Badly explained help!
Tropical Sam
Posts: 1,488
Like everyone here I always read all the gardening sections of newspapers, online and wherever we find them.
I quite often read the same 'solutions' that are often wrong or badly explained. Can you add that you have found or are just silly?
I will start with 'cluster your pots together during a frost for protection'
Plants do not release heat, so those pots all need to be in sun for a few hours to store any heat to provide any protection. Clustering pots anywhere where the pots themselves are not in sun is wasting your time.
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If the pots are clustered it makes it easier to throw some protection over them. Perhaps they just needed to add that to make sense of the tip!
You're right, though, the advice does rather suggest that the plants can huddle together like sheep or penguins to conserve their body-heat.
I suppose there would be some protection from the cooling effect of frosty winds. But as remarked already, the main benefit would be that youcould then protect the whole cluster with a layer of bubble-wrap or something.
Ventilate GH's on mild Winter days. I think 15C is mild.
I know what they mean but mild & Winter don't go together for me.
I can't understand when you read 'Bracts' and 'Leaves' in the same sentence. I thought they were one in the same?
They're different. A bract is a leaf like structure found just below a flower. Usually the flower is insignificant in form and size but essential for reproduction so the bract is brightly coloured to advertise it.
Leaves are for transpiration and photosynthesis.
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." - George Bernard Shaw
Thanks obelixx,
That makes sense, I understand now.
KEF - It's winter yet it's 8C at head height on our north facing back wall. That is positively balmy.
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." - George Bernard Shaw
I find the labels with only hieroglyphs very unhelpful. Written for and international market but a lazy option nonetheless.
"Hardy"
Bet it isn't up here, pal!!
I'm very pleased that the RHS have introduced a new hardiness guide - will the plant labelling companies use it?? 3 guesses - 1 will do!
In technical terms, the soil in the pots will radiate heat as infra-red radiation (heat) in all directions. If a pot is surrounded by other pots, some of this heat will be absorbed by the other pots instead of being lost to the environment. The effect of this is that (say) 10 pots clustered together will cool down more slowly than 10 pots spaced widely apart, so it is worth doing.