Why is houseplant advice so bad?
dirtwise.substack.com
dirtwise.substack.com
Unfortunately, I believe it's the latter complex case. pH matters a lot, that affects fertilization uptake, but so does soil bacteria and organic matter, lack of bugs and diseases, proper moisture, and the physical act of cutting the grass is an art and skill, not a mere chore.
Oof, plants need a lot of variables to be in the right ranges, and with soil and watering and weather, it's a lot of fluctuation on top of it all.
A complex system with many variables and optimum points trying to be solved with anecdotes, magical cures, and "good for you" products.
"This is how I do it!" blog kinds of recipes usually suffer from hidden techniques or undocumented variables where you try it yourself and it's just awful.
In other words, good advice involves science and art, not just one-off reports of success.
I've used a recipe that have worked very well for me but then gave radically different results when I used a different casserole dish. I managed to fix it by taking the lid off later in the process and adjusting the oven temperature by 30°C. Not many recipes mention that amount of temperature variation depending on what cooking equipment you're using.
For skincare, see a dermatologist. Anyone with skincare issues or concerns, PLEASE just see a dermatologist. They might not tell you what you want to hear, but they can usually give you a good baseline description and diagnosis of what to work on. That's 99% of the battle.
For lawn care, try to talk to a lawn care specialist, hopefully someone who is not trying to sell you something. Golf courses usually have 1 or 2 people that know a lot about grass. Even someone that you think has a really good lawn, ask them to come over and take a look at yours.
Getting advice off the internet is helpful, but I've usually found it to not beat getting someone in person who can actually look at what ever the thing is you're looking for advice for.
If it can't be "solved" with the standard antidepressant, antibiotic, skin cream, or "diet and exercise"; good luck getting anybody to even try to solve an issue that isn't obvious. (your leg is broken, you have a tumor, etc.)
Medical expertise has a problem with only doing one dimensional solutions for one dimensional issues.
Another thing that bothers me is that they never seem to do any sort of testing. They just throw solutions at the problem until one of them works. It is 2021 we have had the technology to grow something in a culture for over 160 years now, but no just take these antibiotics and if they don't work come back and I'll take another random shot in the dark.
“Bacterial culture is frequently more difficult and often requires more training than molecular techniques”[1]
There’s a good chance that many doctors are stuck in a mindset that culturing is too difficult, costly, and time consuming to be effective for all but the most resistant infections, but I’m not sure they’re wrong.
I did see a dermatologist when the skin on one of my fingertips started peeling uncontrollably. He told me 'We call this "desquamation", which just means "it's peeling". We don't know why it happens or what might make it stop.'
It was a less than ringing endorsement of the idea that if you have a skin problem, you should see a dermatologist.
"Just take the cream damnit" - a couple years later I found that the cream was just adjusting the texture of my skin, and likely overly sensitizing it. The doc didn't care and was happy to continue prescribing it.
When doctors abscond their responsibility to know what they're talking about, folks have no choice but to seek it out. Many people have this experience with physicians of all stripes.
Sure enough, it worked. I was just hurting my neck by using my PDA too much with my neck craned downward, and getting massages/exercise or just not using a mobile device fixed the problem completely
I really lucked out with that guy
To be totally fair, I did recently seek help for recurring pain in the back of my head (also the top of the neck, but I described it as the head) and the urgent care nurse did some simple nerve damage tests, asked me about my sleeping posture, and told me the problem was likely that I was sleeping wrong and I should take a different position. He was right.
Of course, he wasn't a doctor either. :/
If you want to turn the tables on your Chinese-born dentist, ask him about the Chinese habit of stopping by the hospital for intravenous saline solution whenever you're feeling like you might have a cold.
Realistically, this isn't good advice - you probably just want to see your regular doctor. The waiting list for a dermatologist can be long, but that GP will probably get you in quickly. They will recognize worrysome skin patches that might be cancer, and can generally do basic things to help common skin conditions (athletes foot, cysts, poison ivy and other common rashes, and so on).
Besides, a lot of folks can't just see a dermatologist - not without a referral, anyway.
This seems to apply to a lot of things, from how many reps you do in the gym to how you apply thermal paste to a CPU to how best to cook a steak. It's not that you can't mess these things up, but there does seem to be a rather large number of methods that work pretty well, and the difference in effect between "pretty well" and "optimal" seems overall to be small enough to allow for controversy.
Even manufactured controversies like 5G crackpots or snake oil cures seems to often revolve around these nebulous long term effects that hover like a mirage right on the precipice of what's testable, hinted at with a generous interpretation of the scientific literature, but never quite rigorously demonstrated.
Not that I disagree, but lots of people would argue otherwise, especially in politics.
Political debates often boil down to nonsense like
"The best way to apply thermal paste is with the dot method!"
"No, are you an idiot, look at the facts! The way you proper way to cook a steak is with a reverse sear!"
Add irrigation and you’ll be at 97+%-ile.
The frustration I have with my lawn hobby is that it looks “great” to most visitors but I know all the flaws and where I’ve still got improvements to make.
I've been saying this a lot lately (in different forms):
Reality is not a single variable problem; it's a multivariate puzzle which is never as simple as a single cause -> effect scenario.
This applies to absolutely everything these days, from growing plants to politics. In many ways this is the failure of the internet/social media. Everything tends towards simple single variable explanations that are never, ever, in alignment with reality. And yet, entire populations become divided along these simple lines. Even when talking about how to grow a lawn.
Their yard was basically a dirt lot with no grass. A month or so later and it was a lush green landscape.
It seemed like all they did was cover the yard completely with manure. After seeing their success I did the same and my yard turned green too.
Was it the manure? Yes, but also no. I moved across country and manure doesn't work like it used to. It was really the expert knowledge that did it.
Ended up with a yard of mud for a month. Was the eye sore of the neighborhood. Then it exploded. Lush beautiful grass that would not stop.
Had to mow it 2-3 times a week until winter.
Part of the problem with lawns in general is the ideal lawn, like the magazine lawn, tends to be a monoculture. But a really healthy, low-maintenance pasture tends to be a polyculture of many grasses, a few legumes (e.g., clover), and the occasional broadleaf (dandelions are great for instance when it comes to improving soil structure--their roots can really help aerate compacted soil).
Baby advice and houseplant advice isn't "bad", it's just subjective.
also: my houseplants don't get big because I don't take care of them! the ones I left outside "to die" have grown substantially... i even left a bunch of succulents outside, that were sitting in pots with no drainage, overflowing with water for 6 months.... they're fine. they "should" be dead as doornails. shrug
For my Bonsais, I didn't know that they should be given filtered water. The Bay area has particularly nasty water, so immediately my plants were getting spots. Second, when you repot in the summers, the soil should be aligned to where you're growing. Third, East facing windows that cliff the sun at the hottest part of the day are imperative. I then asked him, "Wait, I can't leave them in the same spot all year?" and his immediate reply was, "Hell no, not unless you plan to layer shades in front of them, but I bet that's not why you put them where you did." For watering guidance, he said, "Stick your finger into the soil down to the knuckle, if it's dry, water them. If it's still wet, let it dry out."
Keeping plants alive is relatively easy; helping them thrive is another matter entirely.
In the wild, plants are not surrounded by walls, floors and ceilings. They are, however, surrounded by other plants and trees that are trying to out compete them for the basics - water and sunlight.
Indoors the basics are: Water: rainwater only, unless it runs out then tap for a few days at most. Moist but not wet. Light: Some but not direct all day.
Now, some plants prefer more or less eg a Venus fly trap prefers constantly wet roots and direct hard sunshine. A orchid might like 7-14 days of drought and then a good dampening for a day or so (never static water).
It really isn't rocket science. You just have to remember that plants never evolved to live inside houses. Your mate that said "For watering guidance ..." is spot on. Just make it rain water and not tap if you can.
My best tip on looking after plants is use rain water. Oh and actually water them and don't drown them unless they are swamp or bog plants.
Sodium Metabisulfite (Campden) will reliably remove either, as will reverse osmosis.
What does it mean to align soil?
Isn't Hetch Hetchy water some of the cleanest?
https://www.sjwater.com/sites/default/files/2021-06/ccr.pdf
The parameters relevant to plants (EC, pH, chloride, etc.) are usually in the secondary standards, rather than the primary standards most important for human health.
San Jose groundwater is terrible, EC ~ 700 uS/cm out of the tap. I wrote
https://hydromisc.github.io/hydromisc/doc/nutrient-calculato...
to model the custom fertilizer blend that I'm developing now, since the cal/mag in the water plus the phosphate from the acid I use to neutralize the carbonate significantly shift the nutrient profile. That's obviously beyond typical houseplant practice, but professionals growing in non-soil media (nurseries, vegetable growers, etc.) do roughly the same.
Bafflingly wrong, at least for the large majority of the Bay Area. It's Sierra runoff with very low TDS, hardness, or alkalinity.
Maybe your particular area has issues, but to generalize that to the bay area is objectively wrong.
You can use citric or phosphoric acid though.
https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/johr-2019-0004
It may still be better than nothing, since they didn't test nothing. Citric acid was better than vinegar for them, but still showed worse yield than phosphoric. I tried citric acid myself and found that its pH down effect disappeared within hours, as some combination of the plant itself and the root zone microbiota broke down the citrate:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Hydroponics/comments/q4u5wz/gh_ph_d...
The professionals generally use mineral acids, and I believe that's with good reason. Of those phosphoric is the safest to handle, though a significant corrosive hazard in concentrated form; carefully dilute to ~2% for day to day use. You could also try monopotassium phosphate, but if your water is hard then you'd need such massive amounts that the extra K and P may become problematic.
1) Caring: you actually have to care about the plants. This requires that you notice how they are doing and if they aren't "happy", taking action to try and improve their environment.
2) Light: if the light is bad, you're screwed. People keep talking about overwatering but not providing plants with enough light is just as bad and probably worse. Plants indoor get far less light than they do outdoors. If you have a very sunny room, in most cases the only way plants will do poorly is by totally neglecting to water them.
3) Water: not particularly difficult. With most plants you only need to water when the soil is completely dry. What I would especially suggest you do if you are starting out with houseplants is to purchase plants that show, by virtue of their foliage drooping, if they don't have enough water. The leaves of a peace lily will droop. The leaves of devil's ivy will start looking floppy. I've noticed that my spider plant's leaves seem to become paler. Some plants (e.g. ones that look like palm trees) will lose their foliage, starting at the bottom.
In any case, if you have a plant like this, it is visibly telling you it needs water, so it's not hard to comply. It can also serve as a sort of canary in the coal mine for your other plants.
That's honestly about it. I repot the occasional plant, and sometimes I do a little light fertilizing. But if you have a plant that is doing poorly, my advice in almost all cases is simple: ensure it gets more light, and don't water it until it's totally dried out.
Hmm where have i seen that before... oh, here:
The author has also a good point in that maturing plants is a lot of work and as they become more of themselves they become more than, imo, what people would consider aesthetically appropriate.
M.deiciosa is a hot plant right now and maybe in these 5+1 apartments someone will live in one long enough to let it really start branching up and out and taking up a valuable amount of living real estate. It also has these, to my fiancee, 'penile' roots that are to her unsightly.
They make me feel more alive seeing the plant thrive and do its thing.
As a systems and network administrator I know that the vast majority of outages are human initiated. Maintenance gone bad. Simple mistakes such as unplugging the wrong cable. Stupid stuff. Sometimes thresholds such as disk usage or other resources get exceeded or a part just wears out and breaks, but usually it's us stupid humans fucking something up with our own hands where it would have been just fine if you had left it alone.
So there's your servers are houseplants advice. Stop touching them. Stop doing stuff. Leave it alone.
Of course that's impossible. We have to get new plants installed and have to find that equilibrium they like to thrive.
But when you find it, leave them the fuck alone and don't break it.
Anyway, since you are here: You may kill your plants with tap water. Plants evolved to get demineralized rainwater. The salts of tap water will build up in the soil, slowly poisoning the plant. Additionally the pot is also the plant’s potty: It disposes excess minerals and waste through the roots, and expects the rain to flush it away.
It’s best to water your plants with demineralized water, but you can also use (old) boiled and cooled down water, which lost at least some CO2 and consequently fell out calcium. In any case, if you water your plant, do so thoroughly, until water comes out at the bottom. Let it collect for a few minutes and then dispose it. Do not let it reabsorb! This will help the plant getting rid of salts and also helps not getting the soil soaking wet.
Btw. this is also why irrigation is a problem for food security. Using straight underground water for crops in hot regions will only work for a few years, until the soil is dead for good….
Edit: Oh yeah, and IIRC the snake plants leaf tips are crucial for growth. They may be hurt from handling in the store and will consequently not grow in length anymore. Not sure it has anything to do with watering at all. My snake plant got “store leaves”, which haven’t changed at all over the years, got brown just at the very end, and new leaves, which are almost double the length and totally healthy. Maybe a brown tip is just the normal display of a leaf without a head (cell).
Fun fact: Did you know snake plants store “sun energy” at daylight, and then do the rest of photosynthesis at night? So they do not lose water due to evaporation as much, when opening their pores for gas exchange! Pretty cool, eh?!
Neither is too important for plants, though. The usual problem for plants is chloride, which can't be removed except by processes like reverse osmosis or distillation. Most plants can easily survive chloride at typical concentrations in tap water; but if you don't water to runoff then that concentration may slowly increase in the root zone, eventually harming the plant. You typically want something around 10% runoff, though that will vary with your plant species, water, fertilizer, etc.
Yes plants need water, but they can't grow on water alone. They need all kinds of minerals that are in the soil. When those are gone the plant will die. When you repot plants you add fresh soil so you also add minerals. But when you don't repot you need to add those minerals once in a while.
Tip for aquarium owners: a lot of plants benefit from the 'dirt' in dirty aquarium water.
An also lesser known fact is that there is a huge symbiosis between bacteria, fungi and the roots. So in fact you also need to keep them alive.
And yeah, that root zone microbiome is complex, though somewhat different in containers than in nature. In soil-like potting mix, you're generally guaranteed to have nitrifying bacteria, so ammonium fertilizers are still generally safe to use. (Ammonium can easily become toxic to plants; but soil bacteria oxidize it to nitrate, which plants tolerate in higher concentrations.) Stuff like sulfur to amend soil pH doesn't necessarily work in containers though, since you don't necessarily get the bacteria that oxidize that to sulfuric acid. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria for legumes may also not be present unless deliberately inoculated.
The plants would die without that microbiome in nature, but with human help it's not mandatory. Many hydroponic methods run with a root zone that's as sterile as possible, and the only major change required is to supply most (~90%) of the nitrogen as nitrate.
There are some interesting-looking mini-aquaponics systems out there that could be useful for anyone who already knows how to take care of a fish tank.
> This comes about by having the roots well distributed in free-draining soil so that water and oxygen can feed the plant. From this you can infer there might be a problem If water runs right through the pot, and/or you squeeze the pot at its base and it’s rock solid. If so, take the pot off and have a look. From this you can also infer that, repotting into a much larger pot will just leave the roots buried in a mound of cold, wet soil, far from any roots. You might also see that a root-bound plant might not even need to be repotted, or can be repotted back into the same pot.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/46345
That's a guide to operating a nursery, developed by academics seeking to distill the scientific state of the art into something practically useful with basic equipment.
Specifically as to judging how much to water, I go mostly by weight. Thoroughly wet the medium until water runs from the holes in the pot, and then don't water again until the weight drops below some fraction (e.g., 20%) of that maximum. You can use a scale, or judge by hand with practice.
You can also wait until the plants show drought stress. For example, they might visibly wilt, or succulent leaves and herbaceous stems may go from turgid to limp. That's probably not optimal, but it's better than overwatering.
Finally, you can also pot in media with very low water holding capacity, like a blend of normal potting mix and perlite. This makes it near-impossible to overwater, but the tradeoff is that frequent (e.g., every few days) watering then becomes mandatory.
Generally, some people like to think they know better what the plant needs than itself.
I went from being talked in to overcaring to the probable most careless approach. My plants get water when the soil is dry. That's it.
Gladly, I also ended up stopping to interfere with e.g. how they grow and I've now noticed that they started to look "wild" and healthy.
Done right, it's a beautiful display of nature.
My reasoning being that rain unless it is heavy, doesn't actually reach the soil directly and then there is the matter of water coming out through the openings in the pot if there is too much of it.
I don't know why this works for me.
Doesn't this get a lot of water on the ground? Or do you keep your plants in a dedicated area, where water wouldn't be much of a bother?
In my case, the plants are in the living areas, on hardwood floors, where I usually walk. I'd hate to get my feet wet every time I walk next to them.
You could try using water sprays instead.
Unfortunately, there’s often a lack of good evidence except from industrial agriculture.
These meters used to be expensive, but you can get them for a few dollars on eBay, AliExpress, etc. now. Such measurement is now de rigeur in hydroponics. It works in soil-like potting mixes too, though only the most technically sophisticated hobbyists there (e.g., many orchidists) have adopted so far.
http://www.yieryitools.com/sale-9685340-high-accuracy-drinki...