November 5th Baron Update

It’s been almost three weeks since the last update. Things have been just a little crazy around here. My work kind of took over since we got back from St. George.

Before we went to St. George I went to the temple and prayed to know what to do to help my business make more money with less work. The answer I got was surprising but I’ve learned to trust in the Lord and his ideas, especially about something I just prayed about at the temple.

The idea I got was to move most of my plants from my nine IKEA cabinets to my downstairs unfinished master bathroom. It’s really hard to maintain a good balance of temperature and humidity in the cabinets. The only way I had to lower the humidity was to raise the temperature. Most of the time the cabinets were at an average of 82 degrees and 70% humidity.

Maintaining that temperature in the summer is not easy to do with the air conditioning trying to lower the temperature and the cabinets raising the temperature in the house. We didn’t realize how big of a deal it would be until we got our first electric bill in the summer and it was $200 more than normal!

I finally came up with a solution a few days after I saw an awesome dehumidifier on clearance at Target. Long story short, I put it in our downstairs master bathroom and have the dehumidifier plugged into a controller that turns it on when it gets above 62% humidity and turns it off when it gets below 58% humidity.

That way I can easily keep the humidity at an average of 60% humidity and I can keep the temperature around 72 degrees with just a little space heater that has a built-in thermostat. It mostly only turns on at night.

This way my plants are in about the lowest humidity they can be to thrive but the room is at the max humidity to hopefully not grow mold. It is also very energy efficient to maintain, at least compared to my cabinets.

The only thing I had to buy for my new setup was two wire shelving units at Costco, the dehumidifier and the dehumidifier controller. But it made it so I can sell most of my IKEA cabinets and most of the things inside them, like heat mats, thermostat controllers, shelving, fans, lights, etc.

I think I’m going to keep 2-3 cabinets in my front living room of the plants for sale and some larger favorites of mine.

So between a much cheaper setup and the hopefully much lower energy costs, I will hopefully be more profitable. The best part is my plants seem to really like the constant, ideal environment. I can really notice a difference in how healthy they are and how fast they are growing.

It took me almost two weeks (with Norm’s help) to get everything situated and I was just finishing that up by spraying all my plants with insecticide last Saturday around 1 pm right before our extended family Halloween party.

Right when I finished everyone in the house started complaining about how it smelled like a pool in our house. Then all of a sudden everything clicked for me in a moment of recognition of what I had just done!

Back story – When I started spraying my plants with an insecticide a year ago I put it in a spray bottle and labeled it as “Captain Jack’s” which is the brand I was using at the time. After a while, I switched over to a pump sprayer and that made things so much easier. When I did that, I dumped the Captain Jack’s into my new sprayer.

A few months ago we found some mold in that bathroom so we bought this really strong cleaner that is basically really strong bleach you spray on the mold and it just disappears without even touching it. It’s pretty cool but it stinks up the house for days. It’s really strong and ate through the spray bottle it was in so Norm dumped it into the Captain Jack’s spray bottle and didn’t re-label it.

Fast forward to the two weeks ago when we were moving into the bathroom – we found a little spot of mold we missed so Norm looked all over the whole house trying to find the mold spray and couldn’t find it anywhere. He even smelled the Captain Jack’s sprayer and couldn’t smell anything.

When I was re-doing the bathroom I found the sprayer and forgot I had already dumped out what was in it and since there was something in the sprayer I figured it was Captain Jack’s because that’s how it was labeled so I just dumped it in my pump sprayer.

Back to 1 pm last Saturday – I instantly put two and two together and realized I had just sprayed all my plants with the bleach mold cleaner!

I still can’t believe I did that! I did smell a bit of chlorine but the spray tends to not be very strong at first but pretty soon gets overwhelming. I just thought it was the smell from the bug spray, which was part of what I sprayed on my plants.

It wasn’t the best timing because I had a party to get to. All we could think of doing was to just spray down all the plants a few times with plain water. Then I got to realizing the soil would have bleach in it too so I went late to the party and rinsed down a bunch of my plants and rinsed out the soil and hoped that would be enough.

I was kind of half freaking out during this time and half thinking this was an interesting way to get an answer to my prayers. I just kept thinking that however it turns out is what God wants for me. I was singing, “Que Sera, Sera, Sera. Whatever Will Be, Will Be.” (from a Doris Day movie).

Once I got home and started researching the cleaner and how it’s really, really bad to spray your plants with bleach I started freaking out and thinking they would all be dead in 2-3 days, which is what most people said.

I was so sad at the thought that I might not be able to sell plants anymore and would have to just get an accounting job or something. I realized this is my first “job” I was sad at the thought of leaving.

I finally came across an online forum where someone said she did something similar and someone else said you can’t rinse bleach out of soil and the best thing to do was to take the plant out of the pot, completely rinse off all the leaves and roots and then put new soil back in the pots.

This is because even if you rinse off the leaves, the bleach is really bad in the soil because it raises the PH to 14 and basically suffocates your plants. It could take anywhere from a few days to two weeks but they would die for sure if I didn’t do something about it.

Ugh! That gave me hope that they weren’t all going to die like everything else I was reading said – but I had 660 plants! That’s a lot of plants to repot. I decided it was worth a try, even if it would be an insane amount of work.

We started by just throwing away any plants I had under $8. I had probably 150 plants I sold for $2 and I was already feeling like they weren’t worth my time to water, propagate, repot them, the soil, the place to put them and then in like six months when they were finally ready to sell to spend at least 10 minutes for each plant to take a photo and list it in 4-5 places. Not to mention all the time to either coordinate pickup with someone or to ship it.

The process went like this – go shopping all over town and buy all the “ingredients” I could find for my custom soil mix, mix up the soil a few times a day, fill up a mixing bowl with water and put it by my garbage can, take a tray of plants and put all the soil in the garage then put the plants to soak in the bowl of water, scrub the tray the pots were in, put the felt mat that goes on the trays in the washing machine (I had a few extra trays and mats so I could do the cleaning in batches), scrub the pot the plant was in or pile them up to be washed later if I was going to use a different pot, decide what to do with the plant (such as chopping it up and/or making more “Mothers”), actually re-pot the plant and put it on a new tray, water the plants and take them back downstairs again.

It was very labor intensive and exhausting. I spent the last week working on it every chance I could get and even had help from Norm, Lili, Emma and Mom. I am so grateful for their help. It was such a big project and so tiring. I’m so sore.

I started with my more valuable plants and the ones that I had already sold first. Some of the plants were just totally dead by the time I got to them. Most of them had very white, stiff roots. Many of them have very damaged leaves and I’m not sure if those leaves will make it.

Over the last week, many of the leaves have died. But with these types of plants, it’s not the end of the world if the leaves die. As long as the node is good (the part of the stem where new growth comes out) then you can propagate the plants and eventually have a whole new plant.

Some of the plants seem perfectly fine, especially the ones with lots of roots and/or thicker roots. So I ended up chopping up all the plants I could. My thinking is that even if the base of the plant dies then hopefully the propagations will be ok since they didn’t have roots to get damaged.

I figure chopping not only helps increase my chance that at least part of the plant will survive but it will make it so I have way fewer plant chores to do for a few months while I wait for all the plants to get large enough to sell.

I also took the opportunity to make more “Mothers” of plants that sell well for a good price that I want to keep selling. In the past, I haven’t had enough Mothers of most of my plants so I ran out of stock a lot. I’m hoping this way I will eventually have a more consistent supply of my good plants.

I also decided to sell larger pots of some of my less expensive plants so I can make more money with less work.

I have a few plants that could be ready to sell in as few as two weeks, assuming they continue to do well and get new growth on them. But most of my plants won’t be ready to sell for months.

So the good news is now that I finally finished re-potting everything, I can kind of take a few months off and just let everything grow (and I’m sure some of them will die). I can hopefully finally get to a few of the things I never seem to be able to get to.

I feel quite confident that at least some of my plants will make it. Some of the plants I re-potted at the beginning of the week are already showing signs of new growth, which is very encouraging. Some of them that looked fine when I re-potted them don’t look so fine now, especially any tender, new growth.

I finished re-potting and cleaned everything up this afternoon – so it took almost exactly 7 days. I started with 660 plants and now have 394 plants. That’s still a lot of plants. It feels so much more manageable though and I really think that once they recover in a few months I will be able to make more money with less work.

A short summary of the “fun” things – Kayla passed another level of Kumon already. She made the decision herself to do two extra assignments a week so she can catch up to grade level faster. We had fun at the family Halloween party, went to dinner for Ruby’s birthday, Ruby had a birthday party with a few friends today, Ruby has had play practice and seems to enjoy that, and Tyler is getting his braces off in a few weeks and is really excited about that.