I've just received a shipment of beneficial nematodes yesterday. I will be drenching the potted yangmei's with the good nematodes today without pretreating the plants with chemicals to kill off the root-knot nematodes. My reasoning for bypassing the chemical treatment is that if I were to first kill off the bad nematodes, then I'd be removing the food source of the good nematodes. I'm thinking that if the good nematodes are introduced to an environment where there's an abundance of food (being the bad nematodes), then they will be well-fed, multiply, and colonize the pot even faster. At least until when there's a shift to there being more predators than prey. In which case, my problem with the bad nematodes are hopefully resolved. That is my hypothesis but only time will tell.
Also an update on yangmei plants. I noticed that they were slow to push so I put plastic bags over them and placed them in the greenhouse located in direct sunlight and they seemed to respond really well. However, I did use opaque bags so the sunlight was technically filtered out a bit but it still helped to retain more humidity and higher temperature. It was mostly in the 80s during the day and mid 50s during the night in the greenhouse. For me, the Black Crystal and An Hai were to quickest to recover and leaf out. Both were younger and smaller, than the Biqi and Dongkui. My guess is that because they were younger, they had more of the feeder roots closer toward the center of the root ball. Maybe that helped preserve more of those vital roots during the harvesting of the trees. Whereas, the larger, older Biqui and Donkui trees came with mostly larger roots with very few feeder, fibrous roots. I'm assuming those got cut off during the harvesting process because the harvesters didn't dig far out enough. From my own experience with the 15 trees or so, I've noticed a direct correlation between the size of the trees, amount of fibrous roots and its ability to recover. I've also noticed that one of my An Hai's that is pushing buds had no branching roots, aside from a sad stubby looking central root. Initially, I had little hope for its survival, but it seems to be doing just fine now. It too was a smaller, younger tree as well. On a different plant, I've also seen a white root developing from the tree trunk. I'm guessing yangmei's do have some ability to root from the lower trunk it's covered with soil? From my observations, I would choose smaller, younger trees over the larger, older ones. It will be helpful to see if others have observed similarly. It might be helpful info for future purchases.
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