Why do my houseplants die? (A tale of unnecessary woe)

Or, humans can't live on bread and water alone, and neither can plants...


I have some friends who swear up and down that they have a brown thumb. Every plant they take in dies a long, slow, horrible death. Sometimes it's because they forget to water enough (and even more rarely, too much). Usually when I ask them what happens, they say they don't know.


tl;dr- Buy a good liquid plant food and add it to your plant water as directed. Sometimes you need to re-pot your plants in new soil. Ask at your local garden centre what they suggest. Sometimes your plant has outgrown its pot and needs a slightly bigger one, but if you don't give food to your plant it will likely never get to this point.


If you actually want to learn something about it, read on...

More advanced topics- Soil pH

As I learned from my daughter's grade 8 science class notes pH stands for potential of Hydrogen, and it's determined by measuring the number of hydrogen ions. Water has a neutral pH with a balanced number of hydronium and hydroxide ions. This pH is measured as 7. Anything less is acidic and anything above is basic (or alkaline). Lemon juice is 2.2 pH, so it is highly acidic. The best range for plants is between 5.5 to 7.5 (so acidic is better than alkaline), although some plants have evolved to survive in soils outside of that range (like Arabian coffee and highbush blueberry).

How to wean your garden off its oil dependency- Step 1: Fertilizers

Happy New Calendar Year to everyone! I work in a school, so for me the year 'ends' in June and starts again in September... It also ends in the fall and starts again in the spring... It's an endless cycle of endings and beginnings, and odd spaces in between. This liminal time of the year is when I like to dream about my spring garden (and try to stay away from garden seed catalogues. Danger, Will Robinson!).

Growing your own veggies and herbs not only ensures that you have the best quality and highest nutrition, it can also reduce your impact on the environment. If you want to take that to the next level then you need to wean your garden off of its dependency on oil. The next level is barely a short step, and not hard at all to do.

Most commercial fertilizers are made from oil (natural gas in the case of nitrogen), or with the use of oil or coal in their production. In the end it's all the same chemicals (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium), but where the chemicals come from, and what pollution is left behind in creating them, matters.