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Specimen Plants
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Posted by judyfl z9/cenfl (My Page) on Sun, May 20, 07 at 8:39
| My question pertains primarily to plants of Rex begonia. How large (what size pot) can you safely let these plants get?(My experience has been with growing orchids into specimen plants. After a certain point, they tend to rot or die out in the middle and need to be divided.) I'm probably being overly optimistic that I'll be able to grow specimen rexes(rexi...rexii? (VBG), but I'd like to have the correct size...shallow & wide?...pots on hand in case I get lucky. judy |
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RE: Specimen Plants
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| My best specimen Rex at the moment is my species B. rex. It's in a large azalea pot, clay, that I would guess is at least eight inches and probably more. It's dark out there and I don't wanna go look! I like to use clay 'bowls'--don't know what their proper name is, but they're bowl-shaped terra cotta and come in a lot of sizes (but right now I have more that are broken than are whole!) and sometimes ones that either seem tough or that seem to dry out too fast I put in plastic bulb pans. I don't ever grow them in standard pots, partly because I just don't think they look as good, but partly because I was told many years ago that I shouldn't (I tend to be a 'good girl' who does what I'm told, if I'm told by someone who knows what they're talking about!) They are shallow-rooted plants and there is some danger of soggy soil in a deeper pot which could cause root-rot. They will need to have old rhizomes removed every year or so to make really good specimen plants--you can just prune that out or re-pot at that time. |
RE: Specimen Plants
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| WOW! I'll bet an 8" pot of your species Rex is a sight to behold,Greenelbows. So, I take it the old rhizome eventually becomes non-productive and can be pruned off/out and discarded? judy |
RE: Specimen Plants
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| Yeah, or you can use it to propagate more. I remember visiting the local university's greenhouses a couple times when they'd been repotting rexes and other rhizomatous, and the wastebaskets would be completely filled with old rhizomes. Don't recall if I took any (with permission, of course--I'm really square!) |
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