Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Work-related: certifiable

After re-taking the pesticide test on Monday, I am now eligible to be certified to spray pesticide in the state of Iowa. I'm not actually certified yet, because my employer still has to send stuff off to the state, and then the state sends stuff back, and I'm not sure how long that all takes. Or at least that's how I understand it.

There is also a raise that goes along with this. So yay me.

In more or less unrelated news, we have our first few Viola flowers of the season:

Viola x 'Cutie Pie'


Those don't really count as indoor plants, of course, and consequently shouldn't be on the blog here. But they're pretty, and Violas are familiar to me and I like them anyway.


7 comments:

Tracy said...

Congrats on passing, and Yay for the raise. With summer coming on, don't limit ur blog to indoor plants, go for the outdoor ones too, they are interesting as well. Love your blog!

Aiyana said...

Cutie Pie is a good name for this hybrid.
Congrats on your certification. I've always found it interesting that many areaa of gardening, landscape maintenance and irrigation installation are so highly regulated. Even more interesting is that probably 85% of the people in Arizona who perform those tasks are unlicensed, and they don't seem to get in trouble.
Aiyana

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! I had to postpone taking mine until April - too much to do, no time to study, and car in the shop.

Hermes said...

Well done. More money to look after waifs and strays too.!

Mr. Green Genes said...

Great Mr. S! Maybe more money per month will mean more plants to buy will mean less money per month. However, we'll be reading more from you then. Looking forward to it, and all the best!

Anonymous said...

I have my first Viola, not sure what kind, but I have heard about starting them from leaves. So, I tried it - and not one root on 4 leaves. What can I do?
Also, do you have any tips on getting lots of flowers or just general care - other than water from the bottom and don't get the leaves wet?
One more thing, Viola is not an indoor plant?

From KD in NC

mr_subjunctive said...

I think you're probably thinking of African violets (Saintpaulia ionantha cvv.), which are indoor plants and can be produced from leaves. Violas are a different thing entirely.

Tips? We've had pretty good luck at work getting them to root in damp vermiculite. This takes a while, but seems to give the best results. Starting leaves in soil tends to make them rot, in my experience, though I've occasionally managed to make that work. One can also keep leaves in water until they root, and then transfer them to soil, though that also tends to take a long time. Vermiculite is probably the easiest method, for my money.

See the link above for general care info.