I have a Peace Lily that I resurrected. At least that's how I think of it. It's a potted plant that my wife was given when her mother died. A bunch of her sisters in the spirit pooled their money and bought her a really big pot with a really big Peace Lily in it.
It was really beautiful. My wife is not the greatest with potted plants. She does okay, but she tends to put them out in direct sunlight after they've been inside and used to being inside for months and years.
She'll put them out to get the rain and then she'll forget for three days and they get baked in the sun. She's an irregular waterer, which is okay with some plants, but not okay for the majority of the ones that we have.
Plants like a constant environment with a constant flow of water, even if it's a little bit each week. They adapt and live according to what they're getting on a regular basis. If it's not regular, they don't do well in my experience.
My wife did good with her Peace Lily at first. It was too big to put on the deck with the other plants that I had and so she had it on the front porch. It got beat down by afternoon sun for six hours or so and I told her during summer she would have to water it every day. I helped her by setting up an automatic drip solar system that would water it every day between certain hours just to keep it moist. I think that helped a lot and it flourished on the front porch.
Winter came. It got cold. It dropped to 10 degrees which is very different where we live. It dropped to 10 degrees three or four times and the peace lily died. All the leaves turned black and everything just looked really bad and dead.
She brought it in after it had been beat up by the cold she dropped it in our big bathtub. When spring came and nothing grew we put the pot under the deck and left it.
I went under the deck for some reason and was scrounging around for something. I saw this big pot and I remembered how big the peace lily had been. I was starting a new thing with lemongrass. I bought lemongrass at one of the asian marketplaces near us and rooted them, then put them in tall pots on the deck. My hope was that the lemongrass would repel mosquitoes. It helped a little but I love the smell and I love the look.
But I looked at the peace lily pot. I scraped the top of it and scraped all the dead stuff off. I thought to myself that with the root system that that big peace lily plant had there had to be something down there that might come back.
So I put the pot up on the deck. I let it get beat down by the Sun every day, but I watered it every day, too. An entire jug of water.
It sprouted leaves and it sprouted more leaves and it started growing and doing its thing. I was happy to see that the peace lily came back!
In the fall I was crabby about it because I really didn't want a big plant like this inside. I also knew that watering it inside would be a pain because it's a big pot, I mean it's two feet across. And heavy! So I bought a tub and put some pavers in the bottom of the tub. I put the pot on top of the pavers and rigged up something so that we could dump water in the pot and it would drain, but not stay in the pot. It would go in the tub of water underneath. And then I bought one of those battery operated siphoning pump things and I would use the drained water to water the peace lily every other day or so.
The plant flourished over the winter! I was amazed. The plant flourished during spring. I kept rotating it so that the leaves would have to tilt to get the sun from the windows, but we've decided to keep the peace lily inside and let it keep growing.
My hope is that it will bloom sometime this year. I'll keep using my little siphon pump thing to recirculate the water in my little watering system I've set up.
It's fun to bring plants back like that, especially when they have meaning like this one does.
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