Pon Addict has never really been about simply owning plants. I like knowing what they are doing, why they are doing it, what changed, what worked, what did absolutely nothing, and occasionally what I did that made everything worse.
That naturally resulted in collecting a slightly unreasonable amount of data.
For a long time, all of that lived in Notion. It started simply enough: a database of my plants, some photographs, dates, notes and records. As the collection grew, so did the amount of information I wanted to preserve. Leaves became individual records. Flowers became individual records. Propagations, measurements, environmental data, nutrition, provenance, parentage and significant events all started becoming connected.
Eventually, I outgrew Notion.
I wanted more control over how the data was stored, how different records interacted with each other, what could be automated and, most importantly, what I could actually learn from everything I had been recording. So I built my own plant management system around the way I grow and document my collection.
The Pon Addict Digital Collection is the public side of that system.
A digital botanical garden
When I started building the new system, I realised there was no reason for all of it to remain hidden in a private database.
I have always liked the idea of being able to show someone my collection without sending them a list of plant names or fifty photographs. So the Digital Collection became something closer to my own little online botanical garden.
Each specimen has its own record. You can browse the plants I grow, see photographs, follow their development and explore the information attached to them. Depending on the specimen, that might include its growth history, leaf measurements, flowering records, provenance, lineage, propagation history or other observations collected throughout its life in my collection.
It is connected directly to the same system I use privately, rather than being a separate website that I have to remember to maintain. Information intended for public viewing can therefore appear as the underlying records are updated. The sensitive and private parts stay private.
Instead of telling you what I grow, I can send you a link.
And if you happen to care about an unreasonable amount of plant data, there is plenty of that too.
Why collect so much data?
Because plants are very good at telling you what happened after it has already happened.
A leaf does not suddenly become smaller because of something that happened that morning. A growth slowdown, aborted inflorescence, root problem or nutritional issue can be the result of conditions that existed considerably earlier. Looking at the plant in front of me only tells me part of the story.
Its history provides the rest.
By recording individual leaves, I can calculate things such as the average time between leaves, how long a leaf spends developing, emerging, expanding and hardening, and how those values change over time. I can follow changes in leaf dimensions and growth rate rather than relying on my memory of whether I think the plant is growing faster.
That creates a baseline for the individual specimen.
If something starts moving away from that baseline, I have a reason to look closer. Sometimes that can provide an indication that something has changed before the plant reaches the point where the problem becomes painfully obvious.
More importantly, it allows my care to become less reactive.
If I understand where a plant is within its normal growth cycle, I can start thinking about what it is likely to require next rather than waiting for it to show me what it was missing.
Leaves are only part of it
The same system extends into flowering.
By recording flowering events and their individual stages, I can begin to understand how a particular specimen behaves reproductively. Previous flowering records can help me anticipate future stages and prepare for them rather than discovering one morning that the plant has decided today is apparently the day.
That matters particularly for breeding.
If I know what stage an inflorescence is approaching, I can prepare pollen, plan crosses and adjust nutrition around the plant’s current demands and my goals for that flowering event. Over multiple events, those records also begin to show patterns that would be very difficult to reconstruct from memory alone.
The same applies to propagation, rooting, repotting and other major events. Instead of existing as disconnected notes, they become part of the plant’s timeline and can be viewed alongside what happened before and after them.
The plants even get their
own environmental records
Some of the data does not require me to enter anything at all.
Temperature and humidity information is periodically sent directly to the relevant plant records from the system controlling and monitoring the environments in my growing cabinets.
Day and night values are recorded and summarised across different periods, including daily, 7-day, 14-day and 30-day data. That means changes in a plant can be considered alongside the environment it was actually experiencing at the time.
If growth suddenly changes, I do not have to wonder whether the cabinet was warmer that month or whether night humidity had been different. There is a record.
That is where collecting data becomes genuinely useful. A leaf measurement by itself is interesting. A leaf measurement connected to the previous leaves, the time between them, the plant’s nutrition, flowering activity, environmental history and significant events provides context.
And context is usually what I am actually looking for.
What can you do with it?
You absolutely do not need to build a slightly deranged plant database to benefit from the same idea.
The public collection gives you real specimens to explore. You can look at how a plant has developed over time, how frequently it grows, how successive leaves compare, when it flowers and, where the information is available, what conditions surrounded those events.
It is not intended to tell you that because one of my Anthuriums took a certain number of days to produce a leaf, yours should do exactly the same. My environment, growing system, nutrition, genetics and individual specimen are different from yours.
Instead, use the data to understand what might be worth observing in your own collection.
Start recording when leaves emerge. Measure them. Photograph them consistently. Write down when you repot. Record flowering events. Keep track of major changes to nutrition or environment.
Eventually you stop asking, “Is this plant growing slowly?”
You can ask, “Is this plant growing more slowly than it normally does?”
That is a much more useful question.
Why make all of this public?
Partly because I think it is interesting.
Partly because provenance, history and data should not have to disappear into someone’s private spreadsheet.
And partly because Pon Addict has always been built around sharing what I learn while growing plants, including the experiments that work, the ones that do not, and the things I only understand because I bothered to record them.
The Digital Collection lets me take that further.
It is a living record of my collection rather than a finished catalogue. Plants grow. Leaves emerge. Flowers develop. Specimens get propagated. Conditions change. New data gets added. The collection changes with them.
There will probably always be more information I decide I absolutely need to track.
For everyone else, it is simply an open door into the collection.
Have a look around.