Tuesday, September 14, 2021
I can't keep these plants alive. They are very unhappy.
The soil holds too much water. I wait for several days between waterings, and in that time the top few centimeters of soil are bone dry, while the soil below is still moist.
There is an epidemic of fungus gnats. "Just let the soil dry out," they say. "You're just over-watering," they say. "The soil isn't draining," they say. Are you sure? Do you mean to tell me that if you put a plant in soil and water it once a week, it will die from over-watering?
"But the gnats proliferate due to the presence of fungus, and the fungus only grows when the soil is moist too long!" they exclaim.
"There's too much soil! Plants that size potted in that much soil will die from root rot!" is the warning.
Here's a question. Does vermiculite cause water to pass through the soil more easily, or less easily? Does it improve drainage, or hinder drainage?
The answer, as far as I can read, is "both" or "neither." The first couple of pages of google results are all cooking recipe style articles that rephrase, sometimes verbatim, the same unhelpful claims about perlite, vermiculite, what they are, what they're for, how they're similar, and how they're different. If you instead look at message boards or reddit, you'll see claims that perlite and vermiculite are polar opposites — that perlite improves drainage, while vermiculite retains moisture. If you read articles for DIY potting soil mixes, you'll see things like "2 parts perlite and/or vermiculite in any proportion."
I've been spraying a dilute neem oil mixture onto the soil of the plants in an attempt to terrorize the fungus gnats. It doesn't seem to be helping, but apparently this takes time.
My mother advised me to take one or two of the plants out of their current container and plant each individually into a small pot. The goal is to improve soil drainage. I took this opportunity to mix up some new soil, this time with the following ingredients:
It's vermiculite rather than perlite, because the local gardening store's perlite included Miracle Grow fertilizer, and I'm trying to control the "drainage" variable only.
I mixed the soil, roughly, by volume using a quart sized measuring cup as a scoop, and worked the mixture with a big metal paddle and a little wooden spoon until I had broken up most of the clumps. The soil has the consistency of wet sand, but lighter.
The unamended potting soil really is very dense and moist. Probably adding anything (perlite, vermiculite, sand, styrofoam) would improve it. That's not to mention nutrients, which I'm not addressing until I can get the plants to stop dying. Besides, the soil and the compost probably have enough nutrients to get the plants further along into the vegetative stage. I could always supplement with liquid fertilizers later if necessary.
I accidentally destroyed most of the root system of one of the plants that I transplanted today, so that one I expect will die. The other one looked like it was going to die anyway, so I wish it the best of luck.
It seemed like a fun idea to use an old Android phone as a time lapse camera to monitor the growth of the plants, but it turns out it fucking sucks and is a total pain in the ass.
Assuming the camera app hasn't spontaneously stopped taking pictures without leaving a hint as to why, you can see the most recent picture here. There's also a less frequently generated everything-so-far time lapse video.
Here they are inline:
Yes, it's blurry. It focuses on whatever it wants to. I could make the focus fixed, but then the next time I nudge the camera or move anything in the shot I'll have to set it again. Better to let it focus itself on something.
You can see the whole system here.
As you can see, everything was fine until the sudden cut to brown at the 32 second mark. The interim period was a week that I spent at my parents' house, during which the phone decided to stop taking pictures. There's another used camera in the mail that I'll flash Ubuntu Touch onto in an attempt to wrap my own camera intervalometer. Existing Android solutions work very well until they stop working entirely.
Before leaving my apartment for the airport, I watered the plants with a little more water than usual and added in some of the dilute neem oil mixture. After a week of then leaving the plants well alone, you can see that they're all dying.
If the plants recover as is, great. Nothing to do.
If the re-potted plants do better, great. I'll re-pot the rest.
If everything dies, well then shit. I'll buy more seeds, this time keeping each plant in its own tiny container full of super draining soil mix, and I won't water them one fucking drop until they beg for mercy.
