Gardening and plants

March 17th 2022

I like having plants around, here are some miscelenius thoughts.

One of the big problems with plants is how... holistic they are. Holistic like medicine, or like bad programming. Everything is connected and it's hard to isolate independent variables and figure out how things effect one another. I started with some ikea plants, I'm generally a fan of ikea as a company (feels weird to say that, I'm generally not a fan of any company) and I figured they'd probably try to set me up for success.

One thing I noticed is that all the ikea plants seem to use more or less the same soil. It's a very well draining soil that doesn't seem to retain much water. The succulents and the english ivy both use the same soil. I think part of it is that they've chosen some very robust durable plants to sell to people, and those plants are probably more sensitive to over-watering than under-watering.

So far the ikea house plants are working on pretty well. The internet tells me to only water the succulents when they start "showing signs of thirst". To my mind this mostly means when they start to look a bit wrinkly. I have them next to a misting humidifer that I run pretty frequintly, so far they really do seem to require very little water. I'm sure that the very well draining soil helps prevent the root rot that succulents are known for.

I put some alpine strawberry seeds I ordered online in the fridge today, apparently you need to "cold stratify" them. I think the alpine strawberries are the way to go as they're not really industrially farmed. You can't just go out and buy a bunch of alpine strawberries for a reasonable price, so they'll be a much nicer treat than if I had chosen one of the commonly cultivated commercial strawberries. They're also a non-hybrid, you can grow them from seed. I've had alpine strawberries a few times in my life, and they really are very different from the commercially available brands. Reminds me of an article I read once about how the types of apples that people tend to get aren't nessesarily the best, they're the types of apple that ship easily and keep for a long time.

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