Saving Poor Plants

When over visiting family in the Netherlands some years ago, we went to the local Aldi to get some groceries and spotted a rather sad looking packet of hosta plants, although that’s putting it mildly as the packet was torn, the plants were completely dried out and 2 were missing too. It was already reduced to 2 euros, but when I went to the till, I mentioned that there were 2 plants missing and she very kindly sold it to me for just 50p (euro cents). Bargain!

Or more likely, waste of money as these plants looked beyond saving.

However, I gave them one last chance of prospering and soaked them in a bucket of water for 24 hours before planting them in pots.

Lo and behold! All 4 started growing again and several years later this is what they look like:
They are now really big and quite an eye catcher, so there you go, sometimes plants may look dead, but can actually regenerate. Nature can be very resilient.

I like rescuing plants and have bought reduced, sad looking plants before, sometimes with good results and sometimes not.
Last year, we bought a small apple tree and when planting it in our garden I discovered an acorn which had half germinated at the bottom of the pot.

Again, I wanted to give this little survivor a second chance and planted the half germinated sapling in a pot.

This is what it looks like now, a year later:

It has grown pretty big in just a year’s time and when it’s big enough it will get planted in the mini forest we are slowly establishing, along with all the other tree saplings I have planted and/or rescued.

We are planning on expanding our flock of chickens; building work on a larger hen house has commenced and the current lot can’t wait to move into their new ‘cathedral’ as they call it. They are so impatient they keep asking “when is our new cathedral ready? When is our new cathedral ready? When is ....”

You get the gist.

We are hoping that we can get eggs to hatch when we get a broody hen as that would be the most natural way of increasing the flock, but nature cannot be rushed, so we’ll just have to wait until one gets broody.

I’ll keep you posted!