Dr.Isley

Plant blog

[pocula-blog]

[insomniac-arrest]

what is it about fungi that’s so mythical and freaky and set in humanities heads as “fable and Other Folk” fodder

the lore

the vibes

the spooky feeling in the Ghosts and Aliens Section of my brain that goes off

like, look at this and tell me that magic isn’t real and doesn’t want to strip us bare and use our souls as bartering chips in cosmic games of poker

[rosemvry]

via pinterest 

[megansplants]

Few headlines make me as annoyed as “10 houseplants that don’t require sunlight to live!”

[catchymemes]

[quiet-nymph]

life.by.linus on Instagram

[botanyshitposts]

realizing there were pitcher plants all around me was super shocking, i had no idea they grew in my cold canadian climate until a few years ago. i think the only reason they go unnoticed, much to their benefit, is they love to grow in soft marshes that people hate walking in

honestly mood, like my fave thing is those pics that show just a massive amount of carnivorous plants in such abundance that it crosses back over into ‘kind of looks like normal plants’ territory. like this picture haunts me

this is a field of the carnivorous pitfall trap darlingtonia california. this plant lures in insects in through an inverted-lobster-pot-like opening, trapping them in a little chamber and letting them either beat themselves to death or tire themselves out trying to escape through little semi-transparent portions in the top (which look like openings it can escape through but are actually just thin parts of the leaf letting light filter through with no opening whatsoever), causing them to eventually fall down deeper into the plant to their death in a pool of digestive fluid. as you can see they are living large in this peaceful meadow. this is what they look like up close

[ta-nehisicoates-deactivated2018]

my girl poured her diva cup out into her plant and now the plant’s alive again her pussy voodoo

[sungawddess-deactivated20180923]

I have questions…

[thatadult]

this is green consciousness and ecofeminism

[the-indecorous-flower]

Period blood is full of nutrients and can act as a plant fertilizer. Which isn’t much help if you use disposables like pads and tampons, BUT if you use moon cups you can pour them onto your plant OR if you use reusable pads you can soak/rinse them in warm water before you wash them and pour that water onto your plants.

[deebott]

Stop being scared of ya own blood 2k18. Do magic. Revive plants. Curse enemies.

[8lckgrlrsng-deactivated20181030]

Woah, plant tip of the year!

[qxessence]

Wonderful fuckin post

[witcheshaven]

To clarify

Blood contains nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. All three of these macronutrients are good for plants.

This is a great alternative to blood meal fertilizers. While blood meal contains large quantities of nitrogen, some gardeners do not agree with its use due to potential animal cruelty nuances. For anyone who feels that this is gross, please understand that organic fertilizer is usually full of poo - this is hardly different than period blood. They’re both great fertilizers that are produced in different ways.

[morepunkmoresolar]

ok but won’t it introduce pathogenes to plants and soil?

[witcheshaven]

@thirdfloorgarden Excellent question! The answer in general is no (assuming that the person does not have any type of menstrual disease or a disease like HIV). Menstrual blood also does not contain elements that are necessary for coagulation. Before you decide to use it as a fertilizer for your plants, I recommend understanding it, and if you have a menstrual disease/STD, as a preliminary step.

[bubblegum-pwussay]

This is so disgusting

[deshauts--desbas]

Interesting. But if rather my plant die before my apartment smells like period blood

[witcheshaven]

@fadeinto-gucci You add water to it to. The nutrients is absorbed by your plants anyway. I’d also like to highlight that it’s only 2-4 teaspoons of blood in general, which is hardly enough to create any strong odor that lingers.

To anyone who keeps sending me messages about how menstrual blood is not sustainable for farmers

I realize this - this isn’t intended to sustain farmers with acres of crops. A women couldn’t produce that much menstrual blood within a given cycle.

[your-new-dealer]

Whaat about with ya weed plants would it make them taste kinda..funky when ya smoke the bud??? Even if you do a detox cycle for the plants?

[witcheshaven]

I mean do vegetables and other edible plants taste “kinda funky” when farmers use poop to fertilize their gardens?

[funkyevilmisandrist-deactivated]

Menstrual blood literally contains the nutrients to grow life. OF COURSE it would help plants.

Also most menstrual blood does not have a strong odor at all. If youre used to disposable products, what you’re smelling is not the blood but the chemical reaction taking place on that product. The blood itself might have an odor if you stick it like right up to face - a coppery odor like all other blood - but it doesn’t cause an entire room to smell.

As for plants you’re eating/smoking, the plants would absorb similar nutrients anyways. It doesn’t suddenly change the make up of the plant lmao. If youre ok with eating/smoking plants that have been fertilized in shit, idk why youre getting squeamish now.

[radfemarchive-deactivated202304]

Womb magic

[elegyforadream]

[feral-crow]

it makes me so mad that people aren’t taught that you can just... clone plants.

[fuzzylizardman]

W h at

[feral-crow]

yeah!! it takes like, five minutes and costs nothing/next to nothing (depending on what plant it is). which is why im especially mad that literally no one talks about it except for like, exclusive gardening circles :/

each plant has different cloning techniques but here are the ones i remember;

basil/peppermint/tomato/most leafy greens with a stem; cut a piece off your main plant about the size of your hand. trim all the bottom leaves, cut stem diagonally, put in jar of water. when roots are about the size of the stem, plant in garden.

onion/garlic; the easiest. just leave whole onion or a garlic clove in a nice sunny area. eventually it will sprout. plant in garden.

pineapple; takes a long time. take spiky leafy part, trim off the bottom leaves, put in water about as deep as the leafless part. wait. a. long. time. (mine took two weeks to root.) when roots are big, plant in garden.

flowers, bushes, trees; get your hands on some rooting hormone (or willow tree branches). cut stems the same way as the leafy greens above, make sure to cut stems diagonally (greater chance of rooting.) dip in water, dip in rooting hormone, shake off excess, and place in water/dirt. these are pretty hard to get to root, especially if you don’t have rooting hormone. 

some plants won’t ever root because of gmos (some companies create sterile plants and when they’re cloned they just die off) but generally any plant you get at a garden store you can clone. 

[roguetatertot]

This is called propagation!!! And it’s awesome!!!

Water propagation comes with some caution tho! While it’s a great way to watch the roots grow and ensure it’s actually propagating, it can shock the plant to remove it from water and suddenly plant it in soil. Water contain no nutrients, so to go from surviving on no nutrients to an abundance of nutrients in soil can potentially shock the wee baby.

Also, unless the water is changed out every day or every other, the oxygen in the water gets used up. Make sure to replace the water often so there’s a constant supply of oxygen.

If you have a fish tank, that is an excellent place to propagate certain plants! The nutrients the fish leave in the water will help the plant thrive, and ensure less shock when transplanting in soil. Fish might nibble on the roots, but probably not enough to cause any issues. Pothos, philodendrons, and monstera adasonii (vining Swiss cheese) are good ones to propagate this way, as they like the humidity from the tank.

Soil propagation has its own downsides, such as not being able to see if the roots are growing, but you can give the cutting a gentle tug in a few weeks, and if it resists, it has roots!!

And with ANY propagation, there is basically a 50/50 chance it will take, no matter which method you use, no matter how careful and attentive you are to technique and care. So don’t be discouraged if your cutting never roots, or dies. Not all plants can be “cloned” either of these ways, as well. Some need grafting from another plant which fruits or flowers! Some can only grow from seeds. Some cuttings need to scab over before propagation.

So if there’s a plant you really love, just Google how to propagate, and then Google some more. And instead of trying to propagate just a single cutting, try a few at a time, just in case some fail.

Happy planting!!!!!

[rob-boss]

It’s true that it’s difficult to get trees/bushes to grow roots with this method, but there is a pretty cool technique to get around this! It’s called air layering and it won’t work for ALL trees but it does work for many.

What you do instead of cutting off an entire limb and hoping it will root is you select the portion of the tree you want to be your new tree, and at the bottom of it, scrape off all of the bark, at least an inch long. Then you need to put your root hormone around the top of the shaved portion on the space where the tree still has bark. After that you’ll need to pack the area you want the roots to grow with sphagnum moss and wrap it in a plastic bag to keep the moss in place.

Once you have roots growing (could take a couple weeks) you can remove the bag, and cut the limb at the dead barkless section. Now you’ve got a new tree that’s already producing sap and as thick as the limb you’ve chosen! WAY faster than waiting the YEARS it could take to grow a tree to that size from a seed or a sprout.

Planting the new tree in sphagnum moss is a good way to help it grow lots of new roots and make sure it stays healthy before transferring it to a different soil mix or into the ground.

You also want to make sure that you leave probably a couple inches between the part of the branch you shave the bark off of and the main trunk of the tree, because after you cut off the limb, the wood beneath it will die back a bit and you don’t want part of the trunk to start rotting.

[plantanarchy]

This is a good intro post!

It’s a good idea if you want to get propagating to search “[specific plant] propagation”. Every plant has a different method that works best, and there are bound to be loads of articles and videos out there of folks who have propagated that species before. Experimentation can’t hurt either.

Some plants need extra humidity or misting, some do best when trimmed a certain time of year, some grow roots when dry and some need to be wet

The “gmo plants are sterile and don’t root” thing in the OP though is complete horseshit and a misunderstanding of what GMOs are. There are only a handful of approved GMOs in the United States and they are all agricultural crops. I would assume many of them are also not sterile.

However! Many common plants you see in garden centers have either been selectively bred for less seed production because not going to seed = more flowers or they are hybrids (plant mutts) or often both! Hybrid plants CAN produce viable seed but there’s no guarantee that those seeds will “breed true” aka have the same genetics/qualities as the mother plant. If you are looking for veggie plants and see the word, “heirloom”, you know that you can save the seeds from those plants for next year.

Being sterile has NOTHING to do with producing roots or not, it’s about seed production. All sorts of fancy hybrid plants can be propagated via cutting. Fun fact though: many fancy plants are patented so propagation with intent to sell is illegal. Most plant breeders use a method of propagation called tissue culture (test tube babies but for plants) to continue the plant’s genetics into the next generation.

It’s a common misconception that any kind of hybridization or selective breeding = genetic modification, but this isn’t the case in a legal sense. There must be some kind of actual tampering with genes in a labratory, not just old-fashioned plant breeding. A few years ago actually there was a big kerfuffle because a number of fancy petunias were tested and found to have been genetically modified, not registered or labelled as such, and then sold illegally in the US and used in breeding programs. All those petunias had to be pulled and destroyed.

Kinda got off topic here but the illegal gmo petunias story is actually pretty cool. Mostly because it came out because some plant biologist dude saw some orange petunias went “huh petunias don’t come in Orange last time I checked but this reminds me of some GMO plant experiments back in the day” and he tested the plants and discovered they did indeed contain foreign DNA

How the transgenic petunia carnage of 2017 began

Growers destroy plants after biologist spots forgotten flowers

[beplantbased]

Succulents are easily propagated but also Begonias and African Violets can grow roots from a leaf cutting. 

[hannahkemp-deactivated20240409]

Focus//Oregon November 2017

Prints//Instagram

[silvaris]

Alpstein, a very unique place by neiltapman

[kylebonallo]

by Kyle Bonallo (Instagram)

[the-bookshop]

Source.

[botaniqueer]

This blog’s official stance on the US is that it (along with Canada who are just as complicit in indigenous genocide) should be dismantled and given back to the indigenous folks.

All of this is also super relevant to a biology-focused blog because as previously discussed, the indigenous folks already know how to manage the continent to the point where large swaths of it were engineered to be habitable to humans, all without causing mass extinctions, and thus it’s impossible to truly have a good conversation on conservation without taking into account indigenous folks and their voices, or it ends up becoming a conservation that throws marginalized folks under the bus and ultimately changes nothing about the conservation of biodiversity, leading to the same route that we’re currently on. (Besides ignoring indigenous folks, a lot of environmentalist movements have been hugely racist in general and also have harmed disabled folks.)

(Which is also why I’ve been making a habit of boosting indigenous-related posts lately)

[thegoodvybe]

[softpxls]

gentle spring rain 🌸 🌾 🌱 🌧

sources: ✿ ✿ ✿