Caring for Potted
Plants: Maintenance
The potted plants
need a lot of care and regular maintenance in the form of regular watering,
nutrient supply in the form of fertilizer/manure/compost, pruning, etc and
these activities should be taken care of regularly. One of the maintenance
tasks that is very regularly ignored by most of us include what I call
de-rooting (removing the excessive roots from the plant pots). As we all know
that the plants have root systems that help it grow and absorb moisture and
nutrients from the soil. These root systems are in a continuous process of
evaluation over time and thus have the tendency to grow into quite a dense
network. I have seen many of my plants having generated very dense
"webs" of these roots, which appear like a bird's nest. Most of these
roots gather at the base of the pot or container your plant is in.
![]() |
Spidey's web |
![]() |
Spidey's web |
These are root
systems of just a bunch of small portulacas in a small earthen pot. Imagine the
dense network of roots in some bigger plants.
While these roots are
necessary, the plant can easily make out without all of these and thus it is
quite safe to remove some of these roots, especially those which have gathered
at the base of the pot. In some cases, the roots do come out of any openings
they find in the container, be it a hole in the bottom for outlet of excessive
water, or some accidental or intended cracks/spaces. These roots may inhibit
the growth of the plant to its full potential and hence I would suggest these
roots be removed from time to time. That too, since our containers have a
limited space, these roots should be removed from time to time.
A simple way to
remove these excessive roots is by regularly digging up the soils in the
containers and removing whatever roots you're getting. If you could dig a bit
deeper, till the very base of the container, you'll hit the jackpot. Don't
believe me? Here are the ones I found while doing this exercise for two of my
rose plants.
![]() |
The birdie's nest |
![]() |
The birdie's nest |
The part in the darker shade of
brown is a bowl like formation of very fine fibrous roots at the bottom of my
pots.
![]() |
The birdie's nest |
There's a possibility
that you may damage some important roots of the plants, thus killing your
plants. So, please do not
attempt if you're not absolutely sure about
what I've shown here. If you're doing it, just remove those fine fibrous roots
and it'll be fine. If you could somehow get the plant out of its container, it
would be much better as this is the only way you'll be able to find the
greatest concentration of roots at the bottom of your container. This is one
big reason I prefer using earthen pots for planting my plants, as these are
relatively inexpensive and using these guarantees that you'll have to change
the pots in a couple of years, because these either break down, or get damaged
due to washing off water, and thus these earthen pots let me maintain my plants
in top shape.
I think this would be
quite enough for now. I'll be back with some more info about some
container gardening with some of my experiences. Till then, keep visiting and
HAPPY GARDENING!
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