Two roommates with little botanical knowledge thought they could make a quick profit by growing ferns for the commercial florist market. They thought it would be very easy. All they had to do was collect the thousands of spores produced by a fern on their desktop and plant these like tiny seeds in individual pots. If they placed the pots in the sun, fertilized and watered the spores, and waited about a year, they would have plants that they could sell. Why are they doomed to failure