What do you get when you add two houseplants, numerous cans of Monster, some milk with Frosted Flakes and some coffee?
Flies. You get flies.
My roommate, bless her heart, has an abundance of plants in our small Dieseth room. They line the windowsill, take up space on her desk and reside on stands in front of the air conditioning unit. Just like what happens when a kindergarten teacher has over thirty students, plants are bound to fall through the cracks. In an effort to thin the crowd and facilitate this falling through the cracks (I swear I value children), I suggested that one “especially iffy” baby take one for the team and become our catch-all garbage plant.
A catch-all garbage plant is exactly what it sounds like. When one of us in the Dieseth quad was done with a drink or a bowl of cereal, the excess liquid was poured into the plant. The sink across the hall was entirely too far away. Notice that I am using the past tense for these actions. Sadly, the poor baby plant is no longer with us.
I justified this cruelty with the moral bandage of “it’s for science” and monitored its progress like I needed to write a lab report on it for BIO 151. The plant did really well for a month. It was relatively green and arguably perky, like the new addition to a crab boat out on the Bering Sea for the newest season of “Deadliest Catch.” Eventually, while the baby was still green, the dirt stopped absorbing the Monster, and it began to collect on the surface of the dirt. To remedy this, we designated a second plant to be the new garbage plant.
While we began pouring our liquids into this second plant, the first plant was left undisturbed for a handful of weeks. I will admit that I was partially to blame for what happened with the poor first plant, but in my defense, I had a new shiny experiment to watch. While nobody was paying the first plant any mind, its green leaves turned brown and droopy and the surface of its dirt grew a film. This film brought with it a smell, and little wormy things could be seen within the film.
After two months, enough was enough. There were fruit flies and what we suspected to be maggots. I ceremoniously dumped the baby into a trash bag and drug it out to the dumpster behind Ylvisaker Hall. I went to work that night and reported my findings to my coworker. I told him that if no one else had told him, as tempting as the idea seemed, don’t designate a catch-all garbage plant for your various liquids. His response was a shocked, “someone had to tell you not to do that?”
This appears to be a classic case of just because you can doesn’t mean you should, as well as a lesson in examining the consequences of your actions before diving into your next “stroke of genius.” Whether you are considering using email to ask out a peer, supporting an unethical doodle breeder, or spending your money at an establishment that holds values that you don’t believe in, consider the metaphorical flies and smells that are inevitable to come should it be a bad decision. Any amount of forethought would have revealed that a garbage plant would mold and attract flies. Any amount of forethought could save you from a lot of grief, even if whatever you’re doing seems like a stroke of genius.
