How to Care for Plants

This is meant to be a practical guide to keeping plants alive; not information on getting touchy-feely for their benefit. If you're seeking the latter, this is not the guide for you. You want savetheplants.com, or perhaps plantfeelings.com. Nor am I talking about factory maintenance. That’s handled by reactor-upkeep.com.

So. Caring for plants. Keeping them alive. It seems simple, until you buy one. You water it; you feed it; it dies. What went wrong?

I’m here to tell you that popular wisdom is wrong. Unlike children, there is a lot more to caring for plants than just watering and feeding them. Guess what — you shouldn’t even feed them.

If you’re wondering why I’m an authority on plant care, trust me, I’ve got credentials. No, I don’t have any plants in my apartment — don’t need ‘em. But I do have two healthy and happy plants at my desk at work and they are fucking thriving. If they could talk, they would thank me constantly until I pruned off their vocal chords. Actually, I would sell them to a botanist for at least a mil each.

But my dream of growing talking plants and becoming a millionaire is not the point. The point is you and your dumb plants and how you keep killing them. The point is that they’re dying because you’re not following my patented System for Successful Plant Care in the Office Environment*, which follows below. I developed this system through trial and success — note the lack of error — and my leafy green babies are living testaments to its validity.

The System

1. Water your plants with backwash three times per week.

   This is essential to The System’s success. You can remember this step with the helpful acronym WPBTTW, which is pronounced “wuh-PEE-bee-tuhtuh-double-you.” It doesn’t matter which days you water, but Monday/Wednesday/Friday is a good schedule because of its beautifully symmetrical on-off-on-off-on timing. What is important is the three-times-per-week part, and the backwash, which I will get to, hold on. You can double up if it’s Friday and you missed a day — that is better than waiting until Monday. But for God’s sake, don’t triple-up if you forgot to water the poor guy all week. That will drown it and it will die. The goal here is the plant not dying, so don’t triple-up. As for the backwash, don’t ask me why it works; I’m not a scientist. But I do know that something about backwash, or at least my backwash, keeps plants alive. If it’s not obvious, the backwash should come from your water bottle. Assuming you’re also trying to keep yourself alive, you should be watering yourself throughout the day by drinking water. Sometimes you forget and only drink coffee, and then only drink beer at night and get dehydrated, but that’s OK. There should always be a little water left (about two three good swigs) in your water bottle by the time you’re ready to go home. You can do a few things at this point. You can finish drinking the water, you can pour it out, or you can give it to your thirsty plant, you greedy bastard. He doesn’t care that what’s left of your water is mostly spit! He just wants a drink! Pour your spit-water into the dirt your plant is packed in (hopefully you have dirt … plants need dirt and I’m assuming you already know that by the time you’ve reached this guide … do you even have a plant?).

2. Don’t feed your plants.

   I already covered this in the introduction. I know, I know: it’s counterintuitive. Plants are living things, and living things eat food, so you should feed your plant, right? Wrong. You probably dump the crumbs from the bottom of your vending machine Cheetoes into your plant. Frito-Lay leavings are like poison to plants. This is because plants use photosynthesis, which means that rather than food, plants eat light. Which takes me to step three of The System.

3. Rotate, rotate, rotate.

   This is the law of both hot dogs and plants. People (stupid people) think they can just leave their plants by a window (you did put it in direct sunlight, didn’t you? God help you and your plants) and be done with them. No! What about the dark side? Don’t you think that wants some light, too? Have you noticed the way its leaves are reaching, yearning towards the light? That means the plant is hungry … hungry for light. Turn it 180 degrees so that its leaves are pointing away from the light. If the leaves are all just shooting out at random directions, then give the plant a good turn and that’ll do. There is no rule to how often you should rotate your plants — use your gut.

4. Don’t talk to your plants, and certainly don’t sing to them.

   This only pisses your plants off. They can’t understand you.

5. Inherit plants; do not buy them.

   All the plants I’ve ever bought at a store have died, even when I use The System (ignore the paradox here). I don’t know why — again, not a scientist — but plants hate being bought and sold. They know, somehow. To keep plants alive, acquire them through other means.

   The two plants I have, those jade soldiers of longevity, cost me nothing. I took them in because they were unwanted. You could say I adopted them, although I never signed any papers. The first one, whose leaves are long and pointy with sharp, pink edges, used to belong to my first boss. She left it in my care when she got a new job. And wouldn’t you know it, she’d received it from her old boss, who’d left it in her care. I suspect it has been passed through companies internal communications departments for Time Immemorial, and will continue to do so as long as the cycle remains unbroken. If it has an origin, it appears to have started its life somewhere tropical and prehistoric. It would be at home in an episode of The Flintstones. The other one features thick, hearty stems and teardrop leaves that curl like tongues thumbing their noses at Death. The tongue plant came from my mom. She’d left it on the counter after moving out. I went to supervise the movers and discovered it. I was confident in my plantkeeping skills, having kept the first plant alive for several months already, so it took it and put it in my trunk. It lived there for a couple weeks until an intern came to work with us. She was lamenting her lack of cubicle decorations when I remembered the plant in my trunk. I gave it to her, and she gave it back when she left. It’s still alive because of The System.

Did I mention my plants have names? They don't. Plants don't go anywhere, so you never have to name them.

*Patent pending