confederate jasmine - what do i do with this stuff?

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Help! My mother thought she wanted to start gardening again. But life got too busy, and now there is a trio of 3-gallon tubs of Confederate jasmine in the back yard. She'd picked out a place to plant them, then bought them, THEN figured out the planting was too much work. They are just sitting there, getting peed on by the dog.
It's all up to me. I want to plant them, but I honestly don't know how.
I know that I need to add some kind of soil to what's already there. Floridian soil is mostly sand. But what kind of soil do I add? How much of it? Do I leave them in the pots until they get really rootbound and THEN plant them, or just pop then in right away? I've asked three people and gotten seven answers.
I've seen this stuff growing all over the place around here, so apparently it can live. But what do I do to make the transition from plastic pot to ground easy on it?
I need help. I don't want these plants to die.

-- Julie (ZepFiend@aol.com), March 13, 2000

Answers

Go get you a couple bags of manure and a bag of really good topsoil. About 2-4 pounds of the soil and about 2 for the manure. One name brand for manure that i know of: "Black Cow".

Dig the holes. Use the dirt you dug out of the holes and mix some of the manure and some of the topsoil. I'd go with all the dirt you dug out of the hole and mix with 1part manure and 2 parts soil. Throw some of this on the bottom of the hole. Put her plant on top. Do this now because growing season is starting and you want it to get established at least a little bit before the heat of the summer hits.

Take the plant out of the pot, check and see if the roots are all tangled and tight together on the bottom. If they are just rip some of the roots off the bottom. Just enough to loosen the bottom up. If they aren't, dont' worry aboutit. Put the plant in the ground. Now the hole should be only as deep as the pot the plant was in. In other words, don't dig a 3 foot hole for a plant that was in a foot high pot. There are feeder roots on top of the soil and if you put too much soil over top of them, the plants will die.

Put plant in hole, fill back in with amended soil. Water well. Keep watered, don't let dry out. Fertilize af

-- Renee (justme@justme.org), March 14, 2000.


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