Before you buy plants, make sure they have healthy root systems

By Jane Clute - Special to The Herald

Confound it, I don't have the sense I was born with.

I've read that you shouldn't buy a flat of plants without poking on the bottom of one cell to see if the plant will pop out, roots, dirt and all, so you can tell if it has a healthy root system, is growing in decent soil — all that good stuff.

There's one caveat: Avoid rootbound plants, which means white roots shouldn't be wound around and around the dirt like a girdle; if that's the case, those plants have been in the cell or pot so long they're apt to commit suicide down the road.

A while back, I bought a flat of pansies and two six-packs of violas, both grown at the same North Carolina wholesale nursery and sold at a garden center in Rock Hill. I babied those plants for several weeks, till I finally had the time to plant them.

The violas looked like little pansies popped right out of their tiny plastic homes, nice dirt and all, simple as pie to transplant. And they hadn't even thought about getting rootbound, either. Frankly, that surprised me, as long as I'd had them.

Their bigger relatives were another story. Half of them had died, despite my best efforts. Even more upsetting was the fact that I couldn't coax the remaining plants out of their temporary living quarters, no matter how hard I tried.

I squeezed the cells, pushed on the bottoms, used a tiny trowel, stout language — the whole bit. When I finally succeeded in getting one pansy out, the problem was obvious. Unlike the violas, those things had been planted in horrid soil, if you could call it that. The stuff looked to be about 90 percent compacted grass clippings or some such material; not even composted stuff.

Tried without success to make a dent in it with my finger. Even had trouble stabbing a hole in it with a knife, if that tells you something. That tells me if a worm can't make a hole in it, roots can't grow in it either. No wonder so many of those pansies died.

The surviving pansies had next to no root system, and what little they did have was right on the surface. Not a single pansy came out with the soil attached. Instead, that mess was glued to the cells; I had to beat it out so I could toss that plastic tray in the recycle bin.

Disgusting.

The temptation is to avoid that garden center like the plague, but that's not fair. How can retailers improve their inventory if you don't praise them for the good and complain about the bad?

My Alberta spruce, from the same North Carolina grower, doesn't look much better. It was so rootbound I had to operate on it with a serrated bread knife to break up the gnarly mass, and I still didn't see what I'd call dirt; just roots wound around roots. You couldn't tap that tree out of its container at the garden center if you tried; had to saw it out while Matt grumbled that this was some way to treat a pricey, two-man Henckel bread knife.

Planting pitiful plants calls for desperate measures. I mixed top-quality potting soil with rich garden soil and added lots of sand, manure and Osmocote. I put the spruce in the center of a large, round clay container and planted the violas around it.

I intend to insert that pot into the big green planter at the front door when the Diamond Frost, million bells and asparagus fern fade.

Now, about those pansies: Bought that flat thinking it would fill three large pots, but when all was said and done, I didn't have enough to fill two small ones. It's been a week or so now, and those pansies still look like they were raised in the desert.

Lesson learned.