let it leave me like a long breath

so last year i got some plants and earlier this year i got some more plants and now is the part where i actually realize that taking care of a bunch of jade plants hasn't prepared me for other houseplants very well b/c jade plants are very slow-growing.

i got a hedera ivy a few months ago and it's grown like a foot and just about doubled in length (though the new growth is a lot more linear than the old growth)

i got a maranta about two months ago that was super singed and withered and it's just exploded back to health. i split it in two and both are growing, but one of them is really growing. like seven new leaves in the two week period, each bigger than the last.

last year in june i got an autumn fern and it put out like two new fronds. now this year it's finally doing some growing and it's unfurled three fronds so far and they're about as big as the entire rest of the plant, and there are like a dozen fronds still curled up tight at the roots. also i think it got some spores into a neighboring pot b/c there are tiny fern-looking flecks starting to grow in there, which would be kind of neat. easy way to get like a dozen ferns

last year also in june i got a still-unidentified plant that might be a ficus. it was planted five to a pot so i separated them and they've all grown a lottt. the biggest one is about a foot tall now. it was like five inches or so when i got it?

in november of last year i got an umbrella plant, which was also potted four to a pot. i separated them (mostly; two are still in the same pot) and they've all also grown enormously. one of the wild things is that you can tell when i got them by their internodes? the internode length shrank drastically for the growth they've had since i got them

i also have some other relatively-new plants (coffee trees, neon pothos, pepperomia rosso, mystery pepperomia, tricolor oyster plant, thanksgiving cactus) but their growth hasn't been as dramatic

also i got grow lights for my succulents and so now my echeverias are actually growing properly in rosettes again instead of continuing to get super leggy. i've had to behead basically every one of them.

basically i'm not gonna be getting any new plants for the forseeable future because all of these seem like they're gonna get really big.

i've mostly been using dreamwidth for like, bi-weekly status posts about programming projects but now i feel like i should actually post some stuff about stuff

so i've been trying to raise peace lilies from seed recently.

( this is a long post about plants )

okay so a while back i repotted my spider plant. the soil was like 75% roots and some parts were so gnarled that they were trapping water and getting moldy. like uh when i got the plant it was pretty rootbound so i repotted it, but i didn't really separate the roots in the way i should have, and it was into a pot that wasn't really big enough anyway. and then i kept it in that pot for like another year or so. it was _really_ rootbound.

so a few months ago i repotted it, and when i was doing that i broke the main growth apart into three separate plants b/c there were three distinct 'crowns'. since then they've all gotten more established, but... yeah uh turns out all that overcrowding and the dim light i was keeping it in weren't actually very good for it. i left one outside where it's getting direct morning sunlight, and... okay for all of them the main crown has only grown a few new leaves, but they're all much broader and darker. but the spiderettes on the one i left outside look like an entirely different plant. this spider plant is variegated, and in all the old leaves this has been expressed as mostly-white leaves with a thin yellow-green margin at the edges. also all the leaves are very long and very thin. meanwhile the spiderettes have short broad leaves that are nearly solid dark green, with a thin white line in the center. a few leaves have more complex green/yellow-green/white streaking patterns.

basically they look really nice but in a way that kinda makes me feed bad for how i've been taking care of it up until now.

also i got a fern a little bit ago and so far it's been doing well, but i need to repot it out of its nursery pot and i don't really know what to do about soil, because ferns are a plant that definitely require something other than just houseplant soil mix. gotta figure that out.

okay gamedev challenge reportback

again

i mean as should be expected at this point

this was on my list as "evolution/genetics system", and it was something i kind of put on there because it was a thing i had always wanted to do, but it was down near the bottom when i just started listing unrealistic longshot ideas, because like... genetics seems hard? genetics seems really difficult and completely unrelated to any code i've written ever.

so then it was kind of a surprise to be idly thinking about my enumeration code and have this train of thought like "it would be nice to be able to walk around inside the deck and see the values as they change, rather than only having a single index that tells you nothing about the structure of the value. i think you could tracked how values were added together you could get a list of all the independent axes of interaction, so you could actually get an n-th dimensional rectangular prism representation of the enumerable space you're building up. and then it would be possible to get a list of all adjacent values, and randomly walk through the possibility space. ...you know that is sounding a lot like random mutation in a genetic space"

SO THEN i spent a while putting that code together (and as you have seen in some of the posts about Data.Enumerable here i figured out lots of it but not all of it), and then i started working on actual plant rendering, since plants are a decent start in terms of simulating evolving things. at first i started by reimplementing some of my really old l-system code, and then trying to code up various l-systems that were mentioned in the algorithmic beauty of plants. i didn't get super far in, only to chapter 3, but that's deep enough to get to some fairly fiddly systems.

after a while i kinda put together my own l-system setup, by having a plant data structure that could generate an l-system expansion; there are some screenshots of my generated plants on my code screenshots tumblr.

but the actual simulation of plants growing in a real 3d space is... a lot more intricate than just running an l-system. i have been reading a lottt of academic papers over the past few weeks, some provided by friends who have journal access, but mostly pirated off of scihub, so, thank you scihub for existing or else i would have had to spend like $500 on downloading papers (or obviously more realistically just not being able to do it at all)

i'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details, but from my reading it sounds like it's still a bit of a hassle to manage plant growth as driven by light and water absorption. l-systems just kind of expand, they don't really respond to their environment, and while there's some study into environmental-response l-systems there's not a huge bulk of papers. there are some really neat l-systems that do manage nutrient distribution, but it seems like they do that by running two completely separate 'root' and 'plant' systems and kinda gluing them together at the base and somehow sending communications through them. so while i did get a 'genetic code' (my plant data structure) and a way to mutate, crossbreed, and grow it, i didn't get a full simulation working, since that would mean... actually simulating growth and pollination and seed dispersal, or at the very least a fitness metric that vaguely imitates that, leading to a second generation being selected.

still, all of this is going to be really invaluable for when i return to this at some point and try to get nutrient flows working. the goal here is a little plant simulation that properly absorbs water from the ground and light from the sky and stores those in specific parts of its body and uses energy stores to grow further roots and leaves. that's a way's away, not the least because i'd have to figure out how to formulate that as an l-system, but i made a lot of good progress here.

in plant news i repotted my small peace lily (now my 'medium' peace lily) and split it apart into four pieces. there was one big growth cluster that was like, 75% of its size, two pretty tiny shards that came off really easy off the edges, and one larger but pretty sparse growth that was more deeply enmeshed with the big cluster. i'm still not really 100% sure how peace lilies grow, if these are separate plants potted together, or if they're a single plant that's connected through some kinda rhizome or what.

it was comparatively rootbound, with a bunch of bigger roots running along the edge of the pot, so i clipped those back some. i can at least verify for sure that whatever problem was plaguing them 1. definitely wasn't root rot and 2. might have been being rootbound. tbh it might just be chronic low humidity; that's definitely the most prevalent poor growing condition here.

so anyway i now have two more pots of peace lily, since i planted the two small ones together in a single pot. hopefully they'll all recover from the repotting well, and i guess i'll see how well they do over the next, you know, year.

okay so around a year ago (last spring) i got a parlor palm plant (chamaedorea elegans). they're... i mean, they're actual trees? just dwarf trees that only ever grow six–ten feet tall, and very slowly at that. pretty common houseplants apparently. but when they're sold as houseplants they're usually sold bunched together -- ten or twenty shoots in a small pot, to make it look thicker and more shrublike, and also to make it grow even more slowly so it stays at manageable houseplant size for longer.

so i got mine and i was like, i'll let it stay in its original pot for a while. and then nine months passed and then the other day i was like "i should probably repot it and break all the shoots apart". so i got some pots and some soil and did that. so from the one very overcrowded pot i separated out the sixteen(!) plants, all sharing a little three-inch pot, and split them apart into four separate pots: one small one got the original pot, and then groups of four, five, and six got bigger pots. even though it's the same number of plants, having them basically taking up four times the space makes it feel like i have a lot more plants.

anyway the repotting seems to have gone well. i mean, hard to tell since it's only been two days, but none of them are withering at all that i can tell. i'm not sure if winter is a good time to repot plants -- i know spring is a bad time, because the transplant shock can basically totally ruin a plant's growth cycle for the year, but i don't know if, you know, the whole winter hibernation thing will lead to worse transplant shock. i also trimmed some of the roots -- previously i had been pretty lackadaisical about breaking apart the root ball, and i tried to keep all the roots intact, but since then i read up some on... roots, and i guess the deal is, hey turns out having big folded-up roots 3x the length of the depth of the pot is not actually great for plants. so i trimmed some of the really long roots, and i guess we'll see how that goes.

also i guess chamaedorea elegans is one of the kind of trees that has sexual differentiation? so there are male trees and female trees, and i don't really know what the difference is aside from presumably the male flowers produce pollen whereas pollinated female flowers produce seeds. but also that given the rate at which they grow they probably won't start to put out flowering branches for like... years and years from now.

i went to the big plant store today and got a bunch of spare pots + a for-real humidity tray + enough fertilizer to last me like a decade probably (like it makes several hundred gallons of fertilizing solution i'm pretty sure) + some lettuce seeds

also an aglaonema which i kinda got on a whim. this is take #2 on "get enough plants in my room so the humidity isn't like 0% over the winter", so like, big peace lily, small peace lily, the neanthe bella, and now this aglaonema, plus two humidity trays, might be enough to make a dent in the local humidity. here's hoping at least.

i'm also gonna try planting some garlic cloves + lettuce seeds in a big container and seeing how that goes. never really tried to grow anything edible before, so this will be an adventure.

start: one (1) corkscrew rush, very rootbound. one (1) pot of aloe plants, similarly overpacked.

first thing, the corkscrew rush ended up being more rootbound than i had anticipated. not only was there a mat extending out of the drainage holes, the interior roots were all curled around the rim of the pot several times over, with one super tightly-packed strand that had managed to curl into what was basically a coil of string that just peeled apart and, when fully unraveled, was longer than my outstretched arm. keep in mind this was from a pot that was like, six inches wide, six inches deep

so i ended up grabbing one of my housemate's unused plastic pots (12'' wide, 12'' deep) and dumping it in there, which will hopefully be good enough for a while. apparently corkscrew rushes are hardy enough to overwinter outside here, but given it's current state i'll probably bring it in once it gets around to frosting.

so that brings us to the aloe. the aloe was in this fancy stone pot with a built-in drainage tray, and also about 6'' by 6''. the thing with this pot is it had a narrow lip -- not a lot narrower, but there was a definite inward turn at the top of it. which was a problem, since the soil had sunk down and there were aloe rhizomes pushing out along all the edges. initially i was concerned with the jostling of getting the plants out tearing out the plant body and leaving the roots, but uh i quickly realized that most of the offshoots had a single rhizome root, that was already disconnected, and basically no further root system. so, yikes.

(now probably wasn't the best time to repot them, since it's right around the end of their growing season, but uh given that they were all packed together i can't imagine repotting them would be WORSE than letting them stay in that pot for another six months.)

anyway so now i have: somewhere between nine and twelve aloe plants. nine separate pots, though some of the plants are doubled-up since i ran out of pots to use. i'm not 100% if they'll all survive, but they all have some growth and some roots, so you know, hopefully.

also due to the pressures of the pot they were in, all but the biggest ones are completely flat. like, aloe plants usually send out spiky growths in all directions, but for these they're all squashed out to the left or right. hopefully as they get used to their new, less-packed confines they'll get a bit spreadier.

okay so the local grocery store has had clay pots for sale in the seasonal aisle for the past several months, and now they're finally getting shifted out and thus on sale for 75% off. which is enough of a discount that the price is comparable to, you know, buying them from a plant store rather than a grocery store. so i got some of them and i'm trying to figure out the order of repottings i need to do, given the pot sizes and which plants need repotting.

the two plants i have that need it the most are both basically handoffs from my mom, who was like "i'm moving i don't want these here you go"; one is an aloe plant that's kinda sunk under the rim of its pot and is gonna be a mess of get out, and also i think at this point like four separate plants, and the other is a sadly neglected corkscrew rush (which are like, water grasses like cattails that can literally sit in standing water constantly and not have a problem) that has not only outgrown its pot, but also, since it's in a pot-in-pot kinda situation, grown out like an inch-thick mat of roots into the containing pot through the drainage holes. so that's gonna be a challenge to get out without damaging.

i guess the plan is to repot the corkscrew rush into a big pot, carefully, and then use its old pots + one of the new big pots to repot the aloe and its likely shards. we'll see how that goes.