At any one time, there are several plant experiments going on hereabouts--various grafts, rooting, germinating seeds, stress tests and such.
This adenium was not supposed to be involved in any of these--it is my personal favorite and was always the most frail in my vast collection of five plants. But for some reason, it stayed outside well into the winter--before temperatures started to go down to freezing but definitely way below what most people would recommend. It was brought it and seemed none the worse for wear even after spending a week or so when night temperatures dipped to around 5C. But about a couple of weeks later, it started turning into this:
It was on sale, you couldn't resist it, it looked so odd, it called you by name, et cetera, et cetera. Whatever the reason, you end up walking out with your first store-bought adenium in a pot. What now?
If you found a blog this obscure, you were probably looking up gritty mix. It's supposed to be excellent for plants although in the beginning it was unclear to me why. The explanation was sixty thousand kilometers long so that took care of that idea for a few months. It fell under the category of "I'll read that someday."
But the gritty mix is all over the web you just have to find out wtf is up with this thing anyway. You find out that the mix involves an odd assortment of ingredients in it, including the some strange substance normally used for baseball diamonds. WTF is up with that, right. I thought baseball players were born with and walked around in their own personal cloud of dust and that's how you knew you'd grow up to be a baseball player. O well.
The thing is that people who use this gritty mix swear up, down and sideways that the stuff was uber. I was particularly interested in its ability to keep plants from drowning. I never had the patience for figuring out which plant needs how much water and when. As a result, my jungle rotates between near-drowning and being bone dry, eventually leading to inevitable death by black thumb.
This is annoying since I don't keep plants for the love of watering them. Watering is just something one needs to do so plants don't die. If this gritty mix will take guesswork out of that process, even the quest for baseball stuff might actually pay off.
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| It turns out it does! |
Although the adult adeniums flourished straight away in the gritty mix, transplanting the seedlings at six months was not so uneventful. In fact, they went batshit almost immediately--first turning yellow, then dropping leaf after leaf until finally, 5 of 7 seedlings had gone completely bald.
Updated February 2015
So you have successfully germinated adenium seeds. What's next?
Adenium seedlings are not really delicate or sensitive. In an emergency (say, someone knocked your pot off the shelf or a cat sat on your week-old seedlings), you can repot them anytime. If sowing and germination has been uneventful; you can wait a couple of months, maybe more. Usually though, seedlings in their cribs will start demanding more nutrients and the more aggressive ones will siphon supply off of their neighbours, leaving you with runts. To avoid this, it is usually better to move the seedlings into their individual pots after two to three months.
