Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia leaflets sprouting

The longish essay-type thing I had planned for today first turned into a different post than I had intended to write, and neither the original idea nor the new one were ready by the time I woke up yesterday. Also the coffeemaker has decided to stop working, plus we'd already been planning to go to the Illowa Orchid Society Spring Show at Wallace's, in Bettendorf (~1 hour away) yesterday so that I could get new and exciting pictures of new and exciting orchids for you guys, but then we had to figure out what to do with [not?-]Sheba when we went, because if we took her there was a good chance she'd yak in the car and be miserable, but if we didn't, she'd be alone in the house and be miserable, and then also plus I had to start the watering cycle again because I had Salvia elegans wilting in the basement already.


So yesterday just kind of didn't work. On a number of levels. And instead of the thoughtful, psychologically penetrating post that I'd thought I would post today, you get a long, drawn-out series of excuses and a couple kind of ugly pictures of baby Zamioculcas plants.

I don't know when these were started for sure; they came from plants that came into work with a few of their leaves broken off. If I'm remembering everything correctly, that means I've had these for either 13 or 17 months. Growing Zamioculcas from leaflets is really not worth the time and effort unless you do it on a pretty large scale, and maybe it's not worth it then, either. There's also the disappointment where sometimes even after you get a leaflet to sprout and nurture it along for a year, it'll still fall over and die on you if you give it too much water (has happened to me). Or it will just sit there doing nothing for ages if you don't give it enough water. But it's kinda fun, if you have the space, aren't made unhappy by looking at dirt for a year and a half, and have a really flexible definition of the word "fun."


On the more positive side of yesterday, the trip to Wallace's netted me a few months' worth of orchid pictures, and they're mostly prize-winning orchids of genera we haven't seen at PATSP before, so that much was very worthwhile. There were orchids for sale all over the place, too, but I think I have decided that orchids are just not going to be one of my things: I don't seem to have a natural talent for growing them, and learning seems likely to involve a lot of plant corpses and even more money. Certainly the flowers are often breathtaking, but I don't need to have all the plants I see, not really.


I did buy an Iresine herbstii, though, and had a nice conversation with one of the employees (Kate Terrell, Nursery Manager), because she e-mailed me after running across PATSP somehow, and she told me I should introduce myself if/when I visited for the orchid show. We had a nice conversation, and of course it's very gratifying to have somebody in Eastern Iowa taking blogs and the internet seriously, particularly when it's my blog. There may be more on this later. The conversation got cut short when she was called away to handle a tree question, and my camera's batteries died shortly thereafter, so we left without getting a proper well it was nice to meet you in, but we'll be back at some point, and y'all may see more references to Wallace's in the future.

As for Sheba, we left her crated at home while we were gone, after first taking her on a long and extremely frustrating walk (Sheba does not yet see the walks as a collaborative activity), and playing with her until almost the exact moment we left. So she probably slept through most of the time we were gone, or at least that was the plan. If she was upset by being left alone at all, she appears not to be holding it against us.