![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Potted Stick
Sunday, June 6th, 2021 10:15 amI have jade plants all over the house, to the extent that anyone who comes over is likely to be offered one (or a dozen). Only one has achieved that sprawling, twining tree effect that jades are known for; it's the second-oldest, my first effort, probably twenty years ago, at growing an offshoot from the original plant, and it's pretty cool-looking. Or it was.
Yesterday it tilted in its pot. I propped it against the wall of the bay window, figuring I'd reset it when I wasn't in the middle of rewiring the crawlspace. Last night there was a weird double thump, and on investigation I found plant and pot on the floor, half the dirt in the carpet and half the plant snapped off. How this happened I can't quite fathom; there's no way it could have gone that direction under the sole impetus of gravity, and it's too heavy for a cat to have knocked it astray. But there it was.
The half a plant that was left was far too lopsided to ever be stable, so I finally bit the bullet and cut off the remainder. (Yes, I could have started new plants from the various branches, but the house is already overrun. It was hard, but I resisted.) So now I have a two-inch thick trunk, entirely bare of leaves, sticking up out of a pot. I've seen healthy, thriving jade plants sprout from a leaf dropped on a shelf, unnoticed and without dirt or water for weeks, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it will recover. But it does look awfully peculiar at the moment.
Yesterday it tilted in its pot. I propped it against the wall of the bay window, figuring I'd reset it when I wasn't in the middle of rewiring the crawlspace. Last night there was a weird double thump, and on investigation I found plant and pot on the floor, half the dirt in the carpet and half the plant snapped off. How this happened I can't quite fathom; there's no way it could have gone that direction under the sole impetus of gravity, and it's too heavy for a cat to have knocked it astray. But there it was.
The half a plant that was left was far too lopsided to ever be stable, so I finally bit the bullet and cut off the remainder. (Yes, I could have started new plants from the various branches, but the house is already overrun. It was hard, but I resisted.) So now I have a two-inch thick trunk, entirely bare of leaves, sticking up out of a pot. I've seen healthy, thriving jade plants sprout from a leaf dropped on a shelf, unnoticed and without dirt or water for weeks, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it will recover. But it does look awfully peculiar at the moment.
