Smashing success: repotting my curry leaf tree

I didn't think I'd be doing a detailed "how to" involving a hammer and a sharp knife when I woke up this morning, but here we are anyway (and it was a smashing success I might add). 

I have more than one curry leaf tree growing in my garden, and quite some time ago I had promised to give my one-metre tall potted curry leaf tree to my good friends Jolanda and Paul.

They used to have a productive curry leaf tree in their garden, but while they were away travelling for several months in 2019 (lucky them!) the tree didn't survive, so they needed a replacement. The problem is that my potted tree really needed repotting before I handed it over to them, so "now is as good a time as any" became a very good reason to repot the tree this Monday morning.

Here's how it all went ...  

I do like terracotta pots for many reasons, but this shape is all wrong. Leaving the existing tree in there too long meant that it had filled the bulbous centre and just won't come out by pulling it out. It's stuck in there!

 

The existing pot is 28cm wide and 28cm high

So I found a perfect replacement that is 33cm wide and 33.5cm high, bigger the than old pot all round and offering room to grow, but only one size up, not too big. And it has the right shape, so in future years if the tree needs repotting, it can be pulled out easily.

Just one gentle tap with my hammer produced the perfect result. Away fell one full half of the original pot, and the rootball lifted out easily. I know, seems like a radical thing to do, but I don't have much inclination to hang onto badly-shaped pots. 

If you think taking a hammer to a pot is a radical manoeuvre, then wait till you see me perform surgery on the rootball with a sharp knife. The rootball was fairly tight at the base, and so I made several vertical slits in the most tightly packed sections then lightly teased out the roots.

Now the roots will happily start moving their way into the fresh potting mix that will surround them in their slightly bigger new home.

The new pot is bigger than the old one, so how much potting mix to add to the bottom, before adding the rootball? I just did a test fitting of the rootball into the new pot, 10cm short.

So I added about 10cm of new mix in the bottom, before sitting the rootball on top.

That worked out fairly well, so I carefully added new mix to fill the gap in the sides. Shaking the pot gently helped to settle the new mix into the gaps.

Ideally, never add much potting mix on top of the existing surface, as there are lots of "feeder roots" right at the soil surface. However, I spread a super-thin layer on top to even out some bumps.

After all the trauma of surgery by Dr Gardenamateur, my curry tree will be a bit stressed, so I made up a seaweed solution and gave the plant a good watering with that. This product is called "eco-seaweed" and I have been using it for years. It's a competitor to Seasol in the market, isn't as well known but does just as good a job. It comes as fine desiccated flakes that you add to the watering can (I add one teaspoon to a 9-litre can of water). 

Finally, to help conserve moisture and suppress weeds, I added a layer of mulch to the pot, making sure to keep the mulch away from the trunk itself.

As a tropical plant, our curry trees don't like Sydney winters at all, and they often lose some or all of their leaves by the end of July. As an annual thing I always prune back the tree a bit, then by early spring the whole thing is sprouting new leaves and greening up rapidly.

So the curry leaf tree is ready to be handed over to Jolanda and Paul. They can leave it in its new pot for a couple of years before planting it out, if they like, or they can put it in the ground straight away. Whatever suits their plans ...

Meanwhile, my "bonsai" curry leaf tree actually provides me with all the curry leaves I need in cooking. It's still covered in leaves, they're a bit down on tropical green-ness at the end of winter, but generally the plant itself seems healthy. 

Last of all, here's a photo from about 10 years ago, of our original backyard curry leaf tree. We originally had it growing in a pot, but then one day its roots got too big and strong and it cracked the pot. So we put it in a bigger pot and a few years later it cracked that one, too.

So maybe Jolanda and Paul's plan to get their new tree into the ground is the best idea. If you grow these things in pots in Sydney, they love our warm wet summers so much that eventually they'll start causing some kind of headache for you ... but along the way they're an elegant addition to any Sydney garden, as well as a delicious addition to so many South Asian and Southeast Asian dishes.

 

Five garden jobs you can do this spring

How's that gardening motivation level going? Out of 10? Locked down by covid and nothing to do, lovely garden out there and you're still a motivational "1" out of 10?

If you can get yourself all the way up to a "3" or better, doing that first gardening job might just propel you to the dizzy heights of 5s or 6s. So here's a short "to-do" list just in case the spring weather starts getting to the gardener in you.

Plant some spuds

Spring is the ideal time to get some spuds planted. The good thing is that specialist spud suppliers have been taking orders online for many years, so that's how to get started.

You can of course grow spuds in the ground, but a big pot works fine, so does a large "grow bag" that has holes included to help water drain away.

To get started on your 2021 Spud Mania, try these links to well known suppliers:

Garden Express:  https://www.gardenexpress.com.au/shop/edible-produce/certified-seed-potatoes/

The Diggers Club:  https://www.diggers.com.au/shop/vegetables/potatoes-and-other-tubers/

Green Harvest:  https://greenharvest.com.au/Plants/Potatoes.html

Goodmans:  https://www.goodmanseeds.com.au/shop/certified-seed-potatoes

Sow some seeds

Spring is the ideal time to sow seeds of so many delicious crops, such as all salad greens, tomatoes, shallots, basil, silver beet, carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini — there are countless others — and the good news if you are locked down is that major supermarkets often stock the seeds you are looking for. I bought my Yates seeds for these babies pictured below at my local Woolies supermarket. 

On the left are some shallot seedlings enjoying the morning sun, while on the right are seedlings of "mesclun" salad greens, which is a mixture of different greens. After sowing the seeds the fastest ones – the rocket (or arugula) – came up in just four days. The slowies took two weeks. The shallot seedlings came up in 7 days, so on each and every morning I was out there misting the seedling trays with water, there was something new coming up.

After about three weeks the seedlings are ready for more sunshine, so in my garden a lovely half-way house is under the dappled shade of my potted Thai lime tree. The seedlings get a bit of direct sun on them during the day but big brother lime tree shades them most of the time. In two weeks from now, they'll all be much bigger and potted up in their troughs in full sun, ready to roar away as spring warms up.

Sowing seeds is a bit hit and miss sometimes, but I find I get 10 hits to every miss, so give it a go, the odds of succeeding are really good.

Salad greens like mesclun, rocket, lettuce etc are very reliable and worth a try.

Basil is a good bet once the weather becomes truly warm.

If you're nervous about tomatoes give cherry tomatoes a try.

And if you want to fire up your lifestyle, chillies are so much fun to grow from seed. So many types and, given you probably only need one or two plants of each variety to knock your socks off, you're bound to have lots of success.

Go potty

Spring is a good time to do a bit of repotting. Here's one simple job I did this week, part of my succulent and cactus patch renovation.

God knows how many years ago, these three were tiny, cute midgets in baby pots that could sit on a windowsill. So I put all three in the one pot, put it out in the garden and forgot about them – and my, haven't they grown. Time for an upgrade in accommodation. 

Half an hour later each plant has its own home, and if I manage to neglect them for the next decade they'll probably need an upgrade in size by then. Without repotting, each plant would have crowded the other and all three would have suffered and probably died in the end.
This way, all three will just keep on growing.

So if you have a single plant that has grown too big for its pot, or you have too many plants in the one container, do everyone a favour and remove all the plants from the pots, upgrade their accommodation, and they'll be with you for many years to come.

Renovate your compost bin

Smelly compost? Open the lid and a cloud of little flies swarms out? Chances are your compost is too wet. What it needs is more dry matter to balance things out. And for me, the easiest source of dry matter is my big bag of sugar cane mulch. 

So I've been adding a few generous handfuls of mulch to my tumbler compost bin, giving the lot a twirl so it all mixes up nicely, then adding some more mulch a few days later. 

If, like me, your kitchen fruit and vegie scraps bin is the main source of new materials for your compost bin, your compost bin is in danger of being too wet. When that happens composting slows down and things can get smelly. Add some dry matter (raked up autumn leaves if you have any), but if you have a bag of mulch, it's the easiest and quickest way to get your compost bin back in business. 

Feed everything!

Spring is fertilising time, so get out there and do it. Doesn't matter what you use, usually, but there are so many specialist types of fertiliser to choose from it's easy to become overwhelmed with choice. 

The only plants you need to be extra-careful with are natives, and they definitely need specialist native-friendly food that won't harm them but will feed them. The good news is there are many native friendly plant foods around now.

The best rule to follow, apart from reading the instructions on the packs, is that it is much much better to under-fertilise than overdo it. More is not better with fertiliser. So treat the maker's recommended dosages as the "maximum" dose at all times, and there's nothing wrong with lighter, half-dosage feeds, either.

To keep things simple I mostly just use a liquid food (mixed up in a watering can) for all my edibles. Leading brands such as Dynamic Lifter, PowerFeed, Charlie Carp all do the same kind of job, and there are several others in the same category. In the growing season (ie, now) I liquid feed crops once a fortnight.

For most of my potted plants I use slow-release fertilisers, brands such as Osmocote and PowerFeed leading the field. These are almost "set-and-forget" in that you apply the little pellets, then you don't need to re-apply for months after that. Read the instructions and you'll see that some last 3 months, others 6 months. That's about it.

And for general garden use and feeding citrus trees I use organic-based pellets such as Dynamic Lifter. The good thing about chicken poo style fertilisers and other organic-based products is that they also feed everything that lives in the soil, not just the plants.

Compost is a fabulous fertiliser for feeding the whole of the soil, so is blood and bone. Seaweed is a superb soil health tonic too. 

All the pure organic, or organic-based fertilisers are the best long-term option for improving the overall health of your garden soil. The benefits don't happen overnight, but over the years they are the outstanding option.

So get out in the spring sunshine, plant some crops, visit your growing babies each day to care for them, then start harvesting the organic home-grown goodness that you've raised yourself. It's a satisfying feeling in a trying time. Give it a try.