Planting is one of the most important of all gardening activities.
The best thing you can give your plants is a good start in life: the more time invested in them when they're little, the less needed later.
This starts from the moment you sow a seed, pop in a cutting or cart a costly treasure back from the garden centre.
I often repot a new purchase when I get it home, usually because I've bought it in spring rather than my preferred planting season of autumn, or if it's root bound and needs a bigger pot.
Like with my seedlings and rooted cuttings, I fancy their chances better in fresh potting mix with fertiliser and wetting agent.
Autumn is our best planting season in NSW as plants can make new roots before winter, making it far more likely they'll survive the following summer.
Before planting, ask yourself if your plant needs sun or shade and how large it will grow.
With a tree, check you're not under a power line, the electricity maintenance guys will love you.
Having made your decision, dig a sufficiently big hole, something that's surprisingly easy to get wrong.
There's a hilarious description in Christopher Lloyd's The Well-Tempered Garden (1973) of a student (Lloyd worked for a time as a horticulture instructor) ramming a plant into a too-small hole, "while a conveniently glazed vision ignored the root tips left waving about in mid-air."
Others twirled plants round so that their roots were forced into a spiral twist.
Autumn is our best planting season in NSW as plants can make new roots before winter, making it far more likely they'll survive the following summer. Before planting, ask yourself if your plant needs sun or shade and how large it will grow.
- Fiona Ogilvie
Either way, the message is clear, dig a wide hole, deep enough for the roots to spread into.
Drop your pot in as you dig to check. Some people recommend square holes, to prevent roots growing into the aforementioned spiral twist, but I don't think it matters if the hole is big enough.
Fill the hole with water and let it drain. Soak your pot in a bucket of water until the oxygen bubbles have risen and disappeared, then remove the plant and place carefully in its new home, replace the soil and tread in firmly.
If you have your own compost, a shovelful or so helps plants to make new roots quickly.
Water everything in, sprinkle around a handful of granular wetting agent and some blood and bone or pelleted manure fertiliser, then water again.
If your topsoil is shallow, don't worry, dig down to the clay but make a nice wide hole.
Break up the base, drop in the plant, spread out its roots, then pile soil and compost around the stem, to the level it was at in the pot.
Before adding mulch, install your preferred irrigation system. I'm testing Peter Varman's method of burying an empty pot near the plant (The Land, February 20), ideal when planting as I can use the pot the plant came in.
Fiona is giving an illustrated talk on plants and plant hunters at ADFAS, Scone (adfas.org.au/societies/) Tuesday, April 7. Details Chairman Kerry Cooke, phone 0428 458 141.