Incense sticks in house plants

None of my house plants are currently blooming so I am burning incense to keep a nice atmosphere indoors right now. Too cheap to buy an incense stick holder, I merely stick them vertically in various house plant pots. The ashes fall into the pots. I assume I am not hurting the plants and perhaps even doing them some good. Any thoughts? Gene

You're adding a lot of soluble salts, especially K, and likely moving pH upward more thyan you might think, not to mention the possibility of phytotoxins from perfumes and dyes in the residual ash.

Al

If you've got a lot of houseplants and don't always stick the incense in the same one, I don't think it'll make a significant change. If a favorite plant starts to not thrive or turns yellow, you'll know something is wrong -- and re-pot. :-)

You are both probably correct. I now use a pot of dirt that has no plant in it. Works. Gene

You could use the pot with ashes to germinate seeds that require exposure to smoke or ashes to germinate!

I know of many plants that require heat scarification in order to get the germination process under way, but none that need ashes or smoke. More details, please? Plant names ......

Al

I thought I'd read about some sort of smoke treatment for certain hard-to-germinate seeds, but darned if I can remember which ones -- I just knew I didn't want to go to that much trouble, LOL. I'm not sure an incense [unk would do the trick, though. :-)

Oh this spring I was doing a lot of reading about South African plants, a lot of them are fire adapted. I have read this elsewhere too in my reading about seed germination, but can't recall exactly where, with specifics of how to do it. Some people have even used 'Liquid Smoke"!
John Manning is one of the big authors for South African plants, I think it was in his big encyclopedic book (I got it out of the library). I just did a quick internet search and here is a scholarly article about it:

http://depts.washington.edu/propplnt/2003guidelines/group1/Smoke%20Infusion.htm

Also in Australia:

http://anpsa.org.au/seed.html

a lot of blueberries grow in the wild after forest fires. there is also a saying in my region that forest fires attract bears because they love to eat blueberries. i don't know if blueberries grow because of the ash or if its something else but i think its worth a try :)