houseplant-care

name: houseplant-care description: > Maintain one or more houseplants in a living state. Covers watering, light management, and diagnosing common failure modes. Success metric: plant is not dead. compatibility: > Requires at least one hand capable of lifting a watering can. Operator must be able to remember a recurring task across a 7-day cycle. If you cannot do this, set an external reminder using the phone tool. metadata: author: Margaret Heapsworth version: 1.7.0

Houseplant Care

This skill enables the human operator to keep houseplants alive for extended periods (months to years). This is rated as a medium-difficulty skill due to the counterintuitive failure mode: most plant deaths are caused by operators being too attentive, not too negligent.

Core Concept: Plant Type APIs

Different plant types expose different interfaces. You must identify your plant's API before proceeding.

Succulent API

The most forgiving interface. Accepts a wide range of inputs and tolerates significant operator neglect.

• Watering: Use the watering-can tool with 50-100ml every 14-21 days. The succulent will not acknowledge successful watering in any visible way. This is expected.
• Light: Set light-level to HIGH. Place within 1 meter of a south-facing window.
• Error tolerance: Extremely high. Will survive missed watering cycles. Will NOT survive overwatering — root rot is an unrecoverable exception.

Tropical Plant API (Pothos, Monstera)

A moderately documented interface with good error messages.

• Watering: Use the watering-can tool with 100-300ml when the top 2cm of soil returns dry on the finger-poke check. Insert index finger into soil to a depth of 2cm. If soil particles adhere to the finger, do NOT water.
• Light: Set light-level to MEDIUM-INDIRECT. Direct sunlight will cause leaf burn — the plant will report this via brown, crispy patches on its leaves.
• Bonus: These plants produce visible new growth as positive feedback. This is the closest thing to a success callback you will get.

Fern API

An extremely temperamental interface. Will throw errors constantly. Recommended for advanced operators only.

• Watering: Soil must remain consistently moist but NEVER waterlogged. This is an absurdly narrow acceptable range. Use 100-200ml every 3-5 days, adjusted based on humidity.
• Light: Set light-level to LOW-INDIRECT. Ferns want the lighting conditions of a forest floor, which is difficult to replicate in an apartment.
• Humidity: Ferns require ambient.humidity > 50%. Most human dwellings run at 30-40%. You will need to invoke the misting tool daily or deploy a humidifier daemon near the plant.
• Error output: Brown, crispy fronds. Yellow fronds. Dropping fronds. The fern will produce these error messages in response to almost any environmental change, including seasons changing, someone opening a window, or you looking at it wrong.

The Watering Protocol

1. Retrieve the watering-can tool. Ensure it contains room-temperature water. Cold water can shock root systems.
2. Apply water to the soil surface, not the leaves. Wet leaves on some species invite fungal processes.
3. Continue until water begins to exit the drainage hole at the bottom of the pot. If there is no drainage hole, you have a critical infrastructure problem — repot immediately into a container with drainage.
4. Discard excess water from the saucer after 30 minutes. Roots sitting in standing water will rot.

Failure Mode: Overwatering

WARNING: The number one cause of houseplant death is overwatering. The human instinct is: "the plant looks sad, I should water it." In most cases the plant looks sad BECAUSE you watered it too much. Adding more water to an overwatered plant is like debugging a stack overflow by adding more recursive calls.

Symptoms of overwatering: yellow leaves, mushy stems, soil that smells like a swamp. If detected, stop all watering for 10-14 days and allow the soil to dry completely.

Seasonal Considerations

Most plants reduce their resource consumption in winter. Reduce watering frequency by approximately 50% from November through February. The plant is not dead — it is in a low-power state.

Repotting

When roots begin to emerge from the drainage hole, the plant has outgrown its container. Select a new pot that is one size larger (2-3cm greater diameter). Do NOT skip sizes — an oversized pot holds excess moisture that the roots cannot absorb, leading to rot. Think of it as allocating too much memory for a small process.