Bertram and Dehydration

 4/23     Since I missed one week due to a family emergency, I'm making this post my last one!      Well I wish I could say that I'm ending the semester off on a high note with a healthy, fully grown white strawberry plant but I sadly forgot to water Bertram yet again and he's severely wilted since the last blog post. That being said, he's still very green though so the possibility of him coming back to life is still very much a reality -- too bad you won't be here to see it.  angle 1  angle 2     It was a fun and eventful 8 weeks raising Bertram. If we were to count actual days where I had taken care of him it'd be more like 8 days but I'm not being graded on plant health here so it's alright. Technically the morality rate amongst plants raised by Chinese people whose names start with Fa- is still above 0% so I'll take it as a win!     I joke about it a lot, but I honestly do wish I had been a better parent to Bertram. Seeing ...

 4/16     From then, I stayed pretty due diligently to watering Bertram on a semi-regular basis. You may notice that my forgetfulness is becoming a pattern at this point.       Despite my very obvious shortcomings in parenting however, Bertram still managed to grow. By this point, my friend Faith's white strawberry plant Gertrude had sadly passed away due to parental neglect. I vowed to myself that my child would not suffer the same fate -- there will not be a 0% mortality rate in white strawberry plants from people whose first names start with Fa.      You can see from the pictures I took of him that he's actually been doing pretty good! I didn't mention this in the previous post but I had turned the pot around in an attempt to balance out the leaning tower of pisa thing he had going on earlier by forcing it to go backwards to face the sun. It worked and Bertram was almost cured of his scoliosis. If only real life worked that way. ...

4/6      My streak of watering Bertram every few days (whenever I remembered to do it) would end as I had to go back to Miami for my grandmother's funeral, who had died the last week of March. It was only 4 days and I came back to Gainesville by Tuesday, but Bertram was honestly not even a passing thought to me.      I know it's a bit awkward to include this in here, but that's why I'm missing a week's blog post -- don't worry, I made it up later.  my grandmother's flowers     Luckily, he was still alive when I came back. Who knew strawberry plants were this resilient? That being said, I did forget to water him for a few more days after that (I never said I was a good parent).       When I did eventually get to watering Bertram, I noticed that he seemed a bit more... wonky than usual? His leaves were obviously angled towards the window like a sunflower and one stem was noticeably way longer than the others. The last remain...