Thank you guys for the replies.
Okay first the Soil:
When I first planted this, I had a gardener who did it for me. And while I was not happy with the progress of the plant, I decided to look into the soil. So I dug a deep and wide hole around the plant. While I was digging I must have picked out 20 rocks/stones of all sizes and I noticed that the soil it stands in was that construction type soil. I stopped digging when I felt the sand I reaches was soft (kind of the sand you find when you dig on the beach for a while). So after taking all that soil away, I mixed:
1. Good quality potting soil
2. Some Vermi Compost
3. Some Plant Compost
4. A custom made fertilizer done for me by an agriculture engineer in a local factory here.
Then I took all that and with the help of my new gardener I filled the holes with this mix. The gardener did not compress the soil with his foot as I would have done and he insisted that its better this way; I as worried about air pockets but thought I will give him the benefit of the doubt. He now waters the plant every other day, not too much and before each watering he would use trowel or a hand fork to mix the soil going 1-2 inches deep. He thinks it was over watered so that's why he does it every other day and I decided to follow his lead.
The outer layer of the plants is pretty squashy when I press it, but its not the case on the inner layer. As for the leaf growth, when I first planted this two leafs started growing and I could see the growth "clearly" every single morning... but now I can see two leafs that are trying to grow but with zero progress for the past 10 days or so; the tip of both "about to grow leafs" is brown and dead-ish.
As for the weather, its Dubai Winter which means our a low of 16C and a high of 26C and the plant is in the sunny side of the garden.
Hope this gives you a more clear picture
