| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
- Retrieve the
watering-can tool. Ensure it contains room-temperature water. Cold water can shock root systems.
- Apply water to the soil surface, not the leaves. Wet leaves on some species invite fungal processes.
- 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.
- 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.
