Experimenting

I must confess to being a bit of a geek, this takes many forms in my spiky addiction.

Clues that you are spiky obsessed No. 3: You keep a list of all the plants you buy.

I would guess many people have lists, surely there is nothing geeky about it. Well I may have taken this a tiny bit further than most people, setting up a database with all the plants, when and where I bought them, if it is a species or hybrid and anything else I feel is useful.  I also take photos of most plants in spring and again in autumn so I can follow their growth.  It is fun especially at this time of year to sit and look through them.

A small selection of the 120 pots I ended up with on this trial

Probably the main way my geekiness shows up is in the experiments on my poor plants. One of my biggest so far was a seed germination trial.  As I have always learnt by trial and error, I wanted to see what effect planting medium and heat made. Between having 5 different aloes, 3 planting mediums and 4 different heat settings you can probably guess where this is going, I ended up with a LOT of pots and with my poor OH looking on in despair.

Then of course I ended up with around 60 - 80 seedlings of each aloe  and I started trying to kill these.  I am sure I'm not the only one to put small pots out of the way and then forget about them.  Who would have thought this would not be the best way to ensure maximum growth rates.

The plant on the left was given good care,  the ones on the left were left to get on with it.

You would think this would be enough for the poor plants, but come winter I then got to try different hardiness tests.  Which was not pretty and I will not traumatize you with photos! A couple of years later and I am down to about 5 of each variety.  I am pleased to say I have given a lot away and it is not purely me killing them.

I doubt I will ever stop my experiments,   but my OH is hoping that in the future they involve a lot less pots.