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Why does nobody talk about the fern that came back from the dead after my cat peed in it
Back in March I left my rabbit's foot fern on the porch in Athens for two days and my cat used the pot as a litter box, so I figured it was done for and shoved it behind the shed. Three weeks later I found new fiddleheads pushing up through what looked like straight ammonia damage, and now it's the biggest plant I own. Is it the urine or just ferns being unkillable, because I have questions.
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troyh551mo ago
A buddy of mine had almost the same thing happen with a staghorn fern his roommate killed with beer. Roommate poured a half-finished bottle in the pot before a trip, came back to brown mush, and chucked it in the compost corner. Fast forward a month and there's this bright green nub poking out of the dead crown like nothing happened. He swears it grew faster after that than it ever did before, which makes zero sense unless the sugar and yeast did something weird to the soil. My guess is ferns just store a ton of energy in that fuzzy root ball and the ammonia burn only killed the fronds, not the rhizome underneath. Cats peeing in pots is mostly a death sentence for other plants though, so yours getting a glow-up out of it is wild. Anyway the urine probably isn't the magic part, the fern was just playing dead and waiting for the abuse to stop.
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