PWJ Plant Experiments: Fire, Ice and fertilizer

In December 2025 i did a 3-part plant experiment series on my YouTube channel (@PlantsWithJules) to learn more about how plants react to certain things like fire, the freezing cold, an explosion of fireworks and over-fertilizing. 

WARNING: DO NOT TRY THESE EXPERIMENTS AT HOME!

I learned a lot from this experiment, and that was my goal. Though i sacrificed over 6 plants for this, this is for my development and learning process.

If you want to see the entire playlist of the experiment video which may include future updates, CLICK HERE!

Let´s start with experiment #1 (text goes on below the video):

Like i said, this was for educational purposes only, and please do not recreate this experiment at home, it can be dangerous.

Now what were the results and what survived from this experiment?

I noticed that those regular plastic pots just melt away and burn, so not safe at all. When exposed to fire, leaves wilt, the sap evaporates and the leaves burn. Your propagations in water will be the safest in a house fire! Everything that´s underwater stays cooler aka more protected. The thing is though... Water evaporates, and glass shatters at such temperatures! So there is no guarentee that it will survive. The fire experiment with the propagation in water-filled glass only lasted about 3 minutes before being fully done burning, so i cannot tell you how long glass will stay intact in a house fire.

Now i had a Rhaphidophora tetrasperma in that glass propagation and the top part went up in flames and that died, but everything that was underwater sort of survived! I put it in sphagnum moss to propagate, but the damage spread down to the last node. As of writing this (February 9th), There is 1 node left and no sign of growth.

Fun fact:

I just to not understand how forest fires where even possible because plants are basically full of water, but what i didn´t think about was that leaves have a BUNCH of microscopic holes in them which are kind of like pores. When there is an extreme amount of heat nearby, the sap will get pushed out of those holes which plants use for photosynthesis, the sap evaporates and the leaf will be fully dry, and a dry leaf can burn.

Experiment #2: Ice, ice, baby!

(Not ice as in the terroristic American government-funded organization that kidnaps, kills and abuses ´´illegal´´ immigrants and take them away to get deported. I am talking about ice as in.., well... ice/frozen liquid.)

In this experiment i placed 2 or 3 plants in the freezer, with 1 being frozen in a block of ice to see in stages how plants react to such cold. The temperature inside the freezer was around 16°C (3.2°F), so it was quite cold.

Now what were the results and what survived from this experiment?

Absolutely NOTHING survived this experiment (as expected), but i did learn a bit from this!

So when in just above-freezing temperatures, plant cells die off which causes the leaves to turn brown, but as soon as it is freezing it is almost like time stops: barely any visible changes and the plant freezes in place. Like you might expect, this makes the plant extremely fragile, so if you even touch a leaf a bit too hard it´ll split in half, Also, it defrosts suprisingly fast! You´ll see that it is extremely floppy and weak while turning entirely brown, and that means that the plant is dead and not rescueable. So unless you know that a specific plant that was exposed to such temperatures can survive freezing temps, throw the plants away or compost it.

Experiment #3: Over-fertilizing & firework explosion

For this experiment i bought 2 Ficus elastica tineke (Fun fact: Botanical names are both singular and plural so no need to add an S at the end! Oh and only the genus name starts with a capital letter, the rest of the words/names are lowercase), and i fertilized 1 normally, and i used WAY too much fertilizer on the other and occasionally used just pure liquid fertilizer without watering it down. I wanted to be able to recognize the signs of over-fertilizing, so that is why i did this experiment. 

Now what were the results and what survived from this experiment?

Only the Ficus that got fertilized according to the label survived. I used a fertilizer from POKON for this experiment.

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Here are the biggest signs to tell if a plant is being over-fertilized:

-Leaves start to wilt, and it starts at the lowest leaf and you can slowely see each leaf progressively start to wilt more and more.

-The wilting doesn´t stop, it only gets worse. No matter how much or how little sun it gets, how often you water or anything else, nothing can stop the wilting.

-The petioles (little stem that connects the leaves to the stem) start turning mushy and black, and eventually fall off.

Now i tried my best to save the plant but what i learned is that once that amount of fertilizer gets into the plants´ system, there is no turning back. Propagating the healthy looking parts didn´t work either.