Now that the winter has passed and our picea glauca fir survived, it’s time to give it a nice home. I replanted it into my standard planter couple of weeks ago. And now it’s showing signs of growth. The only problem I’m having is my cat using the picea planter as a litter box. Dunno why she enjoys that. It’s prickly and she barely fits into planter without touching the tree.
With this planter I’m trying some new methods of setting up my planter. Instead of adding bottles at the bottom to make the self watering container, I added the bottle to one corner so only the top of the bottle is peaking out of the soil, and I’m using it to water and monitor the water in the container. So far it’s working well.

<h3>Picea update – Oct 8th, 2017</h3>

A bit of updates on out little fir. It survived the hot hot summer that was this year and it is looking better then ever. It did have some browning of the needles, but it turned out that it was the drought and the heat. As soon as I gave it some water it sprung right back and the brown needles got green again. It’s enjoying it’s container.And cat was succesfully persuaded from peeing in it’s container by a rather strange action. I let the grass/weeds grow bellow picea. Since it had no more open soil, it stopped being interesting as a cat toilet. And the weeds served one more purpose – they stopped the evaporation during extreeme heat. So even though it didn’t look great, I left them  to grow and pulled them out after the heat was over.

I’m trying to find out what I can plant bellow it. So the trunk isn’t visible and the soil is protected from the evaporation. Right now it has some false heather (cuphea hyssopifolia) planted bellow. We’ll see how it survives the winter.

Updates to follow…