In order to keep your plants healthy and happy, we offer maintenance programs for your indoor plants and gardens. This include: soil testing, pruning, organic pest control, lawn care, tree care, composting and mulching.
We prune plants regularly to promote flower, leaf, and root growth, allow for good air circulation to prevent disease, and maintain its form.
Most plants benefit from some sort of regular pruning and maintenance. The trick is in know when to prune what. A great many flowering and fruiting plants prefer to be pruned while they are dormant, in late winter through early spring. Some, like spring blooming trees and shrubs, will start setting new buds as soon as the old buds have fallen. These will need to be pruned shortly after flowering, or you risk pruning off the new buds with the old. And still other plants need to be continually pruned and deadheaded, to remain vigorous and in flower.
We balance pH levels in the soil for optiminal plant vigor and growth.
Why is a proper pH level in your soil so crucial to plant growth? The “p” is a mathematical operator like “+” or “x”. In chemical mathematics, “p” means “the negative logarithm of something”. In the case of pH, it would be defined as “the negative logarithm of the concentration of hydrogen (H) ions in the soil.”
Soil pH simply measures how many hydrogen ions are affecting plant roots. The more hydrogen ions present in the soil, the more acidic the pH. The pH scale ranges from 1 (extremely acid) to 14 (extremely alkaline). At pH 7 (neutral), hydrogen ions have little effect on the plant’s root ability to absorb nutrients. Plants generally need a small amount of acidity in the soil for optimum growth. The roots seek out the major soil nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium absorbing them for healthy flower, leaf and root development. Some ions are dissolved in water making uptake by plant roots simple. Some cling tightly to particles of clay and humus so the plant roots have a harder time absorbing them. Calcium loosens nutrient ions from the soil particles, making fertilizer more available to plant roots.
The ideal soil pH for many ornamental plants is a range of pH 5.5 to 6.5. In this range most nutrients are readily available. Below 5.5, phosphorus, essential for food storage, becomes unavailable. In very acidic soil, some elements become harmful. Below pH 4.0, aluminum and manganese become toxic to plant roots. In highly alkaline soil, manganese and boron are not available for absorption by the plant roots.
