Wednesday 9 June 2010

Not enough water, or too much?

For maybe two weeks now three of the Baobab seedlings have been looking, to varying degrees, a bit under the weather. As you can see from the picture, some of the leaves have gone yellow, and are very soft and floppy. The rest of the plant has also stopped growing.

Now yellow leaves usually mean that something's wrong in the water department; either the plant is getting too much, or not enough. The only thing that has happened in the past couple of weeks water wise was that Morag, who is in the office all week and looks after the watering, was off on leave for a week. Now as we know, our seedlings are dryland plants, and so one might think that they would manage ok with missing a watering. The thing that is more strange is that only these three plants have been affected, whilst there are the five healthy Baobabs that I potted up last week, and two of the delicate looking Neems still going strong.
Two of the seedlings do look pretty much past saving, but the third might be salvageable. It'll be a case now of making sure that these do get enough water, seen as that seems to be the most likely thing to have changed, which could either be the kill or cure. What's really interesting to me is that plants that are ultimately treated in the same way have different success rates - a fantastic example of the 'survival of the fittest' principle and evolution in constant progress!

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