Hi David!
Concerning humidity loving plants--I am just guessing we are primarily talking about tropical plants then?
My thoughts are that the plants would prefer to be warmer and humid during the day when they receive light and have their cool period at night --still with humidity-- because that is what they would get in their natural environment.
As far as I know, they like humidity all the time regardless of the temperature--but I think that they need it more when it is warmer. Probably they could tolerate lower humidity when it is cooler, but humidity loving plants don't really like to be cold and dry either.
How are your plants doing? with cool days and warm nights and whatever humidity you do provide?
If they seem to be suffering a little I would suspect that the problem is not so much a lack of humidity when it is cool in the day but more the fact that it is cool in the day...
If they are doing fine, then humidity probably does not play a significant role when they are cool in the day...
Matches--I have heard of people using a book of paper matches at the bottom of the planting hole and covered with soil for peppers--some rave about their success with this method and others claim it makes no difference.
The chemistry:
http://www.cengage.com/chemist...
The tip of a strike-anywhere match is made from a mixture of powdered glass, binder, and tetraphosphorus trisulfide (P4S3). When the match is struck, friction ignites the combustion reaction of P4S3. The heat from this reaction causes an oxidizing agent such as potassium chlorate to decompose, which in turn causes solid sulfur to melt and react with oxygen, producing sulfur dioxide and more heat. This then ignites a paraffin wax that helps to “light” the wooden stem of the match. The chemistry of a safety match is quite similar, but the location of the reactants is different. The phosphorus needed to initiate all the reactions is found on the striking surface of the box. Thus, in theory, a safety match is able to ignite only when used with the box. For a safety match, the striking surface contains red phosphorus, which is easily converted to white phosphorus by the friction of the match head on the striking surface. White phosphorus ignites spontaneously in air and generates enough heat to initiate all the other reactions to ignite the match stem.
Personally, I use matches to ignite fire but not as fertilizer because there are so many better, balanced, cheaper, and legitimately beneficial fertilizer options available that are not very useful for starting fires
(I find it funny that we here speculate first that the matches were confiscated from students
and you are right Lin--fire hazards and safety rules would certainly prohibit playing with matches in schools here!)
Anyway, what to do with all those matches? Since they are the thing with value as matches, perhaps you could return them to the match manufacturer in exchange for empty boxes which are the thing of value to you and your students. In the future, perhaps you could even figure out how to acquire the boxes themselves without the matches from the manufacturer of the boxes? I'll bet you could get a lot more empty boxes for the same investment without the disposal problem on the back end.
I'm not sure what you mean by being an educator and having thousands of extra matches to stick into the plant pots but maybe someone else will understand that and be able to offer advice.
