House Plants Earlier Notes

Input

Cuttings from new or existing plants.

Plastic tubs and trays from the kitchen.

Serious tubs and planters from Garden Centre bins.

Composted soil from the Vermicomposter.

Water from the Grey Water Filter .

Output

A vast array of house-plants in tubs.

Plastic bags of worm castings.

Plastic bags of vermicompost (soil)

Description

When a house plant or bag of soil leaves the dwelling, the raw material carried in (food and paper products) is being carried out in the form of potting soil.

The Grey Water Filter Eavestrough contains houseplants in a sand matrix. This can be thought of as hydroponic gardening. Forty-five feet of eaves-trough, carried in an attractive wooden façade, makes a pleasing display of cascading stems and assists in raising the humidity of the apartment.

I propagate plants by the usual methods, making use of lidded sundae cups to start African Violets from leaves, on a bed of gravel; making use of margarine and other tubs to start citrus trees from pips, and using a variety of plastic and foam trays as saucers, to space the plants.

I repot the seedlings in soil taken from the base of the Tower Vermicomposter.

I have a never-ending supply of cuttings, a never-ending supply of tubs, and a never-ending supply of rich potting soil. This makes for a never-ending stream of houseplants out of my door, and a few grateful friends and acquaintances. If I run out of friends, there's always the lobby of the apartment that needs brightening up.

Self-maintaining house plants

As an experiment I placed about two dozen Red Wrigglers in a twenty-litre (four gallon) pot holding a Philodendron. I buried a garden trowel of raw kitchen scraps and forgot about it, until a visitor commented that the plant had grown two feet "in the past two weeks". My reckoning is that a small colony of Red Wrigglers will dispose of any remaining or new bacterial growth in a pot, and maintain a small but healthy population that aerates and fertilizes the soil to the befit of the plant and diversion of any small surplus of food scraps.

I want to pursue this experiment, migrating plants to larger pots and diverting some of the pureed kitchen and paper mixture to large houseplants, such as citrus trees, palm trees and the like.

I see no reason why one person in an office or residential building should not embark on such a program of plant maintenance.

Sunday, August 10, 2003 - Wall of plants

As time goes on, my main problem is a surfeit of rich vermicompost soil – primarily vermicastings.

As an experiment I built a small wall of plants, described here. My idea was to see if a wall could be built and maintained with grey water. It can.

For my experiment I used a plank of wood about three feet tall and one foot wide. Suit yourself. Tall is good. I had a near-endless supply of plastic pots, three inches square, three-and-a-half inches deep, obtained, with explicit permission, from the garbage dumpster at my local commercial garden centre.

I used old wood screws to attach the plastic pots to the plank. The first row of three pots I screwed so that the base was about three inches above the ground level; that is, I left a gap of three inches from the base of the pots to the base of the plank. I don’t want the bottom row of pots to be standing in water.

The rows of pots (three pots per row in my case) are screwed to but up against each other.

I filled the bottom row of pots with small gravel (collected from the roadside where they’ve recently resurfaced the road). This lower row will serve as a sand filter.

The next row is screwed in place, and these, and all higher rows, are filled with sand as each row is in place.

I screw each row so that the base of the pot is resting on the surface of the material in the row below. In this manner, once all rows are in place, each row will assist in supporting the rows above it.

With twenty-one pots, I had arranged seven rows of three pots each. The lower row of pots contains gravel; all other rows contain sand.

I had a handy supply of philodendron cuttings, having inadvertently snipped the wrong stalk coming out of my “mile long” philodendron tub. Oops! From this stalk I made eighteen cuttings – one per sandy pot – and struck the cuttings so that at least one rootlet was embedded in the sand.

I kept the wall indoors for three weeks. Each morning I distributed a ketchup bottle of water between the three pots in the top row. The water trickled down from the upper pots to the lower pots, and as it went, it drained a small amount of sand from the base of each pot to the pot below. For the first week it became necessary to add small amounts of sand to the top row. The gravel row arrested the flow of sand out of the system.

The plank was stood in a plastic bowl, to catch the water. After the first week I re-used the drain water, returning it to the top row, and reducing my need to traipse to the kitchen sink.

Once new leaves appeared, I reasoned that the cuttings were established, and stood the wall (in its tub) on my east-facing balcony to receive the full blast of early-morning summer sun. After two weeks, no cuttings had died, so I reasoned that they had established healthy roots.

This morning I dismantled the system and transferred the cuttings in groups of three to larger pots, which I will take to work and place on the cafeteria tables.

I carefully unscrewed the pots, starting from the top row, and reclaimed the sand into a bread bag.

When I build the real wall, it will be a backdrop to my dining-nook, and will cover a space about four feet wide by eight feet high. I will need about four hundred pots, if I’ve calculated that correctly. Otherwise I’ll use those ubiquitous water bottles which clutter the indoors landscape, and spike cuttings through holes in the sides. Neck-down, they will funnel water to each lower row.

The sump at the foot will need to be elevated with some sort of spigot to facilitate long-term drainage. I may use a four-foot length of eaves-trough as a collector, and have it discharge into a four-litre ice-cream tub to facilitate daily disposal of excess water.

I won’t use wood-screws to affix the pots or bottles; I’ll use hooks, small picture hooks, so that pots/bottles can more easily be replaced. The wood-screws heads filled with sand, making replacement difficult.

I probably won’t use sand either; it makes for a very heavy chunk of furniture. I’ll return to my practice of popping polystyrene foam trays and cups in the blender, and use 2-millimetre particles as a matrix for the cuttings.

If you decide to use a small wall as a nursery for cuttings, you can flush the gravel pots (the lowest row) by rotating the pot about the screw or hook, tipping the gravel into a tray, rinsing out the sand and replenishing the pot with rinsed gravel.

Friday, November 21, 2003

You will notice, as time passes, that the saucers in which your house plants sit collect small grains of matter. Especially will this be evident just before you water your plants.

The grains of matter are worm castings! Tip the dry grains into a container and spread them on other house plants as a rich and natural fertilizer.

Saturday, January 28, 2023

My System for Watering My Indoor Plants Over Winter

We must not over-water our plants, but it is so tempting to do that. Most of my plants need a good soak once a month, or thereabouts.

In the guest room, which I keep at 10c over winter, I have a five-inch deep tray with water.

Each morning I bring in one large pot and immerse it in the water; the plant sits in water during the day and gets a thorough soaking.

In the evening I place the rack over the tray and set the pot on the rack, it will drain overnight.

In the morning I take the soaked plant back and bring in the next pot.

The three small pots (two gerniums and one creeper) accompanying the big pot are cuttings transplanted over the past few months. They piggy-back on the soaking and will be placed in the large pot once it is back home in the living-room. That saves me a bit of space.

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