Seeds of doubt Small surprise packet

Press, 4 March 1983, Page 15

Seeds of doubt Small surprise packet

fARDENER’Si: . DIARY |l

Y Derrick Rooney

Some tunny things come, up from seed packets. I have just been looking at a couple of cacti, raised from seed a couple of years ago; the packet contained three seeds, two of them germinated, and there is about as much similarity between the two resultant plants as there is between a lump of chalk and a piece of cheese. The seed, which came along in a mixed bag of alpine seeds which produced both weeds and treasures, was labelled “Opuntia fragilis." and according to the seed list was collected in the wild at an altitude of 1300 metres in Oregon. .According to the plant lexicons this is a small species.

occurring in the equivalent of our tall tussock grasslands, and has the most northerly, and possibly the widest, range of any species of cactus. It starts in Texas, in longhorn country, and extends right up into British Columbia, in Canada.

It is described as a variable species, but a cactus expert described it to me as usually small, with flat pads, medium-length spines, and a prostrate habit of growth. The name, “fragilis,” describes one of its methods of self-propagation: the pads, which are really pieces of stem, are so loosly jointed that they break off at a touch, and roll away or are carried away in the coat of an animal to take root elsewhere. I wonder what I have. One of my seedlings is showing early signs of gigantism, and has long spines and a bit of loose, woolly stuff that reminds me strongly of a young Opuntia ursinus, which definitely does not grow in Oregon.

The other one has tiny round joints and tiny spines, so small you can hardly seem them, but plenty of those peculiar little opuntia prickles that experts call ‘glochids.” Short, semi-transparent, and equipped with tiny barbs, they are almost impossible to get out once you have them in your fingers. What a pity the third seed did not germinate to complete an unholy trio. Because most cacti grow very slowly, it will be a few

years before the two seedlings reach flowering size, but I will be watching them all the way to see what, if anything, comes of them.

After all, Opuntia fragilis is a variable species; the books say so. And both the seedlings are interestinglooking plants.

They mav even turn out tc be very good at flowering, if I am lucky. During the wait they u’on't be coddled. Many of the cacti are quite hardy to frost in our winters, and Opuntia fragilis is one of the hardiest; it is able to withstand a winter outside in Europe. If my plants are true to name they will eventually, be their spines long or short, have impressive large flowers in a shade of rosy red.

February and March are bulb-planting months, and one of the perennial questions that come up is, “What soil mix do I pot up bulbs in?” And what a tricky question it is!

If only I had a magic wand with which I could pluck the answer out of the air.

The truth is that you can persuade bulbs to flower, once, in just about any old kind of mix, from ponga

fibre to almost pure clay, but if you want bulbs to go on to flower and increase from year to year, you will have to grow them in something that keeps them well nourished, but is stiff enough to keep the flower-stems short and stout, and the bulbs firm and nuggety.

There are no hard and fast rules as to what this mix should comprise, but I will predict that however much you experiment, you will always end up growing your bulbs in some sort of mix that contains a goodly quantity of soil.

Most proprietary mixes today are soilless composts, based on peat and vermiculite, often with special slowrelease fertilisers added so that they can sustain plants in a pot for several months (both the main components are virtually devoid of nutrients). These will grow a wide range of plants, including alpines, very well, but I have not found them very satisfactory for bulbs. The bulbs will grow and flower in them, very nicely; but they won’t do more than that.

Either they fade away to nothing after flowering, or they split up into miserable little bulblets that won’t flower again, unless they are well fed, for years.

It took me a long time to accept this, because for some years I have grown everything from cacti to bog primulas, sometimes with suc-

cess, in a basic peat-sand mix.

But last year I switched my bulbs to a stiffer mix — about half good soil (dug up from the hen-run where the fowls had ’been scratching and depositing guano), and the other half peat and sand, in equal quantities.

I cut the slow-release fertiliser dose in half, but quadrupled the serving of the basic requirements, superphosphate and dolomite lime. The results were, in some cases, spectacular — not in last year's flowering, which was not better and no worse than in previous years, but in the number and quality of the bulbs that I sieved out of the pots last month.

Some crocuses which had been sulking for years multiplied so well that I had spares to exchange with friends; and one tiny narcissus. which I had lifted from the garden a couple of years ago because it was such a slow increaser that I feared for its future (it is impossible to replace this bulb because its raiser, who is now dead, never marketed it) doubled its numbers in a season.

The experiment will have to be repeated to confirm that it was the mix, and not he season, that made the difference. But everything that I have read, and seen in other gardens, in the last few months confirms my view that as far as bulbs are concerned, the answer lies in the soil'.