Sometimes I write about my student loan debt on this blog, sometimes I write book reviews, and sometimes I write about politics or local people making good news around town. And then there are other times when I write about topics that seem bizarre to everyone. Those are fun entries to write because I imagine my readers going, “Wuh? Hmmm…” when they read these types of entries. Today is probably one of those entries!
Many, many years ago my Mom put a snake plant in my room. For those of you who don’t know what a snake plant is, it’s one of those plants that you typically see in professional offices or in homes of people who have a lot of plants. You can click that link to learn more about snake plants if you want like the fact that NASA proved them to be one of the best plants for cleaning certain contaminants out of the air. One of the things that I learned about snake plants a few years ago is that they usually live for 20 – 25 years before they begin to rot away, though there are stories of people who have snake plants in the family for over six decades. Wow!
Seems like a pretty decent amount of time for a typical house plant to live, huh?!
Unfortunately, I don’t know if my snake plant is going to make it that long. In fact, I think that my snake plant is already pretty old – it has to be about 20 years old already. My Mom put this snake plant in my bedroom when I was in junior high school (sixth or seventh grade) and it’s been in my bedroom ever since (I’m now 30 – almost 31 – years old). Over the years the plant grew very large – to the point where I had to split it into a few different pots. Then, oddly enough, the different potted portions of the plant began to grow quickly, but ultimately the new growth died away and rotted over a number of years. Weird.
Well, now it seems like the core plant is back to the size of the plant that my Mom put in my room some 20 years ago. Over the course of this plant’s life I’d say that its current state is about half as big as it once was (if I had combined all of the different potted versions of the plant together). Here’s what the snake plant looks like now:
This is what's left of my long-time snake plant
The plant is getting pretty small and a lot of those remaining leaves are rotten at the bottom. There could be any number of reasons for the plant beginning to die, but the most common reason (over watering) can’t be the issue. I water this plant once every 4 or 5 weeks and only with a little bit of water at that!
I’m going to move the plant into the bathroom where it’ll get a little bit more light than it currently gets in the corner of my bedroom. We’ll see if that can stiffen up those leaves. Plus, I’m going to dry out the rotted leaves and try to propagate them into new snake plants in the very same pot. We’ll see what happens, I guess!
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