpster, broken bricks. Upon closer inspection, a lot of the stones around the bottom layer of the planter don't really fit, and that's why the top layer's always been so precarious. They just assembled it out of whatever they had. The soil inside it looks completely unamended, which I expected that it wouldn't be great, so I was prepared for that, but they just blocked in a patch of yard and planted some stuff and called it a day, I guess.
So I assumed this would be a two-day project at worst, with day one being plant removal and day two being replanting, but that was all I worked on today and I'm not even halfway done with removal and clean up. I might wind up needing to tear the whole thing apart and build it back up from scratch to get acceptable results, which is just... I have time and materials for it, mostly, but this was not how I intended to spend the last days of my vacation.
In better news, everything in the other planters seems to be taking okay--I'm not seeing any obvious signs of transplant shock or wilting--and the Christmas senna weathered yesterday's wind without flopping on any of its neighbors.
Unfortunately for them, I've decided to use the chinaberry tree essentially as a giant trellis for a skyvine and an orchid vine. For that to happen, the oyster plants need to rehomed. I somehow just assumed this would be like, digging up plants and putting them in pots and off we'd go.
What it is like is sometimes digging up plants and putting them in pots and off we go and sometimes pulling up three horizontal feet of base with three plants sprouting from it that will fit in no pot known to man. I have no idea what to do with these conglomerates, so I picked a patch of dirt along my backyard neighbors' shitty wooden fence and dug a hole. It's not far from where they were, soil and sun-wise, so I'm hoping they're not much the worse for wear after they've had time to recover from the transplant.
Also unfortunately, as I'm pulling out plants I'm discovering more and more just random fucking garbage the previous owners threw in there and assumed the plants would cover their sins. Pieces of broken clay pots, concrete chips from where somebody made a batch or broke something up and didn't feel like hauling it all to the dumpster, broken bricks. Upon closer inspection, a lot of the stones around the bottom layer of the planter don't really fit, and that's why the top layer's always been so precarious. They just assembled it out of whatever they had. The soil inside it looks completely unamended, which I expected that it wouldn't be great, so I was prepared for that, but they just blocked in a patch of yard and planted some stuff and called it a day, I guess.
So I assumed this would be a two-day project at worst, with day one being plant removal and day two being replanting, but that was all I worked on today and I'm not even halfway done with removal and clean up. I might wind up needing to tear the whole thing apart and build it back up from scratch to get acceptable results, which is just... I have time and materials for it, mostly, but this was not how I intended to spend the last days of my vacation.
In better news, everything in the other planters seems to be taking okay--I'm not seeing any obvious signs of transplant shock or wilting--and the Christmas senna weathered yesterday's wind without flopping on any of its neighbors.
