transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] The truth is that no plants thrive in low light. You know how like a human body, like they say we need like 2000 calories a day to stay alive and to be like healthy? Well, a human can live on 500 calories a day. They're not very happy about it, but they can live. That's what low light is to a plant. It's 500 calories a day. They're sustained, but they're not thriving. They're not gonna be putting on a whole lot of mass. You know what I mean? They're gonna be more stringy. They're gonna be etiolated. They're gonna be an overall just weaker plant.

Speaker 2:
[00:34] Welcome back to The Beet Podcast. Today, we are talking about houseplants, something that I think everyone has some experience with. We all have some level of houseplant experience or have tried to, at least in our homes. And today we have Tanner, Tanner Mitchell actually from Tannner the Planter. I've actually been following you for a few years on your houseplant growing journey and your whole story, now ending up with a boutique houseplant store. So it's been really cool to see you kind of grow through these years. And I think in some ways similar to me, both of us did not come into this world of growing plants with any sort of horticultural background, experience, or even social media in the first place. So I thought that was kind of interesting as I was reading your story. I was like, oh, I get this. Like, I like the way that you think about things. And we're going to talk about it in the book. But thank you for coming on. Why don't you let people know where you are and also, like, just how you got into this world of growing plants.

Speaker 1:
[01:27] Yeah, thank you for having me. So we're on all the social media platforms under Tannner the Planter. And then that brick and mortar store that you had mentioned is called Famous In Oregon, even though we're in Prosper, Texas. Kind of confusing. My wife says we've been confusing people since 2020 when we opened up. So it is what it is.

Speaker 2:
[01:47] Honestly, that one confused me too. I was like, wait, he said he moved to Texas, but it's called Famous In Oregon. So I was like, oh, I guess he moved back to Oregon. Okay, good to know.

Speaker 1:
[01:56] Yeah, there's a whole story there. So just right off the top, everyone always wants to know what the idea is around that. And basically, long story short, my wife did a little write up about it. But when I moved to Texas from Oregon about 15 years ago, everybody that I would talk to, once they found out I was from Oregon, they would only talk about the plants, which was really surprising to me because whenever you're growing up in an area, I guess you'd probably take it for granted a little bit. I'm not sure if you've ever been to Oregon, but the western half of Oregon is very lush and green. Everything grows there. It's the moss growing all over the trees, etc. I'm actually from the northeast part of Oregon, which is high desert. So everybody's idea of Oregon is really the western half of Oregon. So plants are famous in Oregon. A lot of people think it's me saying, I'm famous in Oregon. I'm not. It's just the plants that are famous in Oregon.

Speaker 2:
[02:52] Okay, I got it. Yeah, it's really interesting. Oregon is super dry and deserty on the eastern side. I've actually spent very little time in Oregon, but I have been to the eastern side. I actually went through the town Rome way back when I was doing some geological work. I was like, wow, I had no idea that basically Oregon can look like the Mojave Desert in some areas. That was pretty cool. But what brought you in to even starting to grow houseplants? Because I'm guessing before that point, did you grow anything? What really pulled you into this whole world?

Speaker 1:
[03:28] I'll tell you what, both these stories go hand in hand really, because when I moved to Texas from Oregon, the part of Texas that I live in right now is just north of Dallas, and it's very flat and comparatively pretty dry and not so green. I didn't realize how much that was affecting me. I was finding myself going to the mountains all the time, like every weekend trying to go somewhere that had greenery around me. My wife and I, we were going to Arkansas, about a five-hour drive, a couple of times a month trying to get a fix. I would go rock climbing up in Arkansas and stay in the mountains as much as I could. When I realized how much I missed having the greenery around me is when I started to bring in some houseplants, trying to recreate that feeling. My dad always grew plants growing up in Oregon. He had a huge garden, several houseplants, all things that I didn't even register in my brain until after the fact. Now I look back at pictures and I'm like, oh, we had a spider plant in the corner. Oh, my dad was growing orchids all these years. I didn't even realize. So I started bringing in a couple of those plants. My wife had actually got a pot from Waco, you know, Chip and Joanna, their silos thing. And she brought it home and I was like, you know what, I'm going to put an aloe vera in there. This pot had, it was made out of wood, first of all, had no drainage and it was huge. Yeah, I potted that thing, put it like 10 feet away from the window and it was declining rapidly and that was really, what was the catalyst for me trying to figure it out? Because I feel like with the Internet, there's not really any excuses not to be able to figure something out these days. So like I'm a millennial, I'm like, okay, let me go search the Internet. What did I do wrong with my aloe? And every article that I would read was contrary or contradicting the next article. And I was like, what in the world, we're talking about the same plant. And I would kind of try to remember where my dad would keep his aloe. And I'm like, well, yeah, it was bright, but was it indirect? Was it direct light? Was it low light? All of these articles are saying something different. Water every seven days, water. Anyway, it was all just very confusing. I said, you know what, I'm getting away from that. I'm just going to go to Google Scholar because I knew that plants were a study. There's science behind them. And so I wondered what scientists were saying about how to grow plants. Like how are they communicating how to grow this plant at the University of Missouri to the people in Australia and to the people in New York and Canada and anywhere else. And that's when I discovered a lot of terms and understandings about houseplants that were definitive. And what I realized is what nobody was teaching, or at least I couldn't find anybody teaching this very basic, straightforward information on the Internet. And I'm like, when I applied those teachings to my aloe vera and all of my other houseplants, it became very, very simple and easy. And so I'm like, why is nobody talking about this? And so that's what I started talking about, and here we are.

Speaker 2:
[06:32] Yeah, it's amazing. It's basically, if you guys don't know, Google Scholar is like a way to search published research papers. So you could really get down to very specific sources on like the exact conditions of how they grew a plant in very specific controlled lighting and watering. And from that, it sounds like you're basically using like this first principles, like deductions, like, oh, like this plant doesn't like this, so let me try moving it here. And you kind of just figured it out. And that's such a powerful teaching tool too, as we all know, because observation is something we could all do, and something we could all learn from and relate to. And it's one of these cool things as I was reading your book, because I've looked through a lot of different gardening books. And by the way, it's called For the Love of Houseplants. This is a really interesting book because I could tell that you didn't write this from the perspective of like a traditional gardening or plant care book. You wrote it from the perspective of how am I thinking about plants and how can somebody else think about plants so they could actually learn it instead of like just saying like, oh, put this plant in this corner with this much water, because that doesn't actually teach you anything. It's also not necessarily something that's that exactly relatable. Like you can't just give somebody a recipe card for growing plants in their home or their yard. That's the same thing we struggle out with the garden. But I thought one of the interesting things that at the beginning of the book, you mentioned this idea of the trap of intuition and the green thumb myth together. So why don't you let us know a little bit about this trap of intuition? Because I think all of us fall prey to this all the time.

Speaker 1:
[08:06] You know, in our brick and mortar store, when my wife and I, we opened this brick and mortar store in 2020, and this is a common theme that we would hear pretty much on the daily. A group of people would come in, is usually like a mom and a couple of daughters or, you know, a spouse and a wife or whatever the case is. And someone would always say, I don't have the green thumb. My grandma got it. My sister got it. My daughter got it. Someone got the green thumb. I did not. And that led them to believe they couldn't take care of houseplants. And a lot of people believe that they should be able to just look at a plant and intuitively know what it needs. When someone says that I started to relate it this way. If I asked you to bake a souffle and you had no recipe and you failed at it, would you say, oh, I'm not a baker? Or would you say, I didn't know, I didn't have a recipe. I didn't, I have no experience. We think that because plants are nature and humans have had such a longstanding connection with nature that we should have these intuitions. And if you don't, then you're just not meant to keep plants. And you therefore have to forgo all of the benefits of growing plants and keeping plants and just having them in your space. And it's just not the truth.

Speaker 2:
[09:27] Yeah, it's very interesting.

Speaker 1:
[09:28] As long as you understand a couple of basic principles, you're off to the races. You can grow like 99% of plants, houseplants, just with understanding a couple of basic things. And that's kind of what I set out to do. It's not about having some like genetic predisposition to keeping plants. It's understanding a couple of the basic principles. And some people get that through observation. And some people get lucky with the general care information that's on cards. Like when someone says, you know, when your care card says, put it in bright, indirect light and keep the soil moist, but not wet. A lot of us are like, what? And then we guess and a lot of people guess wrong and some people guess right. And so it's right for some people sometime. So in this book, I took that all away. You don't have to guess. I'm teaching you how to understand light. So you can know an equivocal. I mean, you can know absolutely. You don't have to guess because when you guess on the most important aspect of plant care, you very often fail and those failures lead you to believe you can't take care of plants. And it's just not, it's just not the case. Everybody can grow them. It's very simple.

Speaker 2:
[10:36] Yeah. I think it's super interesting to think of this like trap of intuition where it's like, I could tell that the plant needs water or tell that it needs light. And this is like one of these tricks that I mean, we all struggle with in the outside world of growing vegetables as well. Like, for example, when I think of like peppers, when somebody asked me how much do I water my plants? I'm like, well, peppers will wilt if they have too much water. And they'll also wilt if they don't have enough water. So I can't really tell you the exact way of like just looking at a plant and telling you what it needs. You have to also do some of the work by like touching the soil, figuring out if it's wet on the surface or only wet down deeper at the root level. And it's just, it's something that there is intuition there, like knowing how to think and where to actually look. But it's not like you could just look at a plant and just say, like, I know exactly what it needs and how I'm going to save the day. And so when you mentioned like this idea of light, you said that there's basically three major things when it comes to choosing the right houseplant for your home, right? So it's light, humidity, and lifestyle. And I do want to talk about light a decent amount, because it seems like that's the one that is in some ways like the hardest. I guess it's not the hardest to overcome, because there are things like light bulbs. But it's kind of like the main thing. Like some plants simply will not thrive in low light conditions and vice versa. So as you mentioned, you said that you're trying to take away the guesswork from it. So what's your approach to kind of helping somebody figure out the light in their home and what plants they can grow there?

Speaker 1:
[12:08] Well, there's two main ways to do it. And the truth is that no plants thrive in low light. There are plants that survive it. I kind of make the comparison. You know how like a human body, like they say, we need like 2000 calories a day to stay alive and to be like healthy? Well, a human can live on 500 calories a day. Right. They're not very happy about it, but they can live. That's what low light is to a plant. It's 500 calories a day. They're sustained, but they're not thriving. They're not going to be putting on a whole lot of mass. You know what I mean? They're going to be more stringy. They're going to be etiolated. They're going to be an overall just weaker plant. And so there are two ways to determine, there are two really good ways that I teach to understand light. Okay. So I'll give you the DIY version first, and then I'll give you my, the scientific one, the one that I learned on Google Scholar. Okay. So the DIY version is super simple. All you really need to do to determine if your plant has bright light is to see what its view of the sky is. And the best way to do that is to literally put your eyeballs where the leaves are. So imagine if I had a plant near me, all my plants are too big to pick up right now. But imagine this book right here is the plant. Okay. It's sitting on your shelf. What you want to do is you want to put your eyes exactly right here where the leaves are, and you're looking out at the sky, and you should be able to see an unobstructed view of the sky. Because one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they'll say like, well, I put my orchid in the window and it's not doing well. I put it in my best light. Well, that window had a covered patio over it, or it had a big tree, or it had their neighbor right next to it where it blocked all of that sky. Even if it's like touching the window sill, if those leaves can't see an unobstructed big wide view of the sky, then it's not going to be bright light. Bright light in that case is where you can actually put your face right here and you should be able to turn your head to the left and to the right and just see unobstructed blue sky.

Speaker 2:
[14:15] Okay. That's really interesting.

Speaker 1:
[14:17] The way that I know that is bright light is because, remember when I was telling you I did that Google Scholar, I figured out how they were teaching light and it wasn't subjective. It wasn't bright light, bright indirect light, low light. All of these terms are very subjective because just for the fact, let's say you have brown eyes right here and I have blue eyes. So my blue eyes, I can, as long as we will have healthy eyes, I can see better in a lower light scenario than you can just because my eyes are blue. I let in more light. So my perception of bright light may or may not be different from yours and the next person and the next person and the next person. And so that's what I mean by when you're guessing, you're telling me, you know, put it in bright light. Well, your understanding of bright light is different than mine. And so my plant isn't going to do well or it may not do well as a result. So what you can do is you get a light meter. So light is measured in many ways, but in the horticulture industry, it's measured in foot candles. And so it's a device. I might even have one nearby. I usually keep one.

Speaker 2:
[15:18] I love the idea of foot candles.

Speaker 1:
[15:20] I usually keep it pretty close by. Yeah. So it's measured in foot candles. And so it's a literal, it's a meter that you can, it's like $30. And you rest the meter exactly where the leaves are. And you point it towards your light source, your window. And it will tell you exactly, there are measurements. So for example, like a thousand foot candles is bright light. So that takes away all the guesswork. This bird of paradise, for example, this plant says, you know, the growing instructions will say, it needs bright light. So instead of guessing what quote unquote bright means, we can just put the meter on there. And is it getting a thousand foot candles? Yes. Okay. That's bright light. And your whole life becomes easier with houseplants.

Speaker 3:
[16:02] K-pop demon hunters, Saja Boys' Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

Speaker 4:
[16:11] It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 2:
[16:16] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 3:
[16:18] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 2:
[16:20] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 4:
[16:21] No, really, stop.

Speaker 3:
[16:23] You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 4:
[16:28] Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. Participating McDonald's while supplies last.

Speaker 1:
[16:32] After that, when you get the lighting right for your plants, everything else becomes easier because light drives all the functions of a plant. And so you can just measure it that way and then it's definitive and then watering becomes easier. Humidity, fertilizing, all of things kind of fall into place after that.

Speaker 2:
[16:49] It's like the base need, like that the plant just absolutely without the adequate amount of light, you can't like fertilize your way out of that problem, you can't water your way out of that problem. It just simply needs light in order to photosynthesize to the ability or to the level that it's required to sustain that sort of plant. And that's just all there is to it. I really like this idea though. Like I actually added a houseplant here since I was talking to you, but I'm kind of cheating. I don't know if you could guess it. It's not really a houseplant. It's a common thing that people like to grow in the garden. And it's actually a... Do you want to guess?

Speaker 1:
[17:30] I mean, it looks a little potatoey, a little squashy. It looks like a little ginkgo leavesy actually.

Speaker 2:
[17:37] So this is a sweet potato cutting that I just had. Yeah. So you're right on the money there with the potato ask. And so I'm just looking... I'm inside my shed here and I'm looking at the leaf level and I could see the sky. So as long as my door is open, that means that this plant in theory is getting adequate light. Is that right?

Speaker 1:
[17:55] No, because it needs to be a wide view of this guy. So like, for example, when I'm looking at my nearest window right here, I can see the entire amount of sky without turning my head at all. Bright light is when the plant is right here. And you should be able to turn your head to the left and see bright. You should be able to see this blue sky and blue sky. The further you get away. Well, I don't need to turn my head anymore. I can see the entirety of the blue sky because the window becomes more narrow. So you need to get close. Exactly. Your plant needs to see a wide view of the sky for bright light. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[18:30] That's cool. That's like a really nice little easy way to think about some of the first principles of light then. But then those little light meters, you said they're not even that expensive, right? Like if you're going to go into houseplants in a serious way, it sounds like that's probably one of your best investments at the beginning, is like a simple little light meter.

Speaker 1:
[18:48] There's nothing better than a light meter. Most people will invest in a moisture meter. But I've always said, if you invest in a light meter over a moisture meter, your life would be your house. Like the success that people would have with their plants would just skyrocket because it makes it that big thing that I see everybody get wrong. Because I do consults. I've been doing consults for almost 10 years. So I've seen thousands of these problems. And it almost seems wrong of me sometimes because 99.9% of the time, the answer to your problem is stop watering so often and give the plant more life. Like that's it. Literally 99% of the time.

Speaker 2:
[19:26] That's so funny. Yeah, one of the quotes you had in the book was you had like a customer who came into your store and they were looking to get a plant. And you're like, no, this one will work for you. And they're like, I've come to your store five times now and you never let me buy a plant because you're not trying to send a plant home to die, right? You're trying to figure out what sort of conditions they have. And I'm guessing they're just keep asking for a certain plant that simply they cannot support in their home.

Speaker 1:
[19:50] So yeah, something we talk about a lot, something I talk about in the book in those first couple chapters is this idea that TV and magazines, Pinterest, a lot of those things are setting people up for failure because they see the design shows and the magazines and the Pinterest boards of, let's just say, a Fiddley Fig. The case right here was a Fiddley Fig, this guy that we're talking about, which is a really popular ficus that needs really bright light in order to live. But in these decorating shows and on magazines and Pinterest boards, they'd usually display the tree like in a corner or by a staircase, somewhere really far away from a window when in fact, the only place that it's going to thrive is right in front of a window, right next to the window with a big wide view of the sky. But people see these shows and they're like, I want that look. And so they'll come into our store and they'll say, I'm looking for a fiddle leaf fig. And everybody in our stores is trained to kind of figure out where the, like, okay, show me where it's going to live. And if it wouldn't live there, we won't sell it to them. Because we believe that, you know, the whole reason I got into plants anyway was to try and, or by educating online, was I was getting so much joy from it. And I couldn't believe how easy it was when I understand, when I understood a couple of these principles. And I'm like, everybody needs to, everybody needs this source of joy. It's so easy. Here's what you guys need to do. And so we believe that if they can have success, if we can set them up for success, then they'll tell their friends and, you know, then they'll come and shop in with us. But yeah, that guy came in like literally four or five times and was asking my wife, this is actually something he was saying to my wife, I've been here four times and you haven't let me buy one plant. She's like, well, all the plants you want are bright light and you don't have bright light, you have low light.

Speaker 2:
[21:40] That's pretty good. I mean, that's a great approach. Like that's why he keeps coming back because he knows that you're not gonna sell him something that's just gonna die.

Speaker 1:
[21:48] Yeah, he's been a customer of ours for years now and he has all low light plants that are thriving. So it's worked.

Speaker 2:
[21:53] Awesome. Yeah, so then, so light's number one and then it's humidity. Now humidity, I guess you could control that, but there's probably a limited amount you could control that with. Just because, I mean, you could run a humidifier forever, but that probably also has other consequences for your home. So how do you think about humidity when you're thinking about plants?

Speaker 1:
[22:14] When most houseplants are tropical, and so most houseplants appreciate higher humidity. But for a houseplant to become a houseplant, it has to go through a lot of testing to see if it can withstand the conditions of an average home. And so some of the tests are they'll put the plant in a completely dark room for like two weeks. They'll water it, put it in a completely dark room, like a closet, like complete pitch black, no light at all for two weeks. And if it comes out and it's still looking okay, that's maybe one of the tests. Another test, you know, can it withstand average household humidity? You know, 20, 30%. Can it acclimate to average household humidity? And if it kind of goes through all of these checks and it's going to be a good crop, you know, sometimes I think people forget that in the houseplant industry, it's a lot like growing corn for the food industry. It's just a different crop for most of these growers, right? So they have to make sure that it's a good product. And so these are all the things that they test to make sure that it's a good product. So most houseplants will acclimate to average household humidity within your home. There are natural things that can make the average household humidity drop, like air. It's especially a hard thing in the winter months when our heaters come on and our fireplaces come on, and it just sucks all that moisture out. But it's easy to control the humidity. I'll say this, I've, you know, at certain points in my houseplant growing hobby, I've had over 200 houseplants in our home and I've never ran a humidifier. And I've grown all of these calatheas and ferns and everything that most people think that you have to have high humidity for, perfectly fine. It's more about light and proper watering than it is humidity. Humidity oftentimes is a scapegoat and I don't mean to say that it's not important. Like I said, they are tropical, so they do appreciate it. But humidity is usually not the thing that's going to make or break your success with plants. And it's very easy to control, like you're saying, if you're committed. But I've never added humidity in any way.

Speaker 2:
[24:15] Okay, that's interesting. So then like the last thing there is the lifestyle, because I'm guessing that kind of even plays in with the humidity a little bit, because just some plants are going to need a little bit more care on a more regular basis. I'm guessing that's what you're really referring to with lifestyle.

Speaker 1:
[24:32] Well, in lifestyle, believe it or not, I'm more talking about your business level. So here's what I'm saying, and this is kind of what I talk about in the book. And again, this is an observation from dealing with a lot of customers real time, and you see the changes that they go through throughout life. This is a perfect example, and it's a very small study, but it illustrates what I'm talking about very clearly. We had a customer come in very early on to us, like probably the first year that we were open. We've been open since 2020, so we're going on year six right now. And she came in and she had a kid at home, she was in high school, and she really wanted something that she could take care of. You know, she had the school, you know, she had her job, she had school, you know, to get her kid from school and whatnot, practices, things like that. And so she had a very busy lifestyle. And so when we were trying to find a plant for her in the store, she was very drawn to calatheas and ferns and peace lilies. All of these plants require very frequent watering. They dry out quickly. And so when I asked her about her lifestyle, I actually recommended a completely different plant. I recommended snake plants and low light tolerance succulents and ZZ plants. Because her lifestyle was so busy, I knew that if I gave her a plant that would need watered every two, three, four days, she wasn't going to have success with it. And years later, she came back with these beautiful plants. She had great success with these very low maintenance plants. She came back after her kids graduated. The day after graduation, she comes to the door and she's like, I'm an empty nester. Give me the ferns. Give me the calathea. And now, and they're thriving. And she was so thankful that I had that observation to know that her lifestyle. So it's not always about the lighting that you have. I mean, of course, the lighting is absolutely important. But sometimes it's just for the fact that you're not in a stage of life to keep up with the maintenance that a plant needs. Now, that can go the other way as well. Because a lot of us are natural nurturers. We want to be taking care of something all the time. And so if you know yourself this way, then you can kind of set yourself up for success. If you have the time and you know you're somebody who loves to nurture, like you always want to be getting your hands dirty and watering and fussing with the plants, get something that requires more of that. Don't get a snake plant. Don't get a ficus or a cactus, something that you're going to be watering once a month. Because you'll be trying to water it every other day and it'll die. Get yourself something that needs what your natural inclination is.

Speaker 2:
[27:18] In the beginning, you also talked about this idea of protecting the hobby and remembering that plants are plants. I think that kind of plays into this lifestyle discussion where it's like, you want to set yourself up in a way where you are going to enjoy it. Because in the end, you're cultivating the houseplants at home as a hobby, as a passion you like to do, and so you want to make sure you're choosing the right plants to support your lifestyle and the conditions you have to make that hobby maybe enjoyable instead of like, why do I keep killing things because I'm just making the wrong choices at the beginning. So I think clearly you're doing that service for these people who are coming in. And that's so funny to think that they've been waiting this whole time to just come in and now start getting all these, like not complicated, but plants that need a little more care and attention. So that's just amazing. I love to hear that.

Speaker 1:
[28:10] I know like with you, you're growing food and that is practical, but like houseplants, there's no reason to grow them other than enjoyment. So something that's very, very happens all the time is like someone will get like spider mites or something and they'll message me and they will just be so distraught, like tears streaming down, like I don't know what I'm going to do, like I am, is it, do I need to wash all of my plants? Do I need to take them all? What do I need to do? They really lose their minds on this. And I understand because, you know, you've made an investment, not only financially, but a time investment as well. But you're growing them for joy. And there, that doesn't mean you have to enjoy all aspects of it. You have to keep the perspective, or else you're going to lose joy in anything that you do.

Speaker 2:
[29:02] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[29:03] Earlier, one of the recent videos that I made, I had spider mites on a plant. And it was on a plant that would take me hours to clean, hours and hours and hours. And instead of fretting over it, I was just like, I didn't even... just throw it away. What's the point? It's not bringing me a whole lot of joy. And if I'm doing it for joy, if I found joy in meticulously cleaning off every single leaf, then that's what I would do. But I don't enjoy that part of the hobby. Now, I'm not unreasonable. Like a lot of my plants will get spider mites. Like this guy gets spider mites. Well, there's six leaves on there. I'll take five minutes and clean them all off. You know, it's not that big of a deal. I do find that enjoyable. So you really have to figure out the parts of the hobby that you enjoy and the parts that you don't and lean more into the ones that you do and don't and deal with the negative aspects of the hobby in a way that still cultivates the joy and protects the hobby.

Speaker 2:
[29:57] Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing for growing vegetables outside. Like, I don't find joy at all in dealing with, like, the pests and, like, gophers bring me zero joy and dealing with that brings me zero joy whatsoever. But it's like it is part of the game. I could do things to kind of, you know, set myself up to avoid it more by planting in different ways. And the same thing could be true with these houseplants is just don't set yourself up. To run into these challenges that you don't find enjoyable. Like, and there's ways around that. And I think even, you were talking about, like, shopping tips and, like, what's even look out for at the very beginning of, like, when you're just first buying a plant. And so that's something I wanted to talk to you about, specifically about the root bound question, because I think that's a really interesting one. But your main things that you set to look out for when you're buying a new houseplant, like, so you're just getting started, is to check for new growth, pests, and its roots. So can you give us a little quick rundown on what those things are that you're really focusing on there?

Speaker 1:
[30:58] Well, a lot of the times when a plant is under stress, negatively, because there's good stress and bad stress, they slow down their new growth or they won't be growing at all. They'll be focusing on different areas, sometimes building out a root system or something along those lines. So when you see new growth, it's generally can be considered a good sign. Of course, you always want to do a little leaf check for pests. Pests usually hide on the back sides of your leaves. So you want to be really careful with that. And I'll say this too, usually when I ask people to look for pests or if I advise them to look for pests, they're usually going on the underside of their leaf and they're looking for like a big house spider. They're looking for something very obvious. If you've never encountered pests before, and you're going to the garden center, you're going to your local plant shop to get a plant, look up what pests, like some common pests, look like ahead of time so that you can kind of train your eye to look for those things because you're always looking for something big and houseplant pests are really, really small. Sometimes even when I physically point to the pest, like my fingertip, I'm like, you see right at the end of my fingertip, do you see that? They're like, no, I can't. Because like spider mites or spider mite eggs, for example, are like, they look like dust. So it can be kind of difficult to find.

Speaker 2:
[32:13] When it's bad, you could tell. When it's really bad, you could tell. But early on, it's probably hard.

Speaker 1:
[32:19] And then for the roots, there's this common misconception that a root-bound plant is a bad thing. And the opposite is true. A root-bound plant is a glorious thing. Plants don't decline from the size of pot that they're in. And the roots is the performance of your plant. It's a whole. It's the health that we always say, the health of your plant is the health of your roots. The health of your roots is the health of your plant. It's responsible for most of what's going on. And so a root-bound plant is saying, well, I've got so many roots, I can't even be contained in this pot. I am so robust and healthy. I'm busting out of this thing, whether you want me to or not. So a root-bound plant is a very good thing to look for in a garden center. I even recommend, especially for your people, like when you're going for an outdoor plant, especially to pop the pot off, you should be able to take the pot off. If the grower does not like you taking their pots off, it's because they have something to hide. They don't have a built-out root system. And the more roots you have in your, the more roots your plant has to begin with, the more likely you are to have success later on down the road after transplant.

Speaker 2:
[33:30] Yeah. And it's also just like, if you have a lot of roots in there, that means the plant's also been growing for a decent amount of time. Because you even mentioned, like oftentimes, and I've had this happen to me before, we'll all buy like a pack of vegetable starts, and you go to take it out and it's just like, it just pulls right out of the soil. I'm like, oh, this was just transplanted in here like a week ago, or maybe even days. And it doesn't actually have a root system that's actively growing and spreading into the soil. And with the root bound plants though, I am curious, this might be a case by case basis for houseplants. But when you see a root bound, like you pull something out, it's entirely roots. Are you going to always think about a bigger pot when you buy it like that? Or are you okay with leaving a root bound since that's like a good sign?

Speaker 1:
[34:23] In the thousands of consults that I've done, underwatering very rarely kills a plant. It's usually watering too frequently. It's the soil staying saturated for too long, reducing the amount of oxygen and inviting that fungus that we call root rot. By leaving your plant root bound, you're naturally going to have more oxygen in your soil combating root rot. Having a root bound plant naturally combats the number one cause of plants not doing well, which is that root rot. Which is also why I always recommend people going into the winter months with a root bound plant. There are a lot of articles out there that say to repot your plants before winter. But why am I going to put more soil around the roots to say wet or longer during the shortest days of the year, where the plant has the least amount of ability to process all of that extra moisture? It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2:
[35:15] What you're saying makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[35:17] Yeah. But that advice doesn't. So I love a root bound plant. Now, it also goes into, to answer your question, do you advise always going up? Not necessarily. You can. But with the world of houseplants, and especially you're probably more familiar with this with bonsai, like how do they keep bonsai in the same size pot for 100 years? They do root management. So they'll take the plant out, a root bound plant. They're pretty much always root bound, those bonsai are. You can cut off about up to 33 percent of the roots. You can cut off about a third of the roots, and then they put fresh soil in the bottom and they put that right back in there. For some people, they like to do that with their houseplants because they maintain a relatively smaller size or a compact size, maybe you don't have all the space. What if you grow a plant up to a 14-inch pot? Do you go up to a 16? Do you go up to an 18? Do you go up to a 20? At what point some of these plants will grow infinitely, if you allow them the space. Eventually, you have to do root management by chopping off that bottom little cake layer, putting in some fresh oil and going from there. Not always, it depends on the goal of the grower, but a lot of the times, we do recommend up potting for your houseplants until you reach your goal and then root management from then on.

Speaker 2:
[36:34] Yeah. It's interesting to think about doing it at the root level and doing the root pruning. It's something that I'll occasionally even do with some of the fruit trees I have in containers, is I'll pull them out entirely, lop off like you said, like a third of the roots and just repot it right back in there with some fresh soil that they could now spread into. That seems to always work. The only thing I'll say from my end is that usually I'll get a little lag and growth right after doing it, but then they always bounce back, especially on that next cycle and they look amazing.

Speaker 1:
[37:05] Oh yeah. They bounce back. It invigorates them a little bit, like pruning branches and leaves. It invigorates them in the same way. There's a little bit of that shock and then it's like, thank you.

Speaker 2:
[37:19] It's like, oh yeah, this feels good. There's some good stuff in here. And the other thing that's interesting about houseplants is that it gets into this, this probably, and it sounds like from what you've said so far, one of the hardest things to answer in the world of gardening is, how much water does my plant need? And there's no real answer that I could give somebody based on, you know, if I can go and physically see and touch and be there in person, it's a lot easier to give an answer. But especially through just a message where it's just words, I'm like, I have nothing to tell you really. Like, you're going to have to give me more than that. But one of the things I thought was interesting was that even in the world of houseplants, there's the discussion of watering from above and also from bottom watering. And that's like a constant thing that's discussed with growing like seedlings to transplant into the garden. So I am curious to just hear a little bit about, like, what is the thought process behind top watering versus bottom watering with houseplants? Or is that just also another case by case, plant by plant basis?

Speaker 1:
[38:25] Well, it's difficult in your industry because you don't know how much water has gone in. So when you're watering a plant, whether you're indoors or outdoors, what's the goal? It's to water all, it's make sure all the roots get wet. When you have a plant in the ground, you don't know that. You're just guessing, you're just like, Well, I hope this is the case. It's really easy with houseplants because your only job when you water a houseplant is to saturate all of the soil in the pot. And it's easier to guess that way. So for example, if I water a plant from the top and I let it all drain out, and I do that five times, I'm pretty confident, and that's usually my recommendation three to five times, I'm pretty confident that the entire root ball is saturated, getting all of the water and the nutrients that the plant needs. But if you're bottom watering, it's as easy as, well, if my soil on the top is dry, because I can touch it and it's dry, and I sit my plant in a tray of water, I'm going to leave it there throughout the day till that water translocates, it climbs its way up the soil until the top soil is then wet. Then I know all of the soil is saturated from top to bottom, completing a perfect watering of saturating the entire pot. No plant needs to be top watered and no plant needs to be bottom watered. They only need to be watered. It doesn't matter. Now, the one caveat to that is most of us water with tap water. In most cases, that's perfectly fine for your plants. Believe it or not, the big thing that people always freak out about is chlorine in the water. But plants need chlorine, and the amounts that are used to treat your water, your city water, is not enough to cause a problem. So the chlorine in your water is not a problem. Leaving it out, you don't need to leave it out, all of those things. But the problem is the built up of the salts in your tap water. So if you're watering from the bottom all the time and it's with tap water, it's going up and it's not going out. It's not flushing out. The salt is not flushing out. And so that build up, when you're, the plant is always sucking up that salt, it can build up and the plant can't use all that salt. And so you'll start to see like yellowing or browning edges on the outer margin of your leaves. And so I always recommend, you know, three or four times a year, grab yourself some distilled water or reverse osmosis water, or if you're collecting rainwater and water from the top to flush out all those excess salts.

Speaker 2:
[41:01] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because especially when you're using something like a distilled water that has nothing in it, it should be able to very quickly sort of pull any of those excess salts out of your pot and soil. Yeah, okay. That's a good thing to think about. I never really, I don't know why, I never really thought about completely watering the entirety of the root ball and the soil. Like a lot of times when you're watering a pot, you're like, okay, well, it's like mostly wet. It's probably good. But especially when I'm thinking now about the fact that a lot of these potting soils are like peat-based, they could become hydrophobic. If you're not fully saturating all of the soil every time, then you're probably just creating like a little problem that's growing over time and starting to spread, like dry spots that will never get rehydrated, and then the roots will never go there. And that's also probably limiting your whole growth in general. So, I guess thinking about fully 100% saturating the soil in your pot makes sense, and it's something I'll think about more as I try to care for more houseplants.

Speaker 1:
[42:08] Well, you know, I said the health of your roots is the health of your plant. What do your roots need to live?

Speaker 2:
[42:15] They need oxygen to some amount and water primarily, right?

Speaker 1:
[42:19] That's it. So, if I'm giving my plant, a lot of people are afraid to water, like, because they think watering, like overwatering, quote, unquote, is a quantity. So they don't want to give their plant a gallon of water. They might give it a cup of water. And so the important thing here is that overwatering is a term that describes frequency, not quantity. So a lot of my plants, for example, a snake plant, a succulent, I recommend that all of the soil in the pot dries out in between watering. That could happen in two days if the conditions are such, or it could happen in a month if conditions are such. It's all about the light and the air, determining how fast the water is processed or evaporated in the soil, right? So if I were to water my snake plant when it's 25 percent dry, that's overwatering. But if it's 100 percent dry, you can water your snake plant with a gallon of water or a hundred gallons of water. It doesn't matter. The plant is going to, as long as you have drainage in your pot, the soil is only going to hold on to so much moisture and the rest is going to drain away. So we want all of it to get wet so that we can get all of the roots wet, so they can take up all the water and the nutrients. Just this morning, I had a consult and this is the exact problem. It's kind of coincidental that you're talking about this. But they said, I've had this snake plant for six and a half years, or six years, well, I guess six and a half years. They got it during COVID. And I water it with a cup of water once a month, just like my friend had suggested. And this morning, I got up and it fell over. It's fallen over in the pot. And I looked and there's hardly any roots at all. What's going on? The leaves were kind of wrinkly as well. So for so long, they've been watering with so little water that a lot of the roots weren't getting any water. And so they eventually died off. And so yes, the plant was putting on mass. It was growing taller. Meanwhile, the roots not getting watered are dying. And so eventually, that top heaviness just can't go over because roots are responsible, in part, to anchor your plant.

Speaker 2:
[44:27] Wow. That's really... I don't know why something about that just feels like it just clicked something in my head. Even just the idea of overwatering, it's not the quantity, it's the frequency. That is a really interesting thing to take away from this. Because like you said, if I pour 100 gallons of water on a potted plant, whatever is not going to get picked up by the soil should drain away, and it's only holding as much as it can. That person putting the one cup of water, probably created a little wet spot right in the middle, and the roots just kept going to that. But then it wasn't enough water to saturate anything else, so they just stopped there and it just died off. I was thinking today, as I was going around my garden and watering, I was like, how come people, like, is mulch, mulch doesn't seem to be a thing in the indoor plant world. And I don't know if that's true or not. Maybe it's not. And you guys do use a lot more mulch than I think. But like mulch on the surface of your soil probably is a hindrance, because now it's harder for you to tell how often it needs water, and it's probably harder to diagnose certain things. And it might prolong that period of sitting in wet soil. So is that basically true? Like, I'm guessing in general most of your potted plants don't have mulch.

Speaker 1:
[45:45] Yeah, because your problem outside a lot of the times, especially if you're away for a day or two, is things drying out too quickly. So you put that layer on there to slow down the evaporation. Houseplant problems are plants staying too wet for too long. So we need that airflow over the soil to get it to dry out quickly. So if we use mulch at all, it's usually as a soil amendment.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 2:
[46:22] I guess the other thing I wanted to ask you about in terms of, I think watering is obviously one of the biggest things for houseplants and probably the biggest factor of success. You talked about this method that you've developed it at least on your own independently, and it's like the baking method, which I thought was a really interesting story too of how you came to it, and it makes a lot of sense. Can you explain that a bit, and then I could think of an analogy that we use in the outdoor gardening world as well?

Speaker 1:
[46:51] Yeah. Light is the most important aspect of houseplant care. That's the number one absolutely thing. But after that, watering. Here's what I've developed. When I was, I can't remember, I honestly can't remember how much of this story I talked about in the book, because they made me take out a lot of my stories. I was pretty story heavy. And I read it like a month ago when they sent it to me, but I can't remember how much of the story I delved into. So the story is that I got really into chess when I was about 11. And practice, practice, practice. I live in a really small town. There's like a thousand people there when I was growing up, very small farming community. And I decided, my 11-year-old self decided to host a chess tournament in my town. My grandparents had the only restaurant in town. And so I held, I put up a little sign up sheet and I gathered a whole bunch of chess boards. And in hindsight, the turnout was pretty good. There was like six of us.

Speaker 2:
[47:51] That's not bad for a thousand people.

Speaker 1:
[47:52] Right? In a town of a thousand people, that many people being interested in chess is kind of crazy. Well, the winner of that chess tournament got a cake baked by yours truly. I thought, because I was all, I've been playing chess for like two months at that point. I thought I was probably going to win.

Speaker 2:
[48:11] Well, I guess I'll make my own cake.

Speaker 1:
[48:12] Yeah, I guess I'll make my own cake. Not a big deal. But when I lost, I was like, shoot, I need to figure out how to make a cake. And so I, you know, I go to my mom and I'm asking her how to make a cake. And she shows me this trick where the cake is in the oven and the timer goes off, bing. And I go to pull the oven out or the cake out. And she says, no, we got to check to make sure it's done first. And I'm like, didn't the alarm tell us it was done? But she's like, no. So she grabbed a toothpick. And while the cake was still in the oven, she reached in there and she put the toothpick in the center of the cake and then pulled it out. And there was wet batter still on there. She's like, oh, it's not done yet. We're going to put it back in for a couple more minutes. A couple more minutes goes by, alarm goes off, ding. We do the same trick. Put the chopstick in, bring it out, and this time it's clean, showing us that it's ready to take the cake out. And so when I was trying to figure out watering for houseplants, I had figured out the lighting with those articles that I was teaching or talking to you about, you know, the foot candles. When I had the light meter, that changed everything for me. But there wasn't any definitive information about watering out there. It was still, in these scientific articles, they were still saying, you know, they were using generic terms. Water when it's a couple of inches, you know, a couple of inches dry.

Speaker 2:
[49:29] Yeah, or like a damp sponge or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[49:31] Yeah, something like that. Moist but not wet. That one still drives me crazy. I'm like...

Speaker 2:
[49:36] That one's good. What?

Speaker 1:
[49:39] So what I would do is I would get a plant, the very first one that I tested out a ton on this one particular summer, I would get a plant. It's called Unsterra Delicioso. You might be familiar with it. It's a really common plant. And I gave it the right light. I could test my light so I knew it had a thousand foot candles. It's in bright light. I know that. I would give it a soak so I would saturate the entire soil. And then I would just wait. A week would go by, two weeks would go by. And I was waiting for the plant to show me physical signs of wilt because I knew then I had surpassed the plant's ability to hold on to water and to keep rigid or turgid because your plant staying upright is a matter of water in the cells. That's what's keeping it firm and upright, you know? So a lack of water is going to cause it to droop. But I also knew in my reading of those articles was that you don't want your plants to wilt in between watering. That's a constant state of shock, okay? So the goal was to water the plant before it wilted, but not water it so often that I'm getting root rot. How can we tell that? So I put my plant in bright light, I soak it, and then I wait for it to wilt. As soon as it would wilt, I was using a bamboo skewer at this point, and I would stick it down in the soil 25 percent, and I would bring it out. Well, it's dry 25 percent down, because no moisture, no wet soil, no moisture is on the probe at that point. Then I put it down 50 percent. Oh, it's still dry at 50 percent. Okay, and at about 75 percent dry is when I first saw that moisture come out of the pot. So I'm standing there. I've got my Monstera in bright light, and at 75 percent, it has wilted. So what happens if I water the plant, get it to perk back up, and then I would wait and I would measure how long would it take to get to 50 percent dry. So when it hit 50 percent dry, I gave it a soak. The plant didn't get in your root rot, and it didn't wilt. Perfect. So I can water my plant at 50 percent dry, and I can do this forever. But what happens if I water it at 25 percent dry? Because plants need to make their own sugar in order to grow, and water is one of the ingredients to them making sugar. So what if I water it at 25 percent dry? Could I get away with giving them more of the sugar making ingredients so that my plant can grow faster without getting root rot? So I watered at 25 percent dry. Did not wilt, and I didn't get root rot. So I said, okay, well, this is like a window then. I can water between 25 and 50 percent dry. What happens when I water every time the top soil dries out? Well, in this case, you get root rot. I tried it several times. I confirmed this probably three or four times that summer of giving my plant root rot, just trying to water it when the top soil dried out, until I definitively said 25 to 50 percent dry. I did this with a lot of different plants, succulents. I could get my cactus, they would dry it 100 percent and they wouldn't get wrinkly or wilted off. So I said, okay, succulents 100 percent dry, that's easy. Then my observation was, why is it that I can water a succulent when they're 100 percent dry, but I have to water my fern every time the top soil dries out, because at like 25 to 50 percent dry, that thing is wilted or dead. And this isn't scientific at all, I want to prelude all this. But my observation was that a plant's ability to hold water in its anatomy kind of determines how often you can water it. So for example, a cactus, a succulent, we all know that they store water in their leaves, in their foliage. So they have a big adaptation to withstanding drought. So that's why they can go 100 percent dry before you need water. They would have so much water storage in their anatomy. And if you compare, for example, like a fern right next to it and you look at its anatomy, almost every bit of its anatomy is papery thin, the leaves are nothing, the stems are just wisps, the roots are fibrous. That's why ferns grow in places where it rains all the time. Yeah. So they don't need any ability to store water. That's why they have water in their soil all the time so they can grab it. And so then I started to look at plants and I would start to guess. And so I said, okay, that monstera has about the same anatomy in terms of thickness as an anthurium. So could I water the anthurium at 25 to 50 percent dry? It turns out you can. And so I've kind of just applied these teachings and then confirming them over my own sort of like experiments. And in teaching this to millions of people over the past seven years or so, and people have success with it. And it's been one of those game changers for people to understand watering in that way. And it just makes it very simple. And that's what I mean by plants are for everyone. If long as long as you know a couple of little things, anybody can grow plants very easily and successfully.

Speaker 2:
[54:39] That's awesome. One more thing on the baking test is when you're doing this like actual test to see when you're poking into the soil, you're not are you leaving that item in the soil at all times? Are you carrying that around and then poking and checking?

Speaker 1:
[54:54] I'm poking and checking.

Speaker 2:
[54:55] Yeah. Okay. I think in the indoor space, it's probably a lot harder, especially since your plants, eventually you will get all those roots in the soil in the pot. Because outside in the vegetable gardening world, we do the finger test, where you'll just shove your finger into your bed. If it comes out clean, then you know that you need water because your soil is dry. If it comes out absolutely caked in soil, then you've probably overwatered your bed. If it comes out with a little bit of crumb on it, then you're probably okay, or maybe you just need water. But I can't imagine actually shoving my finger into a monstera pot that has all these gnarly roots in it. I probably would get only up to my fingertip. So that makes a lot of sense. Also, it sounds like you could go all the way down with something like a skewer, and truly it's like a dipstick of your entire pot there. So that's a really cool way to spot check everything. Now, also throughout the book, at the end, I will say that you even break down 30 of the most popular houseplants and all the information you need to know about them in terms of light, water needs, and a bunch of general care tips. And I just want to say I really, really like the book because I feel like you really took a novel approach to thinking about gardening and growing plants, but not just like we said, it's not a recipe book. It's not do this, get this. It's teaching you how to be a cook that also has recipes in there. So you're really walking people through how to properly think about things when you're actually caring for these plants and how to understand them. So you could get to the point where you're at right now, where you could kind of run these little experiments, figure out based on some intuition. I think at this point, honestly, you probably are running into some level of intuition and growing plants. And while it is a trap maybe at the beginning, maybe you are starting to build that out more and more. And so anyone at all who's even, even if you're already in to houseplants and you feel like you know a lot, or you're just houseplant curious, I highly encourage you guys to check out the book. Again, it's called For the Love of Houseplants by Tanner Mitchell. And I think it'll help you understand, honestly, even in the gardening world, a lot of new things, because you are encouraging people to actually learn it instead of just telling them the information. I had a lot of fun talking to you today, especially about watering, because now I feel like I've learned a lot about container watering. And I'm always going to remember this idea of overwatering is in the frequency, not in the application on the day to day. So thanks for coming on today and talking to us, Tanner. Why don't you let people know where they could get your book, where they could find you online. And just again, thank you for coming on today.

Speaker 1:
[57:41] Yeah, it was a blast. Thank you. It's always fun to talk to other plant people. So you can find the book anywhere that you get new books, Amazon, Barnes and noble.com, bookshop.org. All of those are wonderful places. Tannner the Planter is my social media that there's a lot of the education on. And my store is called Famous In Oregon. So that's all across the social media platforms as well. And our app is called Tannner the Planter as well. We host a twice weekly live show. My wife and I do. We've been doing this for about, well, since 2018. So we have a lot of fun. We ship plants all over the country. And we just have a really beautiful community. And the book comes out on April 14th.

Speaker 2:
[58:26] Awesome. Thanks, Tanner. And I'll be following your videos on your Instagram page for sure because I think I need to learn more about these. And you're definitely a great source. So thanks for coming on again. And if you're in Texas, go visit Famous In Oregon.

Speaker 1:
[58:41] Thanks for having me.

Speaker 5:
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