What's the story morning glory? pt.1

Yeah i know.

Let's get like this.


Alright so the story so far...
I live on the 3rd floor of an apartment building and i have a cement balcony.
In the past 2 years I've tried my hand at raising leafy lifeforms, mostly failing.
The only survivor in my efforts has been Henry, my money tree(s) (Pachira Aquatica) I'm going to go ahead and attribute this to the fact that he is a tree and therefore retains water a little better than his deceased brothers and sisters.

Awwwww there he is.

Now Henry is weird. Because I bought him from Ikea and he is in fact 5 trees that have been braided together as they grew. Which looks nifty and all.
Except I put him right in the window so he got a lot of sun and did very well. Which i was very excited about, especially when i could notice him growing larger even within the span of a couple days.
I knew he was a bonsai tree but i only really vaugely knew anything about pruning and didnt have the heart to cut him back.
Which was stupid.
Now he's a mutant.

A sad little mutant.

Down where the braiding stops is where I should have been cutting him back to when he got too tall, but i didn't and he got all floppy and weird. So i finally sacked up and cut back the trunks that seemed to have the most pathetic leaf growth. I assumed these trunks would sprout new leaves and grow back but thus far the only new grown has been down near the base where there were two new little sprouts which my cat promptly tore off.(You will also notice the scarring on the leaf in the first picture compliments of Sylvia Ellen Ripley the cat)

Surprisingly enough i put one of the pruned branches in an empty vase left over from Valentine's Day which is in the kitchen and we constantly keep the blinds closed. And this is what it looks like today.

I don't get it, but I won't complain.

The moral of the story is that I had no idea what I was doing and because of it my plant is awkward.
I tried growing a couple things on my balcony last summer and i thought that they would need to be watered as much as my indoor plants. I learned at the end of the summer that I was supposed to be watering them daily.(Again, way to check your facts Maeghan!) I randomly bought a Red Dianthus(I don't have it's info card anymore so i don't know its Latin name but all Dianthus are foreign to North America except Alaskan Dianthus and this was not that.) at Lowes about two months ago and I ran out of potting soil while re-potting it and decided to use perlite to fill in the top half of the pot. I probably knew this was a bad idea but I was too lazy.
I also wasn't terribly vigilant with waterings.

Which resulted in this.

-_-

This makes my cats nervous.
So i decided to try something new.

Stay tuned for part 2!!!


-M