Green Thumb Expert Needed

Up to now the only thing I have lost is a bamboo that had clearly been well tended by someone for a long time.

I had no fucking clue what to do with it, but I got five years out of it, and it was awesome to look at!
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Up to now the only thing I have lost is a bamboo that had clearly been well tended by someone for a long time.

I had no fucking clue what to do with it, but I got five years out of it, and it was awesome to look at!
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Don't worry. The 'bamboo' that was being sold in every store isn't really bamboo.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
One is hanging from a rod that cant take more weight, one is on a little table where there is no room for either a bigger table or a bigger pot on the current table. I can repot them and change out a bunch of the soil (40% is best?), but I am lazy, I hope that I dont have to.....but I will.
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Some houseplants don't mind crowded roots. We have the same situation. Plants hanging above every window, and others taking up an entire table. We have one Christmas cactus that I rescued 20 years ago, and it's huge. We've repotted it several times.

Gardening of any type is work.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I have two indoor vines that keep dying back every year or two, leaving a mess of dead vines tangled with the live ones. I cant go to bigger pots for reasons I wont go into. Can I mitigate the problem by doing better at feeding Miracle Grow? I dont have a watering problem, I know how to do that.

I am officially annoyed.

TYVM
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The more you fertilize them the bigger they'll grow. I would just carefully remove the dead bits, and trim the living bits back hard. Probably they are trying to act deciduous and go dormant as daylight wanes. What kind are they?
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I know nothing about that. I assume that these are indoor plants because my wife rescued these and a whole lot more plants during renovations at MotherShip Starbucks (HQ). Instead of taking them home and bringing them back to their cube (Starbucks never did the deeply idiot "open office") people left plants that they had taken care of for sometimes years, all the way up to the last day. THen left them to be thrown into the trash.....everyone knew that they were headed for the trash.

I do pretty good at keeping them alive. I like to remember that Grandpa Crozier was a farmer from about the age of five, I should be able to do this.
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A vine can only grow so long. The nutrients can't travel more than about ten feet, so cut it back to at least half of that.
 
Jim Eagle said:
A vine can only grow so long. The nutrients can't travel more than about ten feet, so cut it back to at least half of that.
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Well if that is true then I have massively misjudged how long mine are. If I am going to do that then I might as well unwind them, cut out the dead, and repot them in new soil I think...a major project.... one I hoped to avoid.

THree years ago we unwound them and put them both in bigger pots.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Well if that is true then I have massively misjudged how long mine are. If I am going to do that then I might as well unwind them, cut out the dead, and repot them in new soil I think...a major project.... one I hoped to avoid.

THree years ago we unwound them and put them both in bigger pots.
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Most plants tolerate severe pruning quite well when done at the end of its growing season. They look like crap for a while but come back a lot faster than a "new" plant.
 
Jim Eagle said:
Most plants tolerate severe pruning quite well when done at the end of its growing season. They look like crap for a while but come back a lot faster than a "new" plant.
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Ya.........and outdoors I tend to not prune enough......so it is not shocking that I am trying to avoid massively cutting these vines back.

But I have to do something, they look terrible with all of the dead in them. The parts that are alive look great though. I have upped the feeding because I thought maybe that was the root of the problem, that they ran out of food so they massively died back.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Ya.........and outdoors I tend to not prune enough......so it is not shocking that I am trying to avoid massively cutting these vines back.

But I have to do something, they look terrible with all of the dead in them. The parts that are alive look great though. I have upped the feeding because I thought maybe that was the root of the problem, that they ran out of food so they massively died back.
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I used to rent a house that had grape vines and let them grow way too long, got no harvest whatsoever. The owner then showed me the proper way. A vineyard prunes heavily every year, and the vines grow for centuries.
 
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