How to Fail at Keeping Houseplants
This could be viewed as a companion piece to How to Fail at Gardening. Not everyone has a piece of land to experiment with growing weeds and cat faeces, so here is a guide to maintaining a home full of dead or dying pot plants.
The best start is to pick up a pot plant from the bargain shelves of your local cheapo-bargain basement store. Look for the container with the driest soil and most withered specimen – failing that, one that has a lot of healthy moss or weed growth around the base of the main plant will do. Don’t worry too much about how to transport your purchase home – any way up in a carrier bag full of other shopping items will do. However, it is probably best to ensure the plant avoids contact with household cleaning products in transit: after all, you don’t want to kill it before it even reaches your home, as that would be defeating the object (this article is not called How to fail at Getting Pot Plants Home Successfully).
Once home, take time to consider re-potting your new plant into a carefully chosen planter with some good quality potting compost: then don’t follow through. The next step is to carefully select the best place for your pot plant to malinger. Some nurseries provide small labels depicting the growing conditions best suited to each plant – you can either just throw this in the bin straight away, or deliberately misinterpret the guidelines. Here follows some suggestions for good positions for plants to die in:
- on top of the television or microwave (especially good if your plant likes cool, shady positions)
- windowsill of south facing room (most ferns will suffer here)
- windowsill of north facing room (definitely a-goner for African Violets)
- behind any large piece of furniture or door of the least used room in the flat / apartment (or anywhere you will simply not see the plant on a regular basis)
- never in the bathroom or kitchen – you don’t want to run the risk of the plant surviving off the water moisture from steamy showers or boiling pans
Once in situ, it is very important that you do not move the plant. In fact, from now on you should ignore it as much as possible. This is another area where misinterpreting the care label comes in handy: check the watering guidelines and do the exact opposite e.g. water cacti twice a day. There is no need to be careful when spraying furniture polish, hairspray and particularly bleach-based cleaning products during your normal housecleaning routine. In fact if you do happen to notice the plant whilst cleaning, give it a spritz of it’s own – observe the effect and either repeat (if signs of damage occur) or desist (if plant refuses to respond negatively).
Larger, floor-level plants should be bashed-into as often as possible during vacuuming, used as sand-trays by toddlers and/or a litter tray by the cat. Cigarette ash can actually act as a fertiliser, so unless you intend to stub it out on the leaves or trunk of the plant, continue using your ashtray. Depending on the height and size of the plant, they can often provide a useful alternative to a clothes rack, so a position in a dark and dingy hallway or next to the bed should be considered.
It is very important that you do not show any interest in the plant’s demise, lest this be taken for genuine concern. It is especially important that any outbursts of temper at signs of health in the plant be manifested physically and not verbally. You can’t run the risk of swearing, shouting or other verbal abuse being misconstrued as concerned communication by the plant. Kicking, slashing or ripping are more appropriate outlets for disappoint.
Putting all of the above into practice will put you on to the correct path for Failing to Keep Houseplants. You need to be strong and maintain absolute disregard for the progress, health or condition of the plant to successfully complete the process. Do not be swayed by comments from visitors or attempts by so-called friends to move, water or otherwise tend-to your plant.
In time you will be rewarded with a dead or wilting plant in a container either light from lack of water or sprouting interesting fungal growth (which will hopefully be transferred to other plants by spore-dispersal). Should you get to this point, the only thing left to do is decide whether or not to buy another plant – do you have it in you to be a serial pot-plant killer?
Tags [ Fun | Funny | Humour | Humor | Life | plants | growing ]
Add comment February 3rd, 2008