Hi everyone - It's cold here this morning (by our standards anyway) and the forecaster says it’s the coldest morning this year with snow in many places where there isn't normally snow and we are paying the price with the cold winds coming from those cold snowy areas. I suppose we are lucky in another way though as we don't get cyclones or earthquakes like our Qld and NZ friends.
I'm a bit cranky with myself as yesterday I found quite a bit of cold damage on my plants as a result of the unusually cold weather. I usually prepare for the very cold and very hot weather by giving my plants a few good feeds and plenty of Seasol, however this year due to various health problems it didn't get done and I'm now paying the price. The upside of course is that I know most of these cold damaged plants will bounce back with some new pups when spring comes, so at least all is not lost.
I think the time is now right to share with you an article I wrote a few years back about preparing plants for extremes of weather. I know the programme I used works as I saw the amazing results for a couple of years in a row, but then I got a bit lazy as other more pressing matters intervened and the programme wasn’t followed until now where I have the present situation with cold damaged plants which I’m sure could have been avoided if I’d kept up with the programme
PREPARING YOUR PLANTS FOR WEATHER EXTREMES - March 2013
Well, we’ve been through a very unsettled summer (weather wise) and who knows what winter will have in store for us. It was this thought that prompted me to write these few lines about what we can do to help our brom’s through these sometimes extreme weather conditions and difficult times.
I initially started thinking about this after our recent two heat wave days, but more so after I had read an article written by a doctor about the plight of impoverished children in third world countries and their extremely high mortality rate.
This doctor said in his view, the high mortality rate was mainly because these children were malnourished; this lowered their resistance to disease and weather extremes making them much more at risk to diseases than well fed children from other countries. He said the way to alleviate this was to simply build up their immune systems by providing good food, combined with a good tonic; this would then boost their immune system which in turn would help them build up resistance to combat these various diseases.
This then set me thinking that if this would work for humans, why it wouldn’t work for other forms of life such as plant life or more specifically bromeliads.
When I first started growing brom's I was told, you don't need to fertilise your brom's, and if you do you will only lose the colour. Well I took this advice from growers who I thought knew much more than me and when the cold weather came I had a few losses like some other growers did, and just assumed it was a normal thing that brom growers experienced. This went on for a couple of years until I noticed that some of the growers of the better quality plants didn't seem to be getting these losses like my friends and I who were following the advice we had been given.
Finally I decided to try something a bit different to what we had been told, and following the suggestion the doctor had made about the impoverished children, I set about putting a system in place to provide food and a “tonic” to help boost my brom’s resistance to the extremes of weather.
I reasoned that if a plant was also malnourished, there was every possibility, that in its “run down state” it would react in the same way as the “impoverished children” when confronted with extreme weather conditions and be less likely to be able to withstand them without sustaining any damage either. The thought about changing my cultural methods was probably hurried along after memories of a heatwave we had in about 2006 (I think it was) and like many other growers, my plants suffered quite a lot of heat damage. About five months later this was followed by one of the coldest winters we had ever had in our area and consequently my plants then again suffered damage from the excessive cold as well.
It was during the heat wave period I had read about a natural product called “Seasol”. I read where it is made from two species of seaweed – Bull Kelp and Knotted Kelp. The Bull Kelp used to make Seasol grows in the clean oceans around King Island and the west coast of Tasmania. It is collected from the shores of remote beaches – it is not harvested from living marine forests. Knotted Kelp grows in shallow intertidal waters. When it is harvested with care being taken not to remove the whole plant – the base is left intact so that the kelp re-grows. In effect, the kelp is harvested by “pruning”. The main claim was that Seasol was promoted as a “tonic” and not a fertiliser.
There was a long list of benefits but the main one that attracted my attention was the claim that “Seasol is a powerful pick-me-up during times of plant stress”. It went on to claim that it is a plant “booster” which promotes tougher more resilient plants, healthier growth, stronger roots, bigger, better blooms, higher yields and can be used in all gardening situations and at all times of the year.
It was also claimed that Seasol contains natural compounds and trace elements which promote thicker, stronger cell walls. Therefore plants are better able to cope with stresses such as heat, drought and frost, as well as some insect and disease problems.
After reading all of this I decided I had nothing to lose, so I bought some and sprayed every plant in the yard the day after the 2006 heatwave and again two weeks later. I mixed it at the rate recommended for “stressed plants” and the results were nothing less than remarkable. In next to no time the results were obvious; climbing beans that had been hanging limp and dying from a trellis had perked up and were beginning sprout new side growth after just a couple of weeks and the brom's, although some were severely damaged by the heat, after a few weeks were also showing the formation of new pups. After a while things seemed to be getting back to normal and then the cold winter hit, and once more the brom's copped the brunt of “Mother Nature”; this time in the form of cold damage. Once again I got out the Seasol and applied it in the same way and once again with the same great results.
This experience now caused me to think about how I could provide better cultural methods which would help protect my plants during these times of stress. Rather than “shutting the gate after the horse had bolted”; I needed to be proactive rather than reactive and I based my changes around how that doctor thought the problem with the children could best be solved.
Thinking back to when I was a child, I (like some of our older members) remember regularly getting a dose of “Cod Liver Oil” as a “tonic” to keep me healthy, and it worked as I rarely ever got sick, not even a common cold. So I thought if a tonic can help to build up resistance in children, why wouldn't it work for other living things such as plants? The other part of the equation was food; if any living thing is deprived of food it will naturally become weaker and its resistance to disease is decreased also. I applied this to what happens with plants; comparing the potted plant (in our case brom’s) to “the child with no food”.
When a plant is grown in the garden it has the opportunity to send out “feeder roots” to forage for food if there isn't sufficient food where it is growing, but when grown in pots (like the most of our plants are), it has no such opportunity, and depends wholly on what we provide. So from then on I started a regular monthly foliar spraying programme using this product called “Seasol” as a “Plant Tonic” and used it alternately with one of the many foliar fertilisers available to provide the food.
The monthly cycle I started and still use is as follows:
Week 1 Seasol
Week 2 Half strength fertiliser
Week 3 Seasol
Week 4 Half strength fertiliser.
I could probably save myself a lot of time by mixing the fertiliser and the Seasol together but as I use different fertilisers from time to time and don't know if they are all compatible with the Seasol, I prefer to play it safe and keep them separate.
I am neither a doctor or an expert brom grower; all I know is that since I started this programme my plants have never looked better and they came through the recent two heatwave days virtually unscathed except for some plants fully exposed to the midday sun in the front garden. All I have to do now is wait and see how these plants will handle winter *.
I think it is a programme worth trying as it's just common sense that if a plant has sufficient food and is fed a “tonic' it must be healthier and be able to withstand extremes of weather much better than the plant which is given nothing else except the occasional watering.
*During the next two years we had colder than normal winters (not as savage as this year but worse than usual) and my plants survived with only very minor cold spotting in some cases.
So there you have it; a system that works, but because I became “slack” and didn’t use it this year, I’m now paying the price.
I’ll just finish with a few pictures of different types of Ae. fasciatas. Pic.1 is growing in the garden and is one of the spineless types, Pic.2 Ae. fasciata var. purpurea, Pic.3 A.e fasciata variegata, Pic.4 Ae. fasciata Rubra and Pic.5 are a couple of fasciata variegated pups with some promising pink colouring which unfortunately faded away as they matured.
All the best, Nev.
