Caffeine is a plant defense mechanism.
Caffeine-producing plants release the naturally occurring compound into the surrounding soil, where it effectively stunts the growth of nearby plants. This means the caffeine-producing plants get access to more light, space, and nutrients; you get the idea. Caffeine is not good for plants.
If you’re looking to raise the pH of your soil, it’s best to stick with tried and true elemental sulfur.
4. Propagate Roses with a Potato
You’ve probably seen a video of someone taking a rose from a bouquet and poking the stem into a potato to root the rose in the tuber. I mean, we’ve all received that one bouquet we wish wouldn’t fade. Why not try and propagate a rose bush from a flower?
Supposedly the tuber keeps the cutting moist. Some call for the use of honey, some don’t. You ‘plant’ the potato in the soil, cover the cutting with a bell jar and wait.
I’m still not entirely sure why a potato, but when it comes to the internet and hacks, sometimes it’s best not to ask.
The problem with this hack stems from a naturally occurring gas and its effect on the production of primary root growth – ethylene. Without getting technical, ethylene interacts with an important growth hormone that inhibits root production when both are present. (It is pretty cool; you can read about it here.) Potatoes give off ethylene; granted, they aren’t huge ethylene producers, but it’s enough to stop the rose cutting from rooting. It also doesn’t help that potatoes produce more ethylene at the sight of a wound, like where you stabbed it with a rose stem.
Burry this whole setup in a pot of soil, and at best, in two weeks, you’ll have a rotten potato.
5. Using a Terracotta Pot Heater to Heat Your Greenhouse
With climbing energy costs, terracotta heaters have been popping up all over social media. But gardeners have been touting them as an inexpensive and easy way to heat your greenhouse. Whether you’re looking to get a jump on the growing season in the spring or extend your growing season into the winter months, it appears all you need to heat your greenhouse is a few tealights and a terracotta pot and saucer.
The idea is that the tealight heats the terracotta, which then radiates all this glorious heat around your greenhouse, warming it up for all your plants.
I’m baffled by how many folks are missing the glaringly obvious problem here.
You’re trying to heat a greenhouse with a tealight candle. Even a handful of tealight candles doesn’t make sense.
Let’s take a trip back to high school physics. (Yeah, I know, you couldn’t pay me to go back to high school either.) Remember thermodynamics? The first rule of thermodynamics is that energy can’t be created. You can take energy and turn it into another form, but the amount of energy stays the same in a closed system.
In layperson’s terms, what this means is the heat (or energy) from that tealight candle stays exactly the same with or without the terracotta setup. It isn’t warmer because it’s absorbed and radiated by terracotta. With or without the terracotta pot, it’s the same amount of heat.
So how much energy is there in a tealight candle?
If you want to measure energy in watts, it’s around 32 watts, depending on the type of wax the candle is made of. If you want to measure it by BTUs, it’s around 100-200 Btus, depending on the wax.
If you’re looking to heat a greenhouse, that tealight isn’t doing you much good.
