I have been somewhat neglectful of my house plants the past couple of weeks. This is partly due to an overbooked schedule as well as some extended out of town trips. For the first time ever, to my knowledge, I let my aluminum plant get so dried out that it was drooping! Of course this was so startling to me that I didn't even think to snap a photo, I just ran to my watering can as soon as I saw it. My polka dot plants were drooping and wilting, too, but those don't seem to concern me as much as old aluminum. Luckily, the resiliency of these plants pulls through and you can see below how the aluminum plant perked right back up after a thorough watering.
A couple days into the week I realized that my double pot technique was not working for this Chinese evergreen. I had placed this draining pot that it came in into a non-draining plastic pot so that I could drop the pot into a porous rustic looking old terra cotta pot, and not need a saucer. As it turns out, the plastic non-draining pot was a little too snug, such that it did not allow for any overflow water to escape and thus the overflow of the way from the draining pot filled up in this little reservoir I created and kept the roots way too wet. The result is the yellowing and drooping leaves. What you can't garner from these photographs is the stench the stagnant rainwater left in this soil. It smells so foul, I thought about letting it outside to air out for awhile. I surmised that just letting the original pot rest on a small saucer was the best move for this plant for right now. I'll have to keep my eyes open for a larger pot for the evergreen.
In researching this plant (in an effort to affirm what I had already assumed - that the yellow leaves were the result of overwatering), I discovered that it is common practice to remove the flowers. Since this evergreen's flowers appeared to have stagnated in development (probably due to the aforementioned overwatering), I decided to snip them. Additionally, they had begun to decay and/or leach onto the leaves a brownish goo reminiscent of withering iris debris. I also noticed an unusual clear sap-like array of drips on some of the leaves. I suspect this is also from the decaying flowers. After reading this info about removing the flowers, I went ahead and snipped them all off at the stems as close to the main trunk as possible.
Lastly today, I decided to migrate my gerber daisy propagations from the sill by my front door up to the east-facing sill where the rest of my bright light plants are. I repotted the small one shown in the itty bitty terra cotta pot below, and I also repotted the one in the square plastic pot, which was doing famously until this photo where it appears a bit saggy and on the verge of wilting. The middle-sized gerber seemed to be doing quite well, with a root sticking out the bottom of its inner plastic pot. It appears that the seed in the larger pot grew the largest, the seed in the smallest pot grew the smallest and the seed in the mid-sized pot grew to be a mid-sized plant, thus far. In spite of this, I think I will leave the medium sized plant in its current pot, since that pot does a good job of keeping the soil moist every day (its inner sleeve is much smaller than the ceramic pot, so a lot of water stores in the bottom, which that protruding root is able to suck up from.
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