Earth Bare Gardening Working day, backyard questions

Q. Each year our attractive orange clivia blooms outside in our shade backyard, but the tops of the foliage are often yellow and brown. What brings about this discoloration of the leaves?

Georgiana Flaherty, San Jose

A. The most very likely lead to, if the crops are in any other case nutritious and blooming, is also a lot drinking water. Clivia, a South African indigenous plant, prefer to be just hardly moist, grown in soil with fantastic drainage. Test your irrigation and soil humidity to make sure they aren’t obtaining too much h2o.

Twice a 12 months, clivias require a relaxation period of time — in winter season right before flowering and right away just after spring blooming. Through those occasions of relaxation, you ought to prevent fertilizing them and drinking water should be considerably lowered to when each individual a few to 4 months. When new expansion starts to seem, you can resume your weekly watering and month-to-month fertilizing schedule.

More mature foliage on the plants also will turn yellow and die as the crops produce new leaves. In that case, the yellowing is ordinary and absolutely nothing to be concerned about.

Clivia thrive with benign neglect. They never like to have their roots disturbed, so they only need to be dug out and thinned just about every a few to five many years. They also bloom best when they are a bit overcrowded.