Sunday, July 6, 2008

Pretty picture: Adenium obesum flower


This post is also a question for the hive mind: as sometimes happens, one of these followed me home from work, and now all of them, both the ones left at work and the one I bought, are dropping lots of leaves and looking kind of miserable. We've had these since either December or March; they behaved themselves just fine until the last few weeks. Googling the species brings up a lot of complicated-sounding care advice that, frankly, makes me a little angry I bought one, but I'm willing to work with mine if we can learn to communicate. I gather that I haven't been watering enough: does anybody have any other advice?

(UPDATE 26 Dec. 2008: It wasn't just watering. I did figure it out well enough to write a profile about Adenium obesum, but the plant in question was gone a long time ago.)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They can be temperamental and drop leaves occasionally which might not mean anything, but check for mealy bugs.

Here's what we recommend: Bright sun. Water every 1 to 2 weeks depending on how hot it is. Make sure they're in a fast draining soil, and that they drain away.

We use powdered nutrients, as the roots will burn easily, except in this case you may try liquid kelp at a low strength. To get them to bloom, we like fish bone meal.

But chances are the problem is the soil they're in.

Anonymous said...

Aren't they like Euphorbia trigona in needing a rest? It seems sort of logical that a drylands plant would put off water-rich leaves while the temperatures are high.