It's an odd title for a botany-themed
blog isn't it? But it's relevant to what I'm going to talk about
today.
First off, I apologize to my friends,
family, and everyone following this blog, because I have been away
for so long without any new material. I have mentioned before that I
am a student, what I haven't mentioned before is that I also have a
chronic health problem, one that on any given day may be tolerable or
horrendous. Sadly, for the last two months, it has fallen on the
side of vicious. It's disrupted my hobbies of botany, my personal
relationships, and my job. It's pretty much taken over my life. And
with such a disruption, paired with being home bound so frequently,
it's led me straight into depression.
I hope that most of the people reading
this will never ever have to deal with depression (or ulcerative
colitis, for that matter). But for those that have suffer, and do
suffer still, from it, it's a horrible disease. It eats you up
inside, it doesn't let you do anything you want or need to do, and
better yet, it convinces you that you don't want to do them. I work
in IT, and I love it. I love coming into work, seeing friends and
getting meaningful work done. I love being a problem solver and
helping people get their technological needs met. It's part of who I
am, but depression tells me that I don't want to do it, that I can't
do it, that I'll never be good enough to do it. It makes you want to
give up everything you love, and it's too good at convincing you of
your shortcomings. It also likes to point out how many mistakes you
make, as well as making them seem much worse than they are.
Depression will turn all of your negative thoughts into
self-fulfilling prophesies.
I'm not even sure if there is anything
I can say to anyone else to help them get through these times, as I
am certainly still embroiled in my own depression. But if I could
say one thing to anyone who reads this, who suffers, or may suffer in
the future, it would be to never listen to that bastard. It's never
as bad as your depression tells you it is. People love and care
about you and you are a wonderful and needed person. We all have
gifts to share with the world. You matter, and what you do matters.
I ask too that if it starts getting too difficult to deal with,
please talk to someone, don't keep it inside. The longer you wait to
get help the worse it will get, and it will be that much harder to
get away from it.
This may sound weird, but I take plant
losses very seriously. To me, losing a plant can hurt just as much
as losing a pet. They are living, breathing organisms, and we take
them in our care, in our homes, just as we do animals. It can be
very difficult to lose one, but for me, most recently, I had many
losses (and almost losses) all at once. It was hard to deal with,
both personally and professionally. Who am I to offer advice and to
teach all my readers about plants when I lose 20 some plants all at
once to a few stupid screw-ups? Well, in a lot of ways, it perhaps
proves that we all make mistakes, and, though hard, it's an important
lesson. I won't forget what I learned from my experience, and I am
also here to help tell you what not to do.
About 2 weeks ago, I tried to give my
Nepenthes some extra light to help stimulate pitcher production.
They need UV light to promote healthy pitcher production. I figured
that removing my greenhouse cover would help them with this (it's
important to note that on the best days, my greenhouse only gets
about 5 hours of direct light, so I figured that this would be fine
for my plants). Well, they loved it, all but two that is. My
Nepenthes petiolata
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepenthes_petiolata)
and my N. hamata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepenthes_hamata)
did not like the light. They both suffered severe sunburn from the
experience. Now, they could recover on their own, and the petiolata
was, however, the sunburn was extensive and severe enough on the
hamata that it got a fungal infection (which is what I was worried
about when I saw the burn). Now, I certainly don't advocate doing
this on a regular basis, and I tried to let it weather the storm,
waiting a couple weeks watching to see if it would recover, but as I
had lost a Nepenthes recently that I had been trying to save for the
last 6 months, only to watch it slowly succumb to disease and die, I
broke out my tebuconazole, which is a very potent systemic fungicide,
and I waited.
While this was happening, I had also
moved my sarracenia starts to a new location so that they could start
being weaned off of the humidity dome, and also so that I could put a
new batch of seedlings underneath the plant light. Unfortunately, I
didn't realize that so much water had evaporated from the tray, and
the next morning I found about 20 dried and dead Sarracenia. Another
30 or so have slowly withered away and died since.
I recently replanted my two dragonfruit
starts that I grew from seed outdoors in terracotta pots. I just
used regular potting soil (it's what they had been in previously) and
they were growing and acclimating to the new levels of sunshine and
loving life, and then one day they both collapsed. Both of their
root systems have rotted away, and I suspect some sort of fungal
infection transmitted by gnats (or some other small flying insect).
When I brought them in, the one that had it worst had them on the
soil. I've seen this before in my Nepenthes hybrid that died.
I have a Drosera regia (King Sundew)
that I got late last year, and it's beautiful (and temperamental).
Regias are cool because they (like the D. capensis) will wrap their
leaves around their prey, usually very dramatically. I have heard
stories(big fish stories?) of them tying themselves in knots over
insects they catch. They are also the largest of the sundews,
growing up to two feet in height when fully grown. They are very
neat. Mine started to die back drastically and rapidly. It had been
in the same spot for some time and was happy and healthy, only to
suddenly and dramatically start to wither away.
All of these events happened within a 3
or 4 day span, and in the middle of my aforementioned depression, it
sent me spiraling downward. But there is always hope, and loss is a
part of life. It's never easy to deal with losing a plant, a pet, or
a person, but we all pull through, in our own way. And oftentimes,
things aren't as bleak as they initially appear to be.
I removed my Nepenthes from their
current shelter, put them under a gentler light, used the fungicide
(as I mentioned earlier), and gave them extra attention and time.
They are both recovering, both showing new growth, and the petiolata
even has a new pitcher that has opened up. They are now back with
the rest of my collection, enjoying the (once again) filtered
sunlight. I refilled the Sarracenia tray, up to a very high level
compared to earlier, replaced the dome and put them back under the
plant light, I figured at the least, I would save the ones that were
still healthy, but to my surprise some of the Sarracenia starts that
I had pegged as dried out and dead have new growth popping out. I
snipped off the roots of one of the dragonfruit starts (they were
mostly gone by this time anyway), and then noticed that the other has
already severed it's connection to it's roots. I set them in shallow
cups of filtered water with some sulfur spray to reduce the chance of
fungus (sulfur is an organic option to the tebuconazole, however it
only works as a preventative, once the damage has started, it won't
reverse it. And although my dragonfruits are probably still the most
delicate, at least one seems to be re-rooting. And my regia just
really needed a trim. I cut off the older dead leaves from the base
and (for good measure) put it in a brighter spot, it's recovering
and seems much happier.
Not every sad story will have a happy
ending, however, if I can impart anything to my readers, things
aren't often as bad as they seem. Sometimes things work out better
than we expect, and we are often better people for having gone
through them and learned from our mistakes. It was a painful lesson,
but I did learn a lot over this ordeal.
