Darryl Cheng of House Plant Journal - Understanding Lighting for House Plants - Get Up & Grow Podcast EP #7

Welcome to the Get Up & Grow Podcast, Episode #7. Today, we have a special guest, Darryl Cheng, the well-known plant care expert and creator of House Plant Journal. Darryl's mission is to help people enjoy healthy and thriving plants for years to come, and he has become a trusted source of practical advice for plant enthusiasts of all levels. In this episode, Darryl shares his background, his approach to plant care and how important lighting is to proper house plant development.

Darryl begins by discussing his background and how he became interested in plant care. He shares how his engineering background has influenced his approach to growing and highlights the importance of observation and understanding the needs of plants.

Darryl then goes into discussing the release of his book, “The New Plant Parent,” Where he shares the inspiration behind writing the book and how it differs from traditional house plant care books. The book highlights his data driven approach to plant care and practical tips people can take to improve the lives’ of their beloved house plants.

Darryl's expertise in plant growth focuses heavily on understanding natural indoor lighting, and he introduces his system of using a standard lumen reader to guide growers in utilizing light appropriately for indoor plant growth. He explains the concept of "indirect light" levels for house plants, sharing useful information on this often misunderstood aspect of plant care.

Finally, Darryl offers advice to those who are just starting to explore the world of plant care. He encourages beginners to observe their plants closely, be patient, and learn from their experiences. Darryl also shares where listeners can find him, purchase his book, and sign up for his courses or one-on-one consultations.

We discuss some of the following:

·      Darryl's background and his passion for plant care.
·      The influence of his engineering background on his approach to growing.
·      Responsible plant parenthood and developing a mindset in harmony with nature.
·      'The New Plant Parent' book and its unique approach to house plant care.
·      Common mistakes in plant care and tips for avoiding them.
·      Darryl's system for utilizing light appropriately for indoor plant growth.
·      What DLI is and why it matters for house plant care
·      Understanding the different levels of "indirect light" for house plants.
·      Implementing sustainable practices in growing plants at home.
·      Advice for beginners exploring the world of plant care.

If you are interested in contacting Darryl with questions about anything we discuss in the podcast please reach out to him directly at his website: https://www.houseplantjournal.com/  

And find his book “The New Plant Parent” for sale here:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419732390/

This Podcast is dedicated to growers like you so we appreciate your feedback so we can provide the best experience possible for the grower community. 

Now Get Up & Grow! 

Taylor S.

Transcript

Darryl Cheng (00:00.000)
If a plant wrote a book about how to grow themselves, they would talk extensively about light and that watering would just be, oh, you know, whenever I need it. If you look at whenever I need it, it'll be a simple matter of just looking at the soil. You know, fertilizer, repotting, all that stuff is all gonna be secondary to like, how well can I grow is dependent completely on how good my light is, right?

Taylor (00:00.738)
Hi everyone. Thank you for joining the Get Up and Grow podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Schaberg, owner of Active Grow. Today I'm super excited to have a pioneer in the growing space with us today. His name is Darryl Cheng of the House Plant Journal. He takes a unique look at growing house plants from an engineer's perspective and educates growers how to use natural light or effectively to grow healthier plants indoors. He's also the author of the popular book, The New Plant Parent that is being sold around the world and has written in multiple languages. He also has a lot to teach us today.

Taylor (00:30.73)
So please enjoy my conversation with Darryl Cheng of the Houseplant Journal.

Taylor (00:01.218)
Hi, Darryl. Thanks for joining the podcast today. It's really good to have you here.

Darryl Cheng (00:05.027)
Hey Taylor, thanks for having me.

Taylor (00:07.166)
Yeah, of course. I mean, I've been following you a while and I think, you know, you're super interesting for the houseplant community. You're doing a lot of innovative things. You have an engineering background. You wrote a really interesting book. You have this light meter things. I want to get into all that, but I wanted to just start, um, asking you, how did you first become interested in houseplants and plant care?

Darryl Cheng (00:32.015)
Sure, sure. So yeah, many years ago when I was still living at home with my mom, she said, oh, help me decorate the house with some houseplants. But she added, but you need to figure out how to take care of them because she claimed to be bad with houseplants. And this was confusing to me because she taught me how to do outdoor gardening. She was great with like outdoor vegetables and all that kind of good stuff. But indoors, she seemed to have this mentality that she kills everything, which I'm sure you hear a lot in terms of when people talk about houseplants.

Taylor (00:58.879)
Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (01:01.655)
So I said, okay, I'll just buy a bunch of plants and we'll see how it goes. Now, what was really, I guess, like serendipitous was that our house had two really big skylights in the upstairs foyer. So then that's like, so the plants were growing excellent. And I said to myself as an engineer, okay, it's not because I have some magical skill, it's be clearly because there's something in this environment that's allowing them to thrive, right? And that's when I...

Taylor (01:29.398)
Mm.

Darryl Cheng (01:31.443)
and pulled up my old light meter that I used to use for photography and like just started measuring and realizing that there is a Dramatic difference in light levels as you move farther from a window So called bright indirect light that is this kind of this blanket term that actually doesn't mean anything or it means everything to lots of people and so It was then that I just decided okay. I'm gonna start documenting how my plants do and that's how houseplant journal

Taylor (01:35.288)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor (01:49.802)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (02:00.703)
It was just a journal for my house plans. So that's sort of how it all started. And I started on Tumblr, not really many people use that. I then switched over to Instagram. And then I think it was already like the house plans was already on the uptick in social media. And then I think the pandemic made it even bigger. So then I can attribute a lot of my growth to just the overall general interest.

Taylor (02:01.514)
Okay.

Taylor (02:26.166)
But I remember you being huge before the pandemic. Like how long was it when you switched from Tumblr to Instagram, how long ago was that?

Darryl Cheng (02:29.91)
haha

Darryl Cheng (02:36.319)
I switched to Instagram in 2015. So that was, yeah, well before pandemic. Yes. But I think the, one of the big turning points was on Instagram when they started allowing 15 second video clips to be posted. And that's when I posted my time-lapse videos, you know, of like plants hydrating or oxalis leaves kind of flapping back and forth. Um, and later on even like leaves fully growing, like these are like several weeks long time-lapse videos.

Taylor (02:38.661)
Okay, so...

Taylor (02:56.837)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (03:03.915)
And so I started posting these and I'm pretty sure that that's probably what would help my account grow a lot because they were like those videos were picked up by lots of big news outlets on Facebook, even another stuff. So that's sort of where I can attribute a lot of the growth to. And then, uh, well, and then the other half of that would also just be when I talked about plant care, I wasn't just saying the same usual usual things, but I was actually trying to be more precise and be more.

Darryl Cheng (03:33.367)
I guess like direct with, okay, when you say water thoroughly, what does that mean? Well, it means you take it to the sink and you fully saturate until the literally the soil is like dripping wet and you let the excess drip away before you put it back. That like, so almost like making no assumptions that people just know when you say give it bright and direct light full stop. What does that even mean? Right? So it's, I sort of decided I would be more precise with writing it and

Darryl Cheng (04:01.951)
I guess this will lead into the next part about writing a book, which is a literary agent reached out to me and said, Hey, I think, you know, you could write a really good book about houseplant care in the way that you write more precisely and in a way that's accessible. So it's not using all this jargon. So yeah, we put together a proposal and then, you know, got a contract and that was really wonderful opportunity. And so that's how my book came about, which is the new plant parent right over here.

Taylor (04:33.462)
Yeah, it's a super useful book. So you came from an engineering background. Did you go to school for that, or how did that come about?

Darryl Cheng (04:39.971)
Yes.

Darryl Cheng (04:43.447)
Yeah, so I studied engineering at the University of Toronto, something called industrial engineering. And industrial engineering is all about understanding like, excuse me, like how systems are put together, how humans interface with all kinds of things. I mean, you know about user interfaces all throughout like apps and on the internet and how we use things. So that's kind of the study of.

Darryl Cheng (05:10.263)
like one of the disciplines in industrial engineering. And I sort of took that same systems thinking, like understanding or user experience kind of thinking. When I look at how houseplant care is taught and disseminated and realized it's pretty terrible in terms of how vague it can be. And yet we just sort of let people off and like, yeah, yeah, bright and direct light, go, go find it. Right? And so...

Taylor (05:30.857)
Yeah.

Taylor (05:38.892)
Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (05:40.127)
It's sort of like, yeah, seeing that gap in at least, I could say it's not that I'm saying that, my way is better or anything, but that I just wanted to say it differently and in a way that resonated with me and maybe people like me who are more technical minded. And so I think it's just good to have a bigger variety of ways of talking about even the same subject, right? We don't have to always say the same types of words.

Darryl Cheng (06:08.155)
for talking about houseplant care. Like, why can't we start talking about DLI? Why can't we start talking about measuring light? That kind of stuff. So, yeah, I think it's just a good thing to add variety to the houseplant care, I guess, realm.

Taylor (06:23.79)
Sure. Yeah. So lighting for you, lighting, it was a huge part of it. Because you saw just a lack of information, specific information. Yeah, I'm I'm in the lighting business. I'm I started the company kind of the same like trying to be very specific. But then there's a lot of people that are super confused. Like, I'll be like, OK, this Monstera plant, it needs two hundred fifty to five hundred, you know, you most at.

Taylor (06:53.43)
you know, for 12 hours a day or something, for example. And people are like, that's one end of the spectrum, this very specific thing. And then there's the other end of people that are just like, what does that even mean? So how do you get those people from here to there and not overwhelm them?

Darryl Cheng (06:56.143)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (07:12.119)
Well, I don't know if I'm doing such a great job of not overwhelming them, but I will say that people are hungry to learn, right? They want to learn and they know that there's more to learn. Like they know that bright and dark light and medium light, like they know that that's not really they like I'm even hand waving as I say, but they like it's a very hand wavy way of describing it. They know that. But they just have not heard the alternative.

Taylor (07:40.375)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (07:41.115)
And or I mean, going into a bigger idea, like there's just no system to understand indoor light as there is a system for growing cannabis, for example. Right. Because I mean, let's face it, people had to grow cannabis in their in their basements. So they they already had very precise instructions. OK, you get, you know, this CMH light. OK, it's going to be this wattage. Oh, then you need to put this distance away.

Taylor (07:54.21)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (08:09.519)
keep it on for, I don't know, 16 hours, whatever. Oh, when it comes flowering, okay, you got to switch it to the high pressure sodium. And then you, you know, and the light is so, like there's so few lights that people can just give you a specification for every single light. But with houseplants, as in, you know, casually growing ornamental foliage plants in a natural light environment in a home, it's sort of like the Wild West of potential daily light integral values, right?

Taylor (08:20.866)
Right.

Taylor (08:38.53)
Right.

Darryl Cheng (08:39.163)
We have no idea because someone could say West window. That doesn't tell you how big the window is. Doesn't tell you the obstructions that are outside. Like, you know, cause you could say, oh, it gets afternoon light or afternoon sun. But what if you have a whole bunch of trees? What if you're in a building and you're way high up and there's no trees at all? Like all of that plays such a big role in it that we are in the house

Taylor (08:58.955)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (09:06.319)
we're generalizing based on window direction or just some subjective sense of brightness. And yet the objective DLI value that someone might get can be completely different. So it's like short of using a DLI logging light sensor, which I have done for indoor space, then we need to either do two things. We could either.

Taylor (09:28.023)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (09:34.787)
change the very simple guidelines. Like, you know, if someone's not interested in measuring light, this is what I tell people. I just tell them, just put your plants as close to your largest window as possible. And only if the sun is going to shine on your so-called bright and dark light plant for longer than two or three hours, then you might consider either moving it back or putting a white sheer curtain in front. Because that's the simplest guideline that still allows the plant to get

Taylor (09:57.221)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (10:03.627)
hopefully an adequate DLI. Now, once you start taking a light meter and going the next step to start measuring, then now I can almost immediately tell you, okay, well, if you're getting between 200 to 400 foot candles, I'm gonna go back to foot candles for now. If you're getting between your indirect light between 200 and 400 foot candles, okay, then you probably have like an eight foot window by whatever height, right? But if you're measuring it,

Darryl Cheng (10:30.967)
and you're not getting anything higher than 100 to 200, well then either your window is too small or you're standing too far back from the window, right? And it's like, the reason for this precision is because light levels like vary so dramatically and yet our eyes, when we just look at everything, it doesn't feel, you know, 10X difference. It just looks like, okay, yeah, I guess it's slightly darker, sure, but your eyes are constantly adjusting.

Taylor (10:38.978)
Hmm.

Taylor (10:54.579)
Right.

Darryl Cheng (10:59.455)
And so our brains will never give us sort of the true sense or like the calibration of how drastically different the light levels can be.

Taylor (11:09.258)
Right. I don't want to confuse people too much. We've said the word DLI, maybe if you want to explain what that is or...

Darryl Cheng (11:16.431)
Sure, sure. So like, I think, yeah, might as well go into this too. Like, let's talk about an analogous concept just so that I can just say, okay, therefore think of DLI like this. It might be easier, right? Because everyone can give you the textbook definition, but let me give you analogous definition, which is that every day when we travel, we have our speed, like the speed of your car. But we also have

Taylor (11:30.146)
Hmm, sure.

Darryl Cheng (11:44.963)
the total distance traveled, right? So if you're on a train and it goes, I don't know, a hundred miles an hour, and you say I'm in that train for two hours, then you can safely say, well, I've traveled 200 miles, right? So what I'm saying here is, earlier you talked about PPFD, which is the like mu moles, that's like the instantaneous, that's the speed of the train.

Darryl Cheng (12:14.223)
DLI would be the total distance or the total light received over the 24 hour period. So grow lights is a perfect example to talk about this because it's easier in terms of conceptually and that is you turn on the grow light, you measure, you take your PVFD meter and it gives you a hundred micromoles, right? And you say to yourself, okay, I know I'm gonna keep this on for 12 hours. So what is the DLI? Like what is the total light received?

Taylor (12:22.401)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (12:44.227)
Well, then you got to take your 100 micro moles, multiply it by 3,600 because of 60 seconds per minute, minutes per hour. And then you multiply by 12 because you know, you're going to keep it off for 12 hours and then divided by a million. And then that big number or becomes a small number. That number represents how many moles of photons hit the plant for the 12 hours you kept the grow light on. Right now. Even

Taylor (13:10.953)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (13:13.591)
Like that's, I said already the simple example, just think about how the PPFD constantly changes for natural light. You have clouds, you have the sun moving across the sky. So the variance of natural light is just so much more that that's why it's kind of like impractical to try and measure the DLI for natural light. I've done it before. You have to basically keep the sensor there.

Darryl Cheng (13:42.495)
logging the light levels, I did it for like two weeks straight. I did it for two weeks straight in the springtime. I did it for the same spot two weeks straight in the winter and I did it for two weeks straight in the summer. Fall I assumed it was the same as the spring because you know time difference was the same like the length of day was roughly the same. So it's like you it's almost like impractical to try and state the DLI for natural light but it's very practical to state the DLI for grow lights because of the fact that you turn it on

Taylor (13:45.952)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor (13:52.759)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor (13:58.904)
Right.

Darryl Cheng (14:12.311)
It stays roughly the same brightness all the time. You control the brightness because you put it closer or farther. And you also control how long it is. So that's why when someone says to you, you're growing a tomato seedling or the seedling stage, oh, it needs roughly 6 to 10 moles a day. Well, then you do your own little calculations and you know how far you did put a grow light, how long you need to turn on, all that good stuff. So it's, I guess you could say,

Darryl Cheng (14:41.591)
This is the math of light is DLI PPFD. And the practicality is you need like a meter to measure this and you have to know how to do the calculation.

Taylor (14:54.638)
And, you know, there's the PPFD, there's the DLI, but I mean, we can get into some other stuff, but I think it would make sense to transition into how you have developed a product and what your product looks at and how that can be useful for people who grow houseplants indoors, which is your meter.

Darryl Cheng (15:14.387)
So, yeah, so like I brought over here, this little thing here. Turn it on.

Darryl Cheng (15:25.231)
So this meter has not only light, but temperature and humidity as well. So yeah, 55% humidity, pretty good in here. And as I move it closer to this light, you can see the number gets higher. It's backwards for me, but hopefully it'll be forward for you. Anyway, now, okay, I mentioned PPFD, and that's like if you have one of these.

Darryl Cheng (00:02.381)
Okay, so yeah, this is the Apogee Instruments PPFD meter, right? And this is actually the ePAR version, which takes the... So instead of just being 400 to 700 nanometers, it takes it up to, I think, 750. Because it's something about like the far red light plays a part in photosynthesis, and therefore they think that it should be counted as part of PAR photons.

Taylor (00:06.881)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor (00:10.495)
Nice.

Taylor (00:24.875)
Right.

Taylor (00:30.502)
True. Yes.

Darryl Cheng (00:33.141)
Anyway, regardless of definitions changing or whatnot, the thing is, in my research of making the light meter, it's quite a lot more expensive to filter out and also have the circuitry to get the wavelengths exactly 400 to 700.

Taylor (00:55.263)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (01:02.809)
lux definition of illuminance, which I mean in those like when I look at the other types of light meters, the lux meters, you know, of course I open them up and they all have a kind of green filter in front, right? And that is because the illuminance definition is okay, you want to be like it's a like kind of like a bell curve, right? So from 400 to 700, 400 and 700 are very low sensitivity for the human eye, but then it gets higher and higher as you get towards 500, which is

Taylor (01:16.282)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (01:32.709)
like green and yellow, right? So those lux meters have a green filter in front. But what I did was I changed it to be, I guess you could say the PAR filter, which is cutting out just infrared and ultraviolet, which makes the middle part roughly equal sensitivity, right? So basically what I'm saying is, even though my circuitry is not calibrated for pure,

Taylor (01:52.127)
Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (02:02.345)
PAR, the filter is, so in a sense, this is a roughly slightly inaccurate for foot candles, but it actually makes it better accuracy for white LED grow lights. So anyway, then the other thing we had to talk about with spectrum and when we're using

Taylor (02:17.237)
Okay.

Darryl Cheng (02:35.074)
the sensitivity curve is different between PAR and LUMS, technically is the bell curve. But it actually depends on what light we're measuring that will give you the bigger discrepancy between the two values of PPFD versus foot candles. And this is like the sort of historical reason, and that is

Taylor (02:39.662)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (03:02.309)
At the time when cannabis growers had to use, they only had the choice of either natural light outside if it was legal to do it outside, or ceramic metal halide for the vegetative phase and then high pressure sodium for the flowering phase. Well, ceramic metal halide and high pressure sodium, if you look at their spectrum, it's like very spiky versus natural light, which is a beautiful kind of...

Taylor (03:20.321)
Yeah.

Taylor (03:31.053)
Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (03:31.173)
you know, bigger, smooth kind of curve, right? So you can imagine that because of this discrepancy of how smooth natural light is versus the spikiness of those two artificial lights, that a foot candle meter, if it was only registering the foot candle, it would kind of like under-represent how strong, like how bright that light feels, even though the PPFD was for sure high enough if you use a proper

Taylor (03:33.432)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (04:00.649)
power meter for those types of lights. So what was happening in the days of using, like before they discovered the using the power meters, was that people were putting their ceramic metal halide lights really close in order to get, you know, 5,000 foot candles, when in fact the PPFD was like way high because it didn't actually register those very spiky kind of things, but rather it was just registering it as, okay, what is this?

Taylor (04:03.35)
Right.

Darryl Cheng (04:29.661)
brightness feel like for a human eye. So all this to say that this is no longer an issue with white LED lights. White LED is also a nice smooth kind of bell curve. It's still not quite as nice as natural light. You know what? In fact, I can do this right now because I have a spectrometer. And that is to say, okay, so spectrometer, if I go over here from natural light...

Taylor (04:30.378)
Right.

Taylor (04:41.186)
Mm.

Darryl Cheng (04:56.014)
This is what natural light through a window looks like. But then if I go to my LED light over here.

Taylor (04:57.13)
Wow, that's nice reading. Yeah, beautiful.

Taylor (05:05.042)
Yeah, it's like 5,000 K.

Darryl Cheng (05:05.24)
This is LED reading, right?

Darryl Cheng (05:09.637)
Yeah, this is 5000k. You can tell because the blue spike is so much higher than the red, right? Um, so so basically i'm gonna see if

Taylor (05:12.437)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (05:19.069)
Oh it does, okay good. So I happened to have, I just turned on an old fluorescent light.

Taylor (05:25.33)
Okay, you got it all set up.

Darryl Cheng (05:28.346)
Look at this. I don't know if you can see this, but look at how.

Taylor (05:29.834)
I can barely see that, but oh, now I'm starting to see it. Yeah, blues random spikes everywhere. Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (05:33.297)
You see how spiky? Yeah, so this is the reason why foot candle and PPFD had such a big discrepancy if you measure number one, fluorescent lights, ceramic metal halide, or high pressure sodium lights. Those three types of lights all look kind of like this. But now when we have LEDs,

Darryl Cheng (05:58.141)
like we get this, which is a lot better. And also now it brings the foot candle and PPFD reading closer to what natural light is in terms of its conversion factor, which if we...

Darryl Cheng (06:14.309)
like natural light like this. And in fact, the reason why this red part here is so much higher is because I'm just reading like the kind of indirect light coming through my window and infrared light is a longer wavelength and it just kind of goes everywhere. But if I was to stand outside and shine this right at the sun and measure it, it would be a lot more even. Yeah. Anyway, so all this to say that

Taylor (06:16.31)
Modify Red.

Taylor (06:24.839)
Right.

Taylor (06:37.371)
Yeah, that's true.

Darryl Cheng (06:43.081)
Today when we measure white LED lights, the discrepancy between PPFD and foot candle is no longer such an issue that I can now sell this for cheaper than a PPFD meter and still people will get the same result. That is, they will know with pretty good certainty.

Taylor (07:03.02)
Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (07:11.709)
how far away to put the grow light. They will know how to calculate the DLI and everything. I mean, as long as you're using the same conversion factor, then this is kind of like another, I guess, thinking is that if I'm just growing my tropical foliage plants, then I don't need to even know my DLI to be that accurate with the grow lights, as long as it's somewhere in the range, right?

Taylor (07:40.555)
Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (07:41.577)
If I'm running a scientific study, if I'm growing a commercial scale, I don't know, cannabis or tomatoes or whatever, then perhaps I should invest in a PAR meter. But if I'm just casually growing my houseplants and I just want them to grow nicely, then a much cheaper lux meter will still tell you the same information is, I guess, my point.

Taylor (07:52.3)
Yeah.

Taylor (08:06.63)
Yeah, no, it will. On your website, you also have kind of guidelines for people for all these different plant types. For like, if you have this lumen output, or for this plant, this is the recommended lumen output for this plant is the recommended lumen output, you have this kind of chart, don't you on your website?

Darryl Cheng (08:26.321)
Right, right. Yeah, but it's not lumen output. It's the light received. So lumen is the rating of the output of a bulb, but then foot candle and lux is the measurement of the light received at a certain distance. Right? But it's easy to confuse these two because technically they are related. So anyway, but on the website is...

Taylor (08:31.398)
Lux.

Taylor (08:40.545)
Right.

Taylor (08:44.37)
I should know that.

Taylor (08:51.118)
Mm hmm. Yeah, Lux lumens lumens is like photons and lux is like PPFD.

Darryl Cheng (09:01.445)
Right, because PPFD has received the light received, whereas the lumens is output from the source. Meaning that if you put the, like even, like for example, you say to somebody, oh, this grow light, you know, puts out 2000 lumens, well, that's great. But if you put this light 20 feet away from your plant, it's not gonna do anything, right? So it's like, to know the difference is to say, like versus when I give my recommendations,

Taylor (09:24.8)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (09:31.005)
then I'm making my, I guess you could say the, I'm making my data to be agnostic of any specific grow light and just say, whatever grow light you use, just turn it on and measure from wherever distance you are. If it's too low, then move it closer. If it's way too high, then move it farther back. That's all I'm saying. And it's more of a way to empower the user to be able to.

Taylor (09:52.547)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (09:59.766)
control their own environment and to know how it works in terms of controlling it.

Taylor (10:04.667)
Yeah. Yeah. Give them the tools. And then if they're ambitious to try to go and like, just like piece it together, because it's very hard to like, lay it all out, you know, it's that you once you understand how it works, then you could apply it to any app, like any application or any plant type. But there is a little bit of learning, there was a little bit of like thinking, you know, there's a little bit of calculation that has to happen to get that resolved.

Darryl Cheng (10:17.801)
Ahem.

Darryl Cheng (10:27.257)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Taylor (10:29.318)
Um, so you've been helping a lot of people out there. I, are you getting, you're getting good feedback on the product. You're getting good, like are people saying, oh, wow, this helped me. This is like, look at my results. Are you seeing this, this feedback?

Darryl Cheng (10:41.429)
Yeah, I would say that it's so the the way that it's helping people is is again this sort of idea that You know, it's not for everyone, right? So it's it's not a tool. That's just gonna be like, oh It'll tell you put it here. It'll tell you put it there. Like that's not the way that this works this is more of like Like when you buy a ruler It doesn't teach you how or like a measuring tape. It's just a tool that helps you understand distances

Darryl Cheng (11:09.349)
It doesn't teach you how to build the house, right? So the light meter just tells you how bright is it, you know, right here, right now. But it's still up to you to understand how does your light change over the whole day, which is why I encourage measuring frequently at the same spot. So you get a sense of what levels you're going to get in this day, like in this spot, right? And of course I'm talking about for natural light.

Darryl Cheng (11:34.565)
Of course, with the grow light, as I mentioned, it's easy. You just turn it on and you also know how long you're keeping it on. So that calculation is much easier. It's more exactly controlled. But for natural light, you do need to measure on a frequent basis. And I think the main thing that it helps you with is really, I guess, calibrating your own sense of exactly how far can I put a plant from this, you know, whatever window and still get.

Taylor (11:34.689)
Yeah.

Taylor (11:40.61)
Controlled. Controlled.

Darryl Cheng (12:01.741)
Okay, let's say 100 foot candles enough for a snake plant kind of thing. Right. That's sort of the sense that I'm helping people to develop. And eventually they may not even need a light meter to understand like exactly how far away they can put it. Right. But it's just that because there's infinitely different size windows and infinitely different, you know, because people may have multiple windows, which is great or skylights even then measuring light is what is what allows you to then.

Taylor (12:05.432)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (12:30.521)
I guess make more confident decisions about that.

Taylor (12:35.126)
What are some plants that people buy and they completely don't know generally, like you had the most questions about when it comes to indoor lighting or indoor lighting for them.

Darryl Cheng (12:47.313)
So fiddle leaf fig is like the classic, classic example, I think because it's often shown in a lot of design magazines because it looks structural and kind of cool, right? But 90% of those photos, I'll say to myself, that plant's going to die in two or three weeks. And when I say die, I mean, it will just constantly drop leaves to the point where you're

Taylor (12:59.964)
Yeah.

Taylor (13:08.813)
Really?

Darryl Cheng (13:16.057)
you are just kind of like disappointed in how this plant looks and then you just quietly throw it away. That's what happens to a plant which is that it will shed its solar panels to the point of balancing how much light it's receiving with what's available and how much it can support, right? Because when you look at a fiddle leaf fig all lush and everything, where did it spend the last year? Probably in a greenhouse where the DLI was like between 10 and 20.

Taylor (13:35.042)
Hmm.

Taylor (13:42.903)
Hmm

Darryl Cheng (13:45.585)
Right? So you just suddenly put it into the dark corner of your room and the DLI could be like less than one. Then it's the same as a person who suddenly has 10 times less food to eat. What's going to happen? You're going to start losing weight and eventually you'll maybe even start to death, which is exactly what's happening to a plant in a dark corner.

Taylor (14:05.186)
So you're saying that those images, so you're saying those images are like staged most of the time. Like if it's a beautiful, healthy plant.

Darryl Cheng (14:14.602)
Yeah, yeah, people mostly use plants indoors for decor and therefore they will put it where they think it looks nice as opposed to the very well-known gardening tenant of the right plant for the right space, which implies you have to find the right space where a plant will actually grow for you.

Taylor (14:40.578)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (14:40.793)
And unfortunately, indoors, that's mostly going to be right in front of the window. And of course, even certain plants will grow better than others right in front of the window, because of just how varied people's windows can be.

Taylor (14:57.858)
I don't, yeah, lighting is such a huge topic. I mean, you said there's, with cannabis, there's been a lot of studies, HPS, metal halide, CMH, now LED, which is becoming more and more common, but houseplants is like this whole wild west. So, I mean, it's great that you're a pioneer in this area and you're really trying to like help people out because I just feel like so many people buy these plants and they just put them.

Taylor (15:27.182)
like you said in the corner or something where it looks good and then you're like, oh I murdered my house plant, I'm such a bad plant parent. What do you say to those people that are just, they're, they just, you know, maybe they need a little bit of education or what can you say to those people to help them?

Darryl Cheng (15:43.877)
Well, I would say that, you know, if you want to buy a plant purely for decor and that you're willing to treat it like cut flowers that need to be replaced, then by all means, buy the snake plant or whatever, or even fiddle leaf, put it wherever and just know for sure that it's going to just die slowly. Maybe die quickly if it's a fiddle leaf. But if you are looking to

Darryl Cheng (16:13.257)
grow or cultivate an indoor garden, then you have to acknowledge that there are limitations to how far away you can put a plant from the window. And there are also limitations to how much light is received by your particular window. So that to realize that perhaps this whole idea of a green thumb, like why does...

Darryl Cheng (16:39.121)
Why does my grandmother grow such nice plants? Well, have you seen perhaps how big her windows are and how little obstructions there are? Like the fact that people have different size windows is the main reason why the result of plant growth is so different between different houses. It doesn't matter, like no matter how much skill I might have in watering or whatever, if I only have a small window, like I can't grow that many plants. It's just that it's...

Darryl Cheng (17:08.333)
It's the limitation that we have to acknowledge and that people don't like to hear because, well, I mean, even plant sellers wouldn't really like to hear that because they have no interest in telling people, oh, this plant will not grow well for you. They'd rather just go with, yeah, they would rather just go with, oh, yeah, does great in low light. Sure, yeah. When you say it does great, it means it does just die slower and less noticeably than other plants.

Taylor (17:19.798)
right they might not have such a high return.

Taylor (17:26.752)
Yeah.

Taylor (17:32.238)
Do you sense a lack of this education in plant growth stores? Or yeah, is that really a true thing you think? Or are people really...

Darryl Cheng (17:41.945)
Well, I think it's not a lack of education as much as it is a need to be a need to give good, nice to hear and comfortable advice, right? Because the perfect example is watering. The natural question to ask about watering is how often do I water this plant? The question implies that this person thinks that

Darryl Cheng (18:11.893)
Each different plant has a specific frequency that is dependent upon the plant alone. But whenever someone asks me how often do I water this plant, I guess you could say the snarky answer is whenever it needs. So then the next question is, how do I know when it needs to be watered? Then I'll say, okay, well, if it's like a cacti or a succulent or snake plant,

Taylor (18:19.778)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (18:42.129)
the time, like the need for watering only occurs once the soil is bone dry, like completely dry. Right? And, when I say it in that way, it hopefully registers in the person's mind that, okay, if I'm putting this plant in my, let's call it, south-facing window and it gets three or four hours sun shining right on it, well, that soil can dry to be completely dry in, I don't know, three or four days.

Darryl Cheng (19:11.633)
So then I would then remember I'm watering it whenever it's fully dry. I see that it's fully dry, therefore I water. It doesn't matter if it was five days ago, it doesn't matter if it was two weeks ago, right? That's sort of the, I guess, mentality is I approach watering as like an observation of soil dryness. But the issue is I just took, I don't know, two minutes to explain all that.

Taylor (19:33.245)
Right.

Darryl Cheng (19:39.677)
But at a store, you don't have that kind of longer, more nuanced explanation to give to someone. You'd rather just say to them, once a week, right? That's because that's the way that people expect to have advice. They want it to be bite size and, you know, nice and easy and everything. And that's sort of like what I was fighting against, which is fighting against that kind of easy knee jerk reaction sort of.

Taylor (19:45.239)
Right.

Taylor (19:48.878)
Thanks for watching!

Darryl Cheng (20:07.225)
advice that makes it seem everything is easy without any nuance, that it doesn't help people actually understand how to water a plant and in fact makes them worse at it because then they'll put the plant anywhere they want, which step one is already bad for light. Then step two, oh it's once a week, okay water water water, after five weeks the plant rots and dies. Okay then oh you overwatered it, okay then you put the plant in the same dark corner.

Darryl Cheng (20:36.157)
and now oh I increased my watering to three weeks. Three weeks, three weeks, still dies, right? That's why the emphasis on light for me is so critical because I know people don't think about light that much.

Taylor (20:41.198)
Alright.

Taylor (20:51.958)
Right. Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (20:52.517)
And the reason for using a light meter is then when you put a number to it, it's concrete. You cannot argue anymore to say, oh, I thought this was bright and dark light. Well, was it roughly 200 foot candles most of the day? No, if you started to use light meter, like nowadays I can just look at where a person puts the plant and know that it's not even close.

Taylor (21:13.71)
So this kind of goes into your philosophy on growing plants. There's a lot of adjustment, things change. There's no perfect plant that's gonna grow indoors. It's just like this pursuit of like, trying to improve at least or learning, right? Is that what you'd say your approach is?

Darryl Cheng (21:36.889)
Yeah, I would say that I can summarize my approach as being that I accept that individual leaves, they have a limited lifespan. That means if a leaf dies, I don't treat it as, oh, it's a sign of something wrong, but rather it's that leaves time to go. Goodbye. But the contrast to this is, but I'm trying to...

Darryl Cheng (22:05.769)
give the conditions that are ripe to allow the plant to keep growing new leaves. Okay? So, number one, I accept that leaves die. But number two, I'm trying to give the plant enough good conditions so that new growth hopefully outpaces older growth that dies. And then the third point is, I have to constantly embrace the fact that the structure of the plant is going to change. And that at some point,

Darryl Cheng (22:34.781)
there may come a time when the structure is just, I don't know, too ugly or too gangly, something that doesn't mesh with my, with what I think the plant should look like, and that it's time to sort of like write a new chapter, propagate it, cut it back. Mostly propagation is the writing new chapter kind of thing, right? So, and to accept that this is the true, like, holistic.

Taylor (22:56.031)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (23:01.677)
understanding of what it means to own a house plan in the long term and that is to say It's constantly changing leaves will constantly die. So you better make sure that it keeps growing new leaves That's kind of like if I can summarize it as quickly as possible. That's what it is

Taylor (23:16.11)
Cool, yeah, I think that's logical and respectful. And yeah, I mean, you've been doing this a long enough time, so I'm just gonna trust you on that.

Darryl Cheng (23:26.485)
But you see, this is the thing. One of the things I want to say, which is different is that like the purpose of growing vegetables or cannabis or anything like any agricultural plant is that we want something from it, right? So the goal of growing a plant is very well defined. If you tweak the spectrum and whatever and you get a little bit more yield,

Taylor (23:46.07)
Production, yeah.

Darryl Cheng (23:55.577)
like in a statistically significant way of cannabis or whatever it is that you want from the plant, then you can say, yeah, tweaking that little thing did something for my end goal. But with houseplants, unless you're like kind of like measuring leaf size and everything or whatever like that, which I don't think anyone really is, but unless we're having such strict like goals to grow a houseplant.

Darryl Cheng (24:25.361)
Like, I'm just happy as long as the plant has a few nice leaves on it. That's what I'm happy with, right? So then in fact, the requirements, because they're so much looser, it makes the instruction of how to grow them more difficult because now we don't have as well-defined goals and, you know, causality things of A and B, you know, switching this little switch here and there. We don't have that precision anymore. So now when it comes to

Darryl Cheng (24:54.921)
growing houseplants, it feels like you said, the wild wild west, it just feels much less less well defined.

Taylor (25:04.7)
Mm-hmm. But we appreciate you trying to define it. In your book, what are some of the things you kind of cover in your book to help define the issues people are having?

Darryl Cheng (25:13.477)
Yeah, so the book, I think in the first half of the book is like a general, like foundational principles of how you look at your space and how you approach watering and all this good stuff. And I'm very happy to say that the light section takes up the most space, because to me, that's what has always been needed, which was to give light the importance it is to a plant.

Taylor (25:32.15)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (25:43.101)
wrote a book about how to grow themselves, they would talk extensively about light and that watering would just be, oh, you know, whenever I need it. If you look at whenever I need it, it'll be a simple matter of just looking at the soil. You know, fertilizer, repotting, all that stuff is all gonna be secondary to like, how well can I grow is dependent completely on how good my light is, right?

Darryl Cheng (26:12.625)
So anyway, the first half of the book is all about those fundamentals. And then the second half talks about specific plants. And I think what's different about my book is that it actually shows like progression over time of certain plants, just because I want to give people like a realistic sense of what does it look like to own a Monstera for three years? What does it look like to have a Mon,

Taylor (26:31.42)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (26:42.217)
to actually decline because it had thrips. And I talk about it in the book and to show that not everything is gonna be rosy. You just follow these, like, it's not like a, it's not like a baking recipe where everything will work just because you follow the instructions, right? It's, you're growing a plant, it's a living thing, and it's gonna be subject to what I call like the probability and harshness of nature, right? So not everything will work out and that's okay for plants because you know that it's a living thing that's not supposed to be.

Darryl Cheng (27:13.006)
perfect as long as you do everything perfect.

Taylor (27:17.31)
Yeah, that's such an awesome perspective and just a realistic one, I think, for a lot of people. And they kind of need to hear that. And that's probably why, you know, it's such a popular book and so well received because it's just honest and not, you know, bullcrap, I guess. Like all this flowery talk. No pun intended. I have a question about sustainability. I know for home growing...

Darryl Cheng (27:29.869)
Oh, thank you, thank you.

Darryl Cheng (27:34.059)
Hehehehe

Taylor (27:45.61)
Maybe people don't think it's such a big deal if they have just a couple of houseplants, but how can you bring sustainability into growing plants at home? Is it even a big subject or what can we do?

Darryl Cheng (27:58.11)
Yeah, it is an interesting topic because when you think about agriculture and then even now I live in a home with property and stuff, so clearly the stuff that I use outside, the volume is just so much more than what I do inside, even if inside I have 100 plants.

Darryl Cheng (28:22.705)
pots are so small that and I'm not replacing it every single year. So it's as if the concern seems to be a little less. But I will say that from a different angle of sustainability that the knowledge of growing houseplants in a way that allows you to keep them long term is in itself a sustainability issue, right? Because if you are just constantly killing plants...

Taylor (28:32.032)
Hmm.

Darryl Cheng (28:52.333)
uh, you know, every, and you keep replacing them, then we're kind of, we're kind of like encouraging this, this sort of conso, like a, you know, throw away mentality that, oh, I just buy them, you know, they're going to last for like less than a year and I just cut, you know, keep replacing them. Whereas, you know, I have one month's there at Thai Consolation and I've kept it, I've had it for five years and I don't plan on ever, you know, not having it. I'm just going to keep growing that one plant for a long time. So in a sense, the ability to

Taylor (28:53.067)
Yeah.

Taylor (29:03.607)
Alright.

Darryl Cheng (29:22.601)
to limit yourself in terms of how much you consume of plants is in itself like a sustainability goal and to have and to see your plants as long-term things that keep growing over the long-term and not to be so, I don't know, flippant with replacing them, then that's sort of like one big sustainability, I guess, goal that people can have with houseplants in particular.

Taylor (29:48.562)
Okay, well then that goes into my next question. For people who have been buying plants and they have been passing away or they're new to plant growing, what would you say to those people to kind of get them to the next level of not killing so many?

Darryl Cheng (30:04.717)
Yeah, I would say that maybe the first thing would be to like shift your mentality away from like reading advice and thinking that somehow proper care ensures that my plant will be perfect forever. That that in itself is what I think causes a spiral of, you know, I kill plants or whatever. And that is just that people see one yellowed leaf and they think the whole plant is dying.

Darryl Cheng (30:35.173)
and then they start to do things that make it even worse. So instead you realize that that leaf turnover is a completely natural thing for plants and that to also understand that your plant structure keeps changing so that now instead of letting the plant seller define what's a nice plant because what they're defining as a nice plant is just what it looks like right now.

Taylor (30:39.863)
Mm-hmm.

Darryl Cheng (31:04.261)
Right. That's how they sell them, which is kind of funny because I think about these really expensive plants, Montserrati constellation, you know, oh, if it's bigger, it's worth more. So it's like you're saying if I just buy a really small one and I'm able to grow it much bigger, then I've effectively 10x my investment just from having bought it earlier anyway. But it's like when you. Sorry, what were you talking about again with the.

Taylor (31:15.286)
Hmm.

Taylor (31:30.766)
10Xing our Monstera plants.

Darryl Cheng (31:33.193)
The next thing I'm saying, I was like, yeah. No, this was about, I guess, yeah, when you're a beginner and you, yeah, when you're a beginner and you realize that you start to realize leaf turnover is natural and that the plant structure keeps changing, it also changes your tastes in what plants will grow well for you, right? So instead of, as I mentioned, having the seller define what you should have just because it looks nice, you will start...

Taylor (31:38.939)
Some advice. Yeah.

Darryl Cheng (32:02.161)
buying the plants that actually grow well in the long term for you. So that means for instance, I'm going to say out loud that I don't like fiddly figs because I don't have a big enough window where it will actually keep a nice shape. I mean, it could probably keep, you know, two or three leaves on each branch, but I don't like that way that looks. So therefore I don't buy it. And whereas my monster at Thai consolation,

Taylor (32:26.561)
Mm.

Darryl Cheng (32:30.309)
has like several huge beautiful leaves. And even though I keep losing the older ones at the bottom, it keeps putting out a new one at the front. And I've been happy with how this plant looks over these past years. So I say, okay, this is a nice plant that I like to keep for a long time. And it's really interesting when I kind of survey, you know, much older generation people, which plants do they still have? And they can tell me if they've had it for 40 years, something crazy like that.

Darryl Cheng (33:00.481)
And it is the staple classics, pothos, peace lily, Christmas cactus. These are plants that I've heard of people keeping for decades. So I have those. And of course my plan is to keep them for decades. And so that's sort of like, maybe not so good for plant sellers, but that's really the reality of, you know, if you're going to grow plants indoors, you've got to see the ones that have a long-term potential and then, you know, treasure them that way.

Taylor (33:29.078)
Right? So be realistic about your expectations and maybe also confirm your space and what you have going on in terms of light already and things like that before you just go buy the pretty thing. Well, this has been a really engaging topic. I wanted to just ask you, like, how can people find you? Where can they get your book? Where can they sign up for your courses? You know, one-on-one consultations? You said you offered those. Where can people find all this?

Darryl Cheng (33:43.098)
Exactly, exactly.

Darryl Cheng (33:55.645)
Sure, sure. Yeah, all that. Yeah, I'm available at houseplantjournal.com and on Instagram also Houseplant Journal and YouTube Houseplant Journal. And all of those things have a link to this kind of like nice, you know, where all the links are compiled together. And on it, you'll find this light meter. It's called the LTH meter for light temperature humidity. And then my book.

Darryl Cheng (34:23.381)
is called The New Plant Parent and yeah it's available anywhere books are sold and I actually just wanted to show you this very proud moment of saying that my book has been translated to Chinese to Korean and also German.

Taylor (34:35.723)
Oh Chinese!

Taylor (34:40.974)
What's it in German?

Taylor (34:43.757)
Grun. I love it. What are you seeing in the German market for houseplants? Is there?

Darryl Cheng (34:43.971)
Green Zoo House

Darryl Cheng (34:52.829)
Well, I mean, my publisher has all those numbers. I don't really know. But I mean, I would assume that, you know, if it was translated to that language, then that particular imprint or publisher believes that, you know, the market is there for the book to do well in that other language. So, yeah, I'm very, very happy with that, especially the Chinese one, because then I can give it to all my relatives and they can have a read of it.

Taylor (34:53.678)
disinterested. OK.

Darryl Cheng (35:20.621)
I don't even know what it says so they have to tell me.

Taylor (35:24.002)
that can, I was gonna say ni hao in there.

Darryl Cheng (35:27.301)
Yeah, I'm sure it says something like that in there.

Taylor (35:31.23)
All right, well, it was really awesome to talk to you, Darryl. Super informative. I think this is one of the more interesting conversations I've had with the guests. So I appreciate this and I hope we can follow up and, you know, yeah, see how things are going. And I hope you can sell more books in other languages, not just the ones you showed me.

Darryl Cheng (35:51.212)
Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was really wonderful talk, Taylor.

Taylor (35:54.09)
Yeah, Darryl, thank you very much. Talk to you later. Bye.

Darryl Cheng (35:55.909)
Alright, thanks, bye.