Archive for Plants
Spring in Brasília
As some of you know, I am spending this autumn in Brasília. Only it’s not autumn here, but spring. As the equinox is this weekend, it seems an appropriate time to write a report of my new daily routine.
I wake up in the morning, and look through my window:
After a hearty breakfast, I drive to the university library:
I park a block away. As I walk alone I wonder
what my day will bring me:
I work in the library all morning:
At lunchtime I drive back home:
Our parish’s little library is open every afternoon. That’s where I go after lunch:
Day and winter come to an end in the capital of Brazil.
The end.
Miraculous Flourishing
A few weeks ago I posted a story — or rather, a confession — about a plant I am trying to baby-sit (and not kill). I am pleased to report that the plant is still alive. Not only that, it is actually flourishing! That’s right: to my surprise, I walked in this morning to find that during the weekend the plant had produced dozens of baby-leaves! I had never seen more than three or four at a time before!
Let’s look at the facts:
Fact #1: I water “my” plant every Monday, emptying half of the contents of a 250ml Tim Hortons plastic water bottle. Until last Monday, these contents consisted simply of 100% plain tap water.
Fact #2: When the plant was on the verge of dying, a few friends recommended I gave her some plant fertilizer. But I didn’t really know where to go buy it, and while I searched, the plant miraculously stopped dying, which made the fertilizer less of an emergency.
Fact #3: Then a week ago last Friday, I passed by a flower shop, and decided to ask them if they had something general enough and (crucial pre-requisite) easy to apply. After asking all sorts of questions about the plant, the guy sold me a little bottle whose label said: “Liquid Plant Food – 7 drops per liter of water: everytime you water, everything will grow.” Just what I needed, I thought. Despite of all my urban skepticism, for the bargain price of $6.99 I bought 118ml of this fantastic elixir, and went home.
Fact #4: 7 divided by 2 equals 3.5. The capacity of my plastic bottle, as I said, is 250ml, which is a quarter of a litre. Hence I neded to divide 3.5 by 2 again how many drops to drop into the Tim Hortons bottle. My skills in basic arithmetic quickly gave me the desired answer: 1.75 drops per TH plastic water bottle. My philosophical accounting skills reasoned that that would be approximately one large drop and one smaller drop. So off goes big drop and little drop into bottle.
Fact #5: Then, exactly a week ago, I meticulously poured half of the concoction obtained through the procedure described at #4 above, and saved the rest for today.
Fact #6: And the rest of the story you know: I walk into my office this morning to find dozens of baby leaves! Without having to handle any smelly manure. Urban skepticism has been completly uprooted!
Conclusion: I’ll never again roll my eyes when I hear a farmer or a gardener go into raptures about their greens. I’ll just tell stories about my own babies too, with pictures and all. Aren’t they adorable?
Picture 1: The exilir and the TH bottle. This picture could well pass for an ad for the concoction, no?
(NB: Notice the cheeky branch with three baby leafs sneaking into the foreground.)
Picture 2: Said sneaky branch up close. Can you see the three little leafs?
Picture 3: Baby close-up: cute, no?
(Disclaimer: no baby-leafs were hurt or suffocated in the process of taking this photograph.)
Picture 4: And there’s tons of them in every single branch! Ester so proud!
Plants live not on worries alone
I thought I had killed it. I was really afraid I had. I had murdered it through negligence.
Well, not really negligence, because I didn’t technically neglect it. I actually worried about it quite a bit. But plants do not live on worries alone. Let’s look at the facts.
Fact #1: A friend of mine went away for the summer, and asked me to take care of some of her stuff, including a futon, a comfy chair, an espresso machine and a plant.
Fact #2: My prior plant experience consisted solety in a cactus I got for my 15th birthday. Before I turned 16 the cactus had died. Of dehydration.
Fact #3: I had informed my friend that I wasn’t very good with plants. She said that it was all very simple, that I only had to water it once a week. This I did. But the plant started to die all the same.
Fact #4: Plants are autotrophs. Which means they’re supposed to make their own food, as opposed to heterotrophs like us, that need to eat other creatures for food.
Fact #5: The friend came to visit last weekend. The espresso machine was very well looked after. So was the futon. The plant, not so much. The friend attributed this to the fact that I put the little plant in a corner, out of harm’s way. It was also out of good’s way, in particular, out of light’s way, something I hadn’t noticed before.
Fact #6: Plants are autotrophs, which does not mean that they generate energy ex nihilo. They produce sugar through photossynthesis. One could say then that light is the food of plants. I had thus put my plant on a water-only diet. My plant was starving.
Fact #7: In the days that followed, I became very aware of how light hits different spots. I put the plant by the window. I discovered that they sun only shines there between 6 and 8 am. I put a 60-Watt spotlight on the plant. I took it for a bit of fresh air and a little tan. I asked friends for advice. I pruned the plant. I took it to the office, where it’s a bit brighter.
Fact #8: Now almost a week later the plant seems to be recovering. Or so I hope. I’d hate to be a plant murderer.
Morals of the story:
1) Plants are hard to feed. Because, as my brother says, quoting a Brazilian songwriter, plants don’t cry, they simply exhale. I exhale too, but it’s a different type of exhale, which doesn’t help (well, it helps, a little bit, in that the plants need the CO2. But we’re still talking oranges and apples).
2) Worrying about things is not enough. Knowing what to do helps.
