Today’s topic is going to be the plant time scale. One of the difficult things newer gardeners have is understanding and appreciating the time scale of plants. The human time scale and a plant’s time scale are completely different. While you can touch your nose in seconds, a plant might take hours to move a leaf just one inch.
Some people may not fully realize that their plants are constantly moving. It’s just happening on that plant time scale and it’s so slow that us humans can’t even perceive it. But, when you compress an entire day into just seconds, it becomes very clear just how alive and active our plants actually are! It’s a regular hoedown!
This is one of the reasons we encourage new gardeners to slow down. If you’re addressing a problem with your plant, you have to realize that it might very well take days to see a result. To truly understand your
plants, you have to think and act on their timescale. Many impatient growers have ruined their plants because things just aren’t happening fast enough for them!
This season, we’ve talked a bit about “doing nothing.” About not being reactionary and allowing things to develop over time. It’s not that we don’t care for our plants or that we’re not interested in solving any problems we see. It’s just that we’re very aware of our perceptive differences between us and our plants and often that “doing nothing” is us slowing down to the plant’s speed.
We also aren’t saying that you shouldn’t take corrective action when you start noticing your plants have issues. But, we are saying to first study the problem and try to be relatively accurate in your diagnosis. Then, when you do take a corrective step, just wait to see what happens.
Also in that vein, your plants aren’t like you. Plants do not self-heal like us humans do, physical damage is usually permanent. So, where you’re looking for results to your corrective actions is in new growth. Many gardeners keep piling on “solutions” because they’re expecting the plant to “just go back to normal.” That’s not going to happen!
Anyhow, we’ve found it very helpful to slow down and this is one of the better ways we can visually show you as to why!
