Pretty pictures: July roadside flowers, yellow/blue

Here's the second round of roadside flower pictures from our trip last Thursday. As with the previous group, pictures will be clearer and more detailed if opened in separate windows, and I encourage people who know any of the unidentified plants in the post to speak up.

It's black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) season again here. I think I would have to be lowered over a field on a crane or something in order to get the kind of photograph that would properly illustrate just how many there are: the flowers all but disappear when you try to take a long, low-angle shot of them. This, however, is maybe somewhat illustrative of the quantity we've got in the area right now. Just picture it multiplied several million times.

This, of course, is the more traditional PATSP view of a Rudbeckia. Only a few of the flowers had the dark spots at the base of the petals like this one does: I have no idea whether this is significant or not, but it's something I noticed.

Good old mullein. (Verbascum thapsus) I've loved these since first becoming aware of them. If I ever get a real garden going outside, I'll have to remember to try to include some of these. This photo doesn't really show you what the flower spike looks like: for that, you can look at last year's set of photos.

I don't know what this is, but I feel like I probably ought to: they had all but taken over the state a couple weeks ago. Simultaneously weedy (as individuals), pretty (en masse, or close-up as seen here), hideous (as the flowers die) and nondescript (all year except for June-August).

UPDATE: I think there's a good chance that this is Pastinaca sativa, wild parsnip.

Close-up picture of another NOID; any given plant will have hundreds of these little spikes of tiny white flowers.

The same NOID, but the whole plant. These, too, are everywhere around here, though they seem to favor the edges of fields, and recently-cultivated fields, instead of ditches and roadsides.

UPDATE: Almost certainly Melilotus alba, white sweet clover. Thanks to Hugh.

Chicory (Cichorium intybus), another sentimental favorite that I also took pictures of last year. Last year's picture was better, actually, because it wasn't quite as ridiculously windy on whatever day I took it. Still, this color is self-evidently awesome.

I don't know what this one is, precisely, though the arrangement of the flowers suggests an Allium or something like it. The flower color (which is more or less accurate), though, is something I've never seen in an Allium before. Maybe I just don't know my Alliums. Anybody know? I've only ever seen it growing wild in this one spot (a ditch along a highway).

UPDATE: Probably Tradescantia ohiensis, not an Allium. Which is kind of a relief. Hat tip to Claude.

I also don't remember ever seeing this before, but there was a lot of it in a spot just outside of Iowa City, and it's pretty enough that I want to suspect that it was deliberately cultivated.

This is the foliage that goes along with the flowers in the previous picture.

UPDATE: I think this last one is probably Verbena stricta, or hoary vervain. Partly this is because the flower spikes seem to be longer than in Verbena hastata, which is the next closest species, but also because the davesgarden.com photo I linked to includes the detail that it's a roadside weed in Missouri. Thanks to RJ Flamingo for pointing me in a verbenerly (verbeasterly?) direction.

Infrequently Asked Question: 550ish plants? How?

I have, on occasion, been asked how I can manage to fit so many houseplants into my living space. It's a fair question. The answer hasn't always been clear to me, either. I've been thinking about it again lately because a reader asked (by e-mail) a couple weeks ago, and it occurred to me that this is something I hadn't addressed yet on the blog, exactly how I manage to stack plant upon plant in a way that enabled me to get 550 or so in a two-bedroom apartment.

There are three key components of my set-up. The first is simple and obvious: small plants take up less room than large ones. If you just want to impress people with how many plants you have, get a bunch of 3- and 4-inch ones and call it a day. This isn't quite how I do it -- I think just by the amount of space they take up, my 6-inch plants are probably the bulk of the collection -- but there are quite a few 3s and 4s, especially among the succulents.

The second part is: four-foot shop lights. They're easy to find, and can be had for about $10 if you shop around a little. Four-foot fluorescent bulbs are not cheap, but they also last for a long time,¹ and fluorescent light is perfectly adequate for a lot of different plants as long as it's not too far away from them, so they're cost-effective in the long run.

African violets, Saintpaulia ionantha cvv. African violets are often grown under all-artificial light.
(I am not, by the way, a fan of the special "plant lights," formulated specially to produce extra-large amounts of the red and blue wavelengths plants need. They're outrageously expensive, for one thing, and I also don't like the unnatural purple color. Regular cool white and warm white bulbs² do just fine.)

The third part, and arguably the most important from a plant-density angle, is: shelving.

I use wire shelves. I don't really have a good name for the particular product (The last boxes I bought said they contained "black wire storage," which amused me: finally! A place to stick all those annoying black wires!), but they're sold in a lot of different places: I've seen them at Lowe's, Menards, Target, etc. There are often a range of different sizes: usually a given company's shelves will fit together regardless of whether you have them all the same size or not, but it's worth paying attention to. (You should definitely try to make sure you're getting all the same color, and from the same manufacturer: this will save you trouble later. I've seen them in black, chrome, and white.) I recommend six-foot tall (72"), for the simple reason that six-foot is usually as tall as they get, and if maximum plant density is a goal, more height is better than less height. The widths vary, though they're usually three-foot (36") or four-foot (48") wide. Four foot is better if you're going with the standard four-foot shop lights. Three-foot may be more suitable for a window, if you're relying on natural light and don't have to worry about fitting shop lights on there.


As packaged and displayed, these shelving units are usually just four poles and four or five shelves, which can be placed more or less anywhere on the poles, so you can adjust the heights of the shelves to your individual needs. I've found that sometimes I don't want to use all the shelves they include: five shelves over a span of six feet means that the average distance between shelves is only 5/6 foot, or ten inches. You might be surprised at how few of your houseplants are under ten inches tall. However, if you buy two sets at once, there's a trick you can use to get much more usable space, which is that you can connect the two sets of shelves with a third set in between:


This way, instead of having ten shelves that are all only 10 inches apart on average, you have ten shelves that are all 21.6 inches apart (72*3/10) on average, which is much more useful spacing for your average houseplant. You can continue this if you want to, and buy a third set of shelves, and connect them twice across the gaps, which puts your spacing at 24 inches apart (72*5/15), and if you really need additional height you can always just leave out some of the shelves that come with the set.

If you run out of wall and need to turn a corner, you can connect two lines of shelves by having both sets share one pole. I'm not sure how to describe it in words, but maybe this picture will illustrate well enough:


The circled pole is shared by a long set of shelves going off to the right of the picture, and by a three-foot shelf going to the left. A fun thing about this is that if I'm really, really slow and careful about it, the shelves on the left can be rotated around the pole to get the two large cacti in the corner out to be watered or whatever, and then swung back into place when they're done, thus leaving the corner still, in theory, usable.

Anyway. So this was the basic set-up I had in three different spots in the apartment, when we lived there. You can, if you are so inclined, try to suspend shop lights from underneath each shelf, but it's easier to just lay the shop lights on top of each shelf, pointing downward through the shelf they're resting on to light the plantsbelow. In some cases, I took advantage of that by placing small cuttings on the back of the shop lights, using the light above the plants for intense illumination and the light below them for bottom heat. It worked better for some things than for others, of course, but when it worked, it worked amazingly well.

The lights can then all be plugged into power strips, and the power strips placed on timers, to turn on sets of lights all at once.

One bad thing about the shelves is that it can be hard to get smaller pots to balance properly: you have to place a three-inch pot pretty carefully on wires that are an inch apart. I eventually resorted to getting some flat plastic (acrylic? polycarbonate?) sheets to lay down on top. They don't have to be especially strong, just flat. The air circulation suffers, but you have less dirt raining down on the floor, which is a plus.

It's also very easy for plants to fall over the back edge of a shelf, so I find it works best when I have one of these up against a wall, with the lights in back. Though putting them close to, but not touching, windows did work in the apartment in a few spots, and sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

The basement shelves. These are possibly going to have to be redone later, because I'm not happy with the range of heights I got out of them and the distribution of warm and cool bulbs, but the general idea should be more or less clear by now.
What does a set-up like all this cost? Well, say you're going to buy two sets of 6-foot tall, 4-foot wide³ wire storage units and connect the fifteen shelves you get from that as far as they'll go, and light the backs of every shelf you can light the back of. Target often has these units available for about $60 each,⁴ so that's $120, and then if you're setting up like in my amateurish sketch above, you can light nine of the shelves (the very lowest one is too close to the floor to get any plants under, so there's no point in lighting it). That means nine shop lights and eighteen fluorescent bulbs. Figure $10 each for shop lights, and figure a box of twelve cool white bulbs costs $25 and a box of twelve warm white bulbs costs $35, and that a light timer can be had for $4 and a power strip costs $8:

$120 shelving units
$90 shop lights
$25 warm white bulbs
$35 cool white bulbs
$24 power strips
+$12 light timers
$306 total

And what have you gotten for the $306? Well, you have ten shelves plants can go on, plus two sections of floor underneath the shelves where plants could also go. Each shelf is roughly 1.5 x 4 feet, or 6 square feet, so that gives you 72 square feet of space, except that the shop lights take up about (9*4*0.4) 14.4 square feet of that so you're really only getting (72-14.4) 57.6 square feet of space.⁵ And then that's only a net gain of (57.6-18) 39.6 square feet, because the whole set-up takes up 18 square feet of floor space that were there previously.

So 39.6 new square feet of growing space for $306: it's $7.73 per square foot. Pricey, but: all the new space, plus the floor area it takes up, is well-lit, higher-humidity (because the plants are closer together) space with good air circulation (wire doesn't block airflow), it's vastly cheaper than the equivalent 6'x6' greenhouse or room addition would be, you won't have to buy fluorescent bulbs for a while, the heights of the shelves can be adjusted as plants grow, and it doesn't add to your heating bill as dramatically as adding a room would. (It does use some additional electricity, but not really so much that you'd notice a difference unless you get really crazy with it.)

I was getting, on average, about 12-18 plants per shelf back in the apartment, so this would be space for approximately 135 plants, or more than that if you pick up more 3- and 4-inch plants like I recommended.

My mini-greenhouse. If you desperately needed to have a very, very high-humidity area for propagation or whatever, you could probably wrap a shelf or two in clear plastic more or less like this and get something functional, if not pretty.
Set up another three units like this in another three rooms, and you have (57.6*4) 230 square feet of plant-growing space plus another 40 square feet of bottom-heat propagation space, room for 540 plants, and you've spent about $1224. The best part of this is that you can buy new shelves one unit at a time, so it's $1224, but in lots of little chunks over a long period. Unless you're really getting serious about propagation, or planning to buy a very large number of plants all at once, you can spend the cash in dribs and drabs, which makes it all sort of affordable. Or at least the kind of expensive you don't notice while it's happening.

The shelves are also moderately good bookshelves or aquarium stands,⁶ if you change your mind later and decide that you'd rather not keep so many plants. I mean, they're a decent long-term investment on their own.

So now you know how I crammed them all in. Is it an example to be emulated?⁷ I suppose depends on your priorities.

-

¹ A lot of people will advise you to change bulbs after a year, even if they've not burnt-out. I know this is something the hard-core, competitive African violet growers do, for example. It is unquestionably the case that light output of fluorescent lights drops over time, and I can definitely see how this might become relevant if one were trying to create very standardized, uniform plants, or if one were trying to grow plants with very exacting light requirements. I don't worry about it so much, personally, because as I mentioned, fluorescent bulbs are not cheap. Also, the sites recommending this never really say what you're supposed to do with a whole bunch of dim, year-old fluorescent bulbs.
² One recommendation I've seen, that I do like, is to mix one cool white (more blue) bulb with one warm white (more red) in each fixture. I honestly don't think the plants care, but the resulting color of light is a little more natural. Also, if you're worried about the red/blue wavelengths thing, mixing warm and cool bulbs would be a good way to feel like you're doing something about this without going bankrupt or turning your home lavender. I don't personally mix warm and cool lights in all of my light fixtures, because, again, I don't think the plants care that much, but in the cases where I have mixed the colors, I like the color of the light better, personally.
³ In most cases, the depth of the shelves is 18 inches, though other sizes are available. It really doesn't matter as long as you're careful not to buy different depths. You can mix three-foot-wide shelves with four-foot-wide shelves easily enough, and if you plan it properly you can mix different heights, too. But depths you have to match up correctly.
⁴ (though not always: right now their web site says $150: that's not typical, or even heard of, in my experience. The website's price structure is clearly different from that of the brick and mortar stores.)
⁵ Plus the backs of six of those shop lights could be used as bottom-heat, top-light propagation areas, so that's (6*4*0.4) 9.6 square feet of propagation area, in theory.
⁶ Mine were originally used as bookshelves; the plants didn't begin to crowd out the books until I'd had the shelves for eight years, and by then a lot of the books had moved on anyway. I'm not 100% certain about using them as aquarium stands: I forget exactly what the maximum weight capacity is supposed to be. Enough to have them full of books, in any case. They should certainly be adequate for a ten-gallon aquarium full of water, or a twenty-gallon terrarium, on each shelf. One minor drawback: the wires do bounce a little bit when heavy things are dropped on them, so they may not be quite as stable as you'd want: that could probably be dealt with by adding a sheet of plastic or a piece of plywood or something. Also, shop lights don't have quite as many alternate applications as the shelves themselves do, so you would still be stuck with those. But your shop, if you have a shop, would be blindingly bright.
⁷ No. It is probably not.

Pretty pictures: July roadside flowers, pink/orange

Took a back-roads route from Iowa City last Thursday, and found all these. Plus there's another post with more flowers coming up tomorrow Tuesday. As always, if you know the identity of the one NOID, let me know in comments.

All of these will be bigger, clearer, and more detailed if opened in a new window.

When I took this picture, I was pretty sure it was a Queen Anne's lace, Daucus carota. Then as I got to looking at it afterward, I was thinking that it seemed awfully full for Queen Anne's lace, and maybe it was some other, related plant. Now I'm kind of leaning toward the Daucus theory again, but I'm unsure. Open in a new window to see the odd insect sitting right in the middle of it all.

I've taken photos of fleabane (Erigeron sp.) before. It's not a big thrill, and this particular batch looks kinda ratty (it's been windy a lot lately) but I feel obliged to include it for the sake of completeness.

Hadn't ever really noticed these NOIDs before: they're pretty tiny, and the plants look like hell (which you can kind of see from the foliage I didn't crop out), but when you get up close enough, the flowers are very nearly attractive. Not quite, but very nearly.

I have yet to take a picture of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) flowers that didn't also include a ton of bugs as well. I think the common name should be changed to "pink orgyflower" or something similar. Interesting greenish, non-metallic bee in the top right.

I think this is a Rosa arkansana, prairie rose, in which case it is the official state flower of Iowa. If I'm wrong, then it's most likely a multiflora rose, Rosa multiflora, in which case it is a noxious invasive weed. Thorny son of a bitch either way.

Red clover, Trifolium pratense. I can't imagine any readers not knowing this plant, but I've led a sheltered and exclusively North American life thus far, so maybe they're news to someone. These are everywhere here, all the time. I also really like them.

Michigan lily, Lilium michiganense. We have orange daylilies all over the place here -- in some spots they're lining both sides of the road for a couple hundred feet. I remembered my grandmother having Michigan lilies along a slope to one side of her house, but was beginning to think I must have confused them with daylilies, because I'd never seen any around here that weren't obviously cultivated: I was pretty sure that hers hadn't been deliberately planted.

Now that I've seen this bunch, though, which was just sitting in the middle of nowhere along a road, with no house or other structure nearby, I feel a little more confident in saying that no, what she had really were Michigan lilies (which she called tiger lilies). 'Cause apparently they are around if you look for them. Just not to the same degree as the orange Hemerocallis.

Asclepias tuberosa. OMG guys I love these. We had had them at work last year, but sold out before any flowered, so I never got to see.

I've been noticing little flashes of orange low in the grass along Highway 218 for a couple weeks now, but of course we're always going by too fast to get a good look, so I wasn't sure what they were. The batch I finally took a picture of happened to be conveniently located near a gravel/highway intersection near Lone Tree, where we had to stop anyway.

Blogroll addition

Just a quick note regarding an addition to the blogroll: I have added the delightful "Nature Assassin," a blog about a young woman in Chicago and the houseplants she kills. More or less. Sometimes they live. Check it out.

I'm particularly fond of "Aced, You Cottony Fuck," though I worry that victory over the mealybugs was declared prematurely. (Victory against mealybugs always seems to be declared prematurely.) I'm also interested in "Bow chicka' bow bow . . . ," because the wall color in the pothos pictures is almost exactly the color I used to have the office in the apartment painted. Though that really doesn't have much to do with anything, in terms of plant care. Anyway. Go say hi.

Random plant event: Impatiens bud

The volunteer Impatiens I asked about a while ago has flourished in Nina's terrarium, and is now one of the five biggest plants in there. Which I guess I'm okay with?

I would have been pretty sure about the ID by this point regardless, but the plant has decided to remove all doubt by flowering. So far, it looks like the flower is plain white: I've got my fingers crossed for a little bit of some other color.


I have helpfully labeled the bud in the above picture, as well as pointing out the anole poop, just in case anybody gets those mixed up.

Happy 4th of July to everyone who's inclined to have a happy 4th of July. We're expecting heavy rain and possibly thunderstorms here. It's supposed to last more or less all day long, with a high of 71F/22C, so I expect to enjoy myself.

Pretty picture: Pentas lanceolata

It is apparently true that not only will writer's block pass, given enough time, but that after it passes, you'll have more ideas than you know what to do with. All of a sudden, I have a whole mess of potential new material, when just last week I was worried I wouldn't be able to come up with anything ever again. So that's good, kinda.


Took this picture yesterday at Menards. The garden-center season is pretty close to being over, now that we're into July, but there are still plants to be had, for anybody who's interested. Annuals are 50% off now where I used to work, if I remember the e-mail newsletter properly. Probably no Pentas left, though.

Point of interest: Pentas is both plural and singular. I won't say where, but I have seen signs at a garden center in the area extolling the virtues of the "Penta," which made me die a little inside. The same place was also really pushing the "springrey" ferns (the correct version is sprengeri, meaning: named for Sprenger) which didn't make me die inside but did make the baby Jesus cry. The first step in pretending to be a garden center is being able to write down the names of the plants you're selling, y'all. (Or at least it oughta be the first step. Yes I know I am being a pedantic jerk.)

We didn't have Pentas where I used to work in 2008, but we did get some in for 2009. They were . . . okay. I never quite figured out the appeal -- big balls of flowers (Pentas, Hydrangea, Kalanchoe blossfeldiana) don't usually get me excited. I hear butterflies like Pentas, and I'm happy for the butterflies, though.

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XVI

I know I just did one of these, but I've burned most of my free time over the last two days working on something that looks like it's going to turn into a series of posts. I'm very pleased with the title -- it may in fact be my best title ever -- but the text is proving to be kind of difficult. It's one of those situations where I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts and figuring out what I want to say. My hope is that this was mostly caused by the relentless sawing and hammering coming from the living room over the same time period (the husband and his stepfather were doing carpentry-type stuff which I sort of understand now but couldn't explain concisely), which is distracting, even with earplugs. It might also just be that this is a complicated thing to write about. Time will tell.

And I could do a pretty picture of a flower or something, but I've pretty well taken pictures of everything I've got blooming at the moment (which was always fairly limited in the first place: I should go back to visit my ex-job for the blog fodder, except that we know I'd wind up buying plants, too), so we're left with another round of transmitted light photos. Which is fine with me. I just worry that it's tedious for y'all. In any case:

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Kalanchoe blossfeldiana NOID. As usual with the thick leaves, even if you can get light to shine through, it doesn't necessarily show off any interesting structure. But sometimes the blurry, cloudy pictures are okay too.

Pilea nummulariifolia. This one was hard to get, but it turned out okay eventually. There are a few plants that I like to give sunny windows less because they require sun than because they're pretty by transmitted light: this is one of them.

Ficus 'Green Island.' This plant and I have gone through some tough times back at the apartment, but boy has it taken off and done well since the move. I've been impressed. If I'd known how appreciative the Ficuses would be, I would have tried harder to get them sun before.

Ardisia crenata. The other plants tease it about its freckles.

Impatiens x hawkeri NOID. I should have waited until the variegated New Guinea impatiens at work grew bigger leaves: would have made for a better picture. But you go to war with the Impatiens you have, not the Impatiens you wish you had, am I right, Rumsfeld?

Chlorophytum 'Charlotte.' The plant itself is still just barely hanging in there; it gets too dry a lot, I think. I should probably repot. The leaf picture is better than I remembered it being.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Peter Wonder.' I'm fairly certain the plant is capable of better photos than this. Will keep trying.

Brunnera cv. 'Emerald Mist.' My favorite from this batch by a mile.

Caladium 'Gingerland.' I'm pretty sure I could do better on this one, too, though really this picture only needs to be lightened a little, maybe up the contrast slightly. Oh well. The things you decide too late.

Codiaeum variegatum NOID. Including crotons kind of feels like cheating. Dunno why.

Personal-ish: Not everybody uses Twitter

I have realized that not everybody uses Twitter. You wouldn't think this would be something that could slip my mind, since I myself have only been on Twitter for about three weeks, but I have apparently acclimated quickly and thoroughly enough that I think if I announce something on Twitter then that means everybody knows.

Totally unrelated picture of Geranium 'Rozanne' for decorative purposes. I'm really becoming fond of 'Rozanne:' she photographs so well.
So, first of all, Happy Canada Day to everybody. (Yes, including you non-Canadians. You have to enjoy it too.) I hope Canada Claus brought everybody just what they wanted (though I understand demand for Ryan Reynoldses far exceeded the supply), and everybody got to spend quality time with their families, gathered around the Canada tree, singing Canada carols and drinking iced chocolate and stuff. The husband and I have already exchanged gifts: we gave one another traditional Canadian goods: Margaret Atwood novels, loons, and health care. Now I have to figure out what one feeds a loon. Grain of some kind? Fish? Also, is there a way to make them quieter?

Second, one of my Twitters yesterday was:

Back from Iowa City. Bought an art photo, got legally same-sex married in the state of Iowa, rented Sawzall. Came home, let dog-in-law out.

So now you know.

Memorial Day

Well, the move has been a done deal for a month now, and I think we've got a handle on how many plants survived. The current census lists the plant population here at 568. It looks like we lost seven from the move, and only one of those hurts, as the others were either duplicated many times over, or not doing terribly well before the move and already kind of mentally written off. I thought it would be only appropriate to take a moment to honor the memories of the fallen, before we go on. Readers with delicate constitutions may wish to look away:

Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana.' January 2008 to June 2009. Cause of death unclear.

Streptocarpus 'Purple Martin.' March 2009 to June 2009. Cause of death believed to be repeated drought.

Saintpaulia ionantha cv. "the Dieffenbachia-leafed one." June 2008 to June 2009. Cause of death: drought. Survived by three clones.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Quarterback.' April 2008 to June 2009. Cause of death: extended drought.

Sansevieria trifasciata 'Bantel's Sensation.' February 2007 to June 2009. Cause of death: fall repotting combined with winter overwatering, rot, root loss. Survived by four leaf-section cuttings, none of which look likely to last more than a month themselves.

Saintpaulia ionantha NOID. November 2007 to June 2009. Cause of death: drought. Survived by three clones.

Not pictured: Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Electric Lime.' May 2009 to June 2009. Cause of death unknown.