How Many Lux in a Foot-Candle?
Despite all the rain and mudslides, spring is coming to the San Francisco Bay. Marie and I are celebrating by taking our tenuous first steps into the exciting world of plant-ownership. I've managed to keep a mint healthyish and alive for almost a year, so having mastered the Mediterranean weeds I'm ready for new challenges. So we threw some money at the problem, picked up some sweet houseplants from the Botanical Gardens, and the apartment is now well on its way to becoming a lush, urban garden fit for a Babylonian king.
Anal scientist that I am, I want to ensure each plant's optimal growing conditions, but it's a difficult task. There just isn't enough quantitative instruction out there. I'm sure wineries and the like guide their growing with clear measurables, like inches of water or soil pH, but the rest of the plant kingdom is left with no more vauge guidelines. The little plastic card stuck in my neanth plam tells me it wants "low sun". But what the heck does that mean? Direct sun 5% of the day? Continuous, indirect sun all day? I have a dank closet which might work nicely. Without defining the extrema, squishy descriptors like "low" and "high" don't mean anything. "Water sporadically in winter", one plant tells me. Wtf?
I stress over this sort of thing. Thankfully there are some kind souls out there such as the American Orchid Society who know how I feel. Check the link - they classify orchids by the number of foot-candles of sunlight needed to survive. Orchid A will flower nicely with 3,000 foot-candles. How sweet is that? Granted, I have no real conception of how many foot-candles spill into my living room each day, nor do I have a good way to measure light intensity, nor is it an SI unit. But it's a start, and I salute them for it.