The Water Prop Story: Negligent Growth at Its Finest.

I have a water prop thingy. It's an AHopeGarden — twelve holes, tray, lives on the buffet in the living room that holds office supplies and dongles and apparently also lives rent-free in the back of my mind as "I should really clean that."

I did not clean it. For three months.

I got this thing for Christmas from my dear, sweet love, who intended me to use it as a seed starter for the Yard Garden. Alas, here we are. I went snip-happy and cut off little pieces of all sorts of things. Intermittently check them for roots, and otherwise I completely ignore it.

Here's what happened anyway.

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As we all know, I'm a clearance rack avoidance failure, and between Christmas and now, there have been...a FEW clearance rack finds that were on the brink of something terrible. Of note here, P. Ring of Fire. We've got like...IDK five of them or so because over the last few months there have been quite a few on the rack that just begged to be brought home. And you know, I tried to give them a Soft Landing like I do my other rescues. Most of them, however, rejected me as thoroughly and completely as Sam does when he's on a diet.

So, there were three in this water prop thingy. And every so often when I happened to look at it there was a start of a root, maybe. You know if you looked really closely. (Side note: these things grow sllooowwwlllyyy. I don't just mean leaves. I mean the roots grow slowly, the leaves grow slowly, the stalk grows slowly. They're just slow. So now I hate them and have five, but I digress.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/6f8628_25f720d8eaa84a24beeb104fa460e216/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Finally washed the thing. With cleaning vinegar and three warm-water rinses, for those of you who want to know how to do that right.

This week, I finally washed the water prop thingy b/c I couldn't get the idea of green fungus crawling up the sides of it out of my head. And lo and behold! One of the P. Rings of Fire (is that how you make this plural?) has actual roots. Like...long ones.

Also on the list of things that needed to probably no longer be in murky water: P. Brazil, P. Heartleaf, P. Cebu Blue, Neon Pothos, Golden Pothos, and a couple of Adansonii that got upset with me for running them up a hanging basket's hangy part until they were whacking the hanger thingy, so look sort of like they've been through a war.

Anyhow, all of this to say: neglect is absolutely not a care strategy. Same as Miracle-Gro is absolutely not a great fertilizer. But sometimes, the plants don't get the memo.

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