Welcome to #PlantFailFriday – a hashtag highlighted by me and Jeannie (@studioplants) to point out that in life, our failures are far more instructive than our successes – the same goes for plants!
Plant care instructions rarely ever tell you how much leaf turnover to expect or even how the shape of your plant will change over time, leaving you in a panic at the slightest sign of imperfection. Yes, we ought to do our best but plants, like all living things, are subject to the probabilities of life.
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📷 1) January 2018 – you’re looking at what’s left of my Peperomia prostrata…just a few strands left to propagate. So what happened?
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📷 2) August 2016 – here it is after living under my skylight for almost a year. When I first got the plant, the strands reached about halfway down the pot. Now, they completely hide the pot. LESSON: rapid growth means rapid usage of water and soil nutrients. Frequent watering also means soil nutrients are more likely to be leached way, which is why repotting into fresh soil is done yearly (approximately).
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📷 3) June 2017 – well, I clearly did not follow this advice. By now, the soil was depleted of nutrients and the older sections of vines had begun to die off. The dangling strands were basically rootless and searching for new soil. Here, my friend Jesse @teenytinyterra and I were trying to carefully repot it. What we should have done at this point was immediately make cuttings from EVERY healthy strand, then I would probably still have a small plant of my own…but fortunately…
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📷 4) January 2018 – during the repotting, Jesse had taken a few cuttings from the stragglers so plant lives on…like a horticultural horcrux!
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My goal is to help people enjoy their house plants by understanding the fundamentals (before tips and tricks in the hopes that their plants will stay looking perfect forever, which only serves to discourage people from the hobby because it implies that plant death is avoidable in all situations). With better understanding, you’ll have the power to forgive yourself after a plant dies.
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