Random plant event: Vriesea splendens blooming!

I'm very excited about this; it's the first bromeliad I've ever rebloomed. I've had this two and a half years, which feels like maybe it's too young to rebloom, but I've repotted it semi-recently (last fall?), and I've watered at least a couple times with the Miracle Gro, so I suppose I've been encouraging it.


I know this isn't a great angle on the inflorescence, but you're not missing much: right now, it's still very narrow. I don't know if this indicates that it's going to be an underwhelming bloom, or if it just has a lot of development yet to go. (The color implies the latter.) Either way, this is feeling like a huge accomplishment. Vriesea splendens was already one of my two favorite bromeliads (the other being Aechmea fasciata), but now I like it that much better.

Elsewhere on the Web

Plant Chaser: Look Jane Look
Summary: Somewhere in the Philippines, a Dyckia 'Platyphylla' blooms. Includes some surprisingly neat close-up photos of the true flowers.

The Scientist Gardener: Better Chemistry Through Breeding
Summary: About the genetic and chemical basis for the colors of peppers and other plants, with pretty pictures.

Cactus Blog: Bitter Root
Summary: Pretty pictures of Lewisia cvv.

One of my Lewisia pictures, from long ago.
Freewill Applicator: On Corporate Law
Summary: Probably best explained by the first two sentences:

Corporate law is the story of made-up characters and their relationships. And it is the story of the real people whose duty is to do what the imaginary characters need.

And then it kinda goes on from there. Nothing to do with plants, but I liked it.

The Variegated Thumb: Plant Find: The Cucumber Orchid
Summary: Zach has a Dockrillia cucumerina now, a plant I'd never heard of before and wouldn't believe in if he didn't have pictures.

The Consumerist: Don't UPS Drivers Realize Customers Have Security Cameras?
Summary: Please don't send me plants via UPS ever, thanks.

The Planetary Society Blog: A dog-bone-shaped asteroid's two moons: Kleopatra, Cleoselene, and Alexhelios (via Bad Astronomy)
Summary: There's an asteroid orbiting the sun that's shaped like a dog bone and has two moons. The main point of interest is the animation showing the three objects together.

~

And one entire blog:

Fuzzy Foliage
Summary: Blog about gesneriads in general, but Saintpaulias in particular. If you have questions about the African Violet Society of America, this is the person to ask. Or at least a person to ask.

Phalaenopsitrocity

From the store that brought you the spray-painted, glittered, green poinsettias:


Yes, they really looked like that. I haven't changed the colors.

I'd heard of this before, from Ivynettle, but this is so much worse than anything she described.

I emphasize that they really looked like this. April Fool's Day is still a few days away. This is a real thing, that exists in the world.

The husband had to draw my attention to them. ("Hey, did you see the blue orchids?") I had gone through the floral department (it's a grocery store), and had looked right at them, but apparently failed to recognize them as plants.

I didn't examine the stalks for punctures, but I assume that's how they made these: dye injected into the flowering stalks.

It makes the spray-painted points seem not so bad, right?

Somewhere, somebody is working on creating something even worse than this, and we're going to long for the halcyon days when people were injecting dye into Phalaenopsis flowers. What do you think it will be?

Pretty picture: Wilsonara Sheila Ann

For some reason, it seemed wrong to me that a Wilsonara could be yellow and orange like this, but it does happen. I've even posted pictures of yellow and orange Wilsonaras before, and there are plenty of them on-line. So I don't know where that feeling came from.


This second photo came out really blue when I uploaded it to the computer. I've complained before about my camera's automatic color balance being inconsistently useful, so I won't belabor it, but I wish I'd taken just a little more of the blue out before uploading.

Newish Plants

I haven't been buying many plants lately; the numbers have been climbing, but mostly that's due to propagation, with a smaller number from declaring older cuttings or seedlings officially plants. But there have been a few purchases, and a lot of walkaways (which may be covered in a post or two later). It's not like I've stopped looking.

Aloe nobilis.
The Aloe nobilis was previously mentioned as a walkaway. I went back for it later.

Sedum burrito.
I got the Sedum mostly because I felt guilty. I asked someone who worked at the store if they sold flats ever, because I was out of flats for 4-inch pots at home (I don't know how that happened either; all the new stuff is in 3-inch pots), and she just went and got me six and gave them to me, no charge. So then I felt like I had to buy something, but they didn't have very much. (They'd started a bunch of new things, but a lot of them weren't established yet.) I don't actually like Sedum burrito, or at least I don't think I do, but I like S. morganianum a lot, so we'll have a burrito. Worst that can happen is that it fails to appeal more with time.

Rhipsalis rhombea? R. micrantha?
The most recent of the three is this weirdo. It didn't have a tag, but the Exotic Angel website says it's Rhipsalis micrantha. I found pictures at cactiguide.com and davesgarden.com that make me think it's probably not micrantha, but I don't know how to determine what it is. I don't know how anybody tells any Rhipsalis species apart, honestly: they don't all look the same, but they all sort of blur into one another.

In any case, though, it's very shiny and green, and I'm excited about it. Apparently, I'm into the epiphytic cacti without intending to be. (At the moment, I count 48 individual plants here, of the genera Epiphyllum, Hatiora, Hylocereus, Pseudorhipsalis, Rhipsalis, Schlumbergera, and Selenicereus. They're sneaky that way.) Epiphytes are the new black, or something.

Music Video: DJ Fox "Come See About Down" (Supremes / Jay Sean)

I really like the way these go together musically and thematically.

Less fond of the video, but if I were to put together a mix tape of mash-ups I like, this would probably be on it.

Not that people still make mix tapes. But you know what I mean.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I stuck a bunch of Salvia elegans cuttings in a plug tray last Wednesday. Being pretty much out of room in the house, I stuck the tray in the best available spot I could find, on a very low shelf in the southwest corner of the plant room, then went on to dealing with the other thing I wanted to put in the plug tray, Canna seeds. (Which have been soaking in water for a couple days now, and aren't showing any roots yet; I suspect I may have overdone the filing-down-the-seed-coat step.)

Thursday morning, I went to take Sheba out, and saw this on the floor in front of the door:


I'm only out three cuttings, of about 22, so this is no big deal unless it happens again, and at least it wasn't something poisonous. But still. Frustrating.


She's also eaten a chocolate chip muffin this week, last Sunday, which was somewhat alarming until I found this site and did some math. No problems related to the muffin as far as I'm aware, but I was prepared for diarrhea and/or vomiting, at the very least. But no, she saves the vomiting for three days later.

Which makes me wonder when she's planning the diarrhea. It's really not the sort of thing you want taking you by surprise.

Unfinished business: Quercus seedling

A couple months ago, I reported a very small oak tree growing in the pot of one of my Cordylines. I was excited about this, because having an oak tree in the yard that I'd started myself, and under such unusual circumstances, seemed like it would be neat. So I very carefully removed it from the pot,


and planted it in its own pot.


Whereupon it shriveled and died. Within a month.


So I guess that's not how one raises baby oak trees. I'm not surprised, but I'm not sure what I could have done wrong in such a short time, either. Easy come, easy go.

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

Ugh. The Schefflera profile is not going well. I suspect the problem is that I'm trying too hard to work in all the information I found, much of which doesn't actually interest me. Sometimes I have to start the profiles several times before I get any kind of flow going; this may be one of those times. *sigh* (UPDATE: Done!)

As for this post, we have more dead leaves than usual. Some months ago, I went through all the transmitted light photos and rearranged them, rather than wind up with four oak pictures in the same set, so this batch includes some autumn leaves from last fall.

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

Plectranthus verticillatus.

Platanus occidentalis (sycamore), autumn. This one is much better full size.

Aglaonema 'Diamond Bay.'

Kalanchoe marmorata.

Magnolia sp., autumn. Not sure what it is, but something about this one really appeals to me. Something about the way the veins are curvy. Might be my favorite from the set, though.

Helleborus 'Painted Strain.' Striking, but almost a little too much.

Eucharis x grandiflora, dead leaf.

Quercus sp., autumn.

Dieffenbachia 'Camouflage.'

Alocasia amazonica 'Polly.' I don't think any of the pictures of 'Polly' turned out very well, but it's still striking.

Other: Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)

Angry dodo! (Pic taken by Mr. Subjunctive, in the University of Iowa Natural History Museum.)

Unfinished business: Schlumbergera 'Caribbean Dancer' fruit

'Caribbean Dancer' still has two fruits on it; the yellow NOID Schlumbergera has one. For reasons I don't understand, only the above fruit looks ripe; the second fruit is also reddish-purple, but it's a much duller shade. They've both been like this for a long time, too, and were formed at approximately the same time, so there's no excuse for them being at different levels of ripeness.

I don't want to try getting seeds now; for one thing, there's a lot of space being taken up by plants I'm propagating already, and I don't have the room. For another, if they're not ready yet, then I'd blow my chances of getting seedlings, and I very badly want to get seedlings. From the research I did for the Schlumbergera profile, I know the fruit will stay attached to the plant for a long time once it's ripe, so there's no harm in leaving it there longer. I just thought you might be interested in seeing what a possibly-ripe holiday cactus fruit looks like.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Love Potion x Nulight

I spent pretty much all day yesterday trying to sort out a schedule for posting the orchid photos from the show at Wallace's a week ago, so that I wouldn't find myself at the end of the run with nothing but pictures of orange Cattleyas, or something like that. The good news is that I succeeded. The bad news is that it left me very little time to come up with a comment on the picture. The other good news is that commenting on the picture is pretty unnecessary: I think it does a fine job of speaking for itself.

I took a lot more photos of slipper-type orchids (Paphiopedilum and Phragmipedium) this year than last year. I don't know whether this is because there were more of them this year than last year, or if I just found them more interesting. Possibly some of both. In any case, fans of paphs and phrags will be pleased.

Random plant event: Musa x 'Cheeka' offsetting

This is another one of those things that's not objectively a big thing, but it's big to me.


My Musa x 'Cheeka' had a couple offsets on it when I bought it, but they withered away fairly soon after it got here, and it didn't grow any to replace them. Since that time, 'Cheeka' has been growing progressively smaller leaves, which are all bunched up together at the top of the plant, and the petioles keep stacking up on top of one another, too, making the trunk V-shaped.

It's supposed to be a compact variety anyway, but you can see that when I bought it, the new leaves were bigger than the preceding ones, and there was a healthy distance between them:

(Pot: 6"/15 cm diameter)
Now, though, they're wadded up at the top:

(Pot: 8"/20 cm diameter)
There are signs that this may be turning around; the last couple leaves have been larger again, and there are suckers too. I'm sort of ashamed to say what I think made the difference: fertilizer.

Not that I haven't been feeding the plant all along, pretty abundantly in fact. But I've been using the N-P-K-only Osmocote, not anything with trace elements in it. With a substantial number of my plants, that hasn't seemed to make a difference -- the Yuccas, Dracaenas and Anthuriums have all been just fine. Hell, the Dracaenas usually don't get any Osmocote, even. But, I had a plastic container of plant food that the husband bought many years ago -- some Miracle Gro product with trace elements;¹ the original packaging was gone -- that was taking up space in the plant room, and I kept having to move it out of the way, or else make a special point of opening it up when I wanted to use it for some plant or another. At some point this winter, that got annoying, and I thought, well hell, let's use this up and get it out of the way.

So for the last three or four watering cycles, I've been using it on everything. At first, I only put it on a few plants. I just sprinkled a small amount of the fertilizer directly on the soil without mixing it in water first like you're supposed to (though I emphasize it was a small amount). After a while, I decided that I should use it on all of them, so I started mixing up multiple gallons at a time in milk jugs.

This is when I was only mixing five gallons at a time (the fifth was mixed directly in the watering can); I'm up to eight-gallon batches now.
Now, granted, the plants would be starting to do stuff now whether I was feeding them special food with trace elements or not: it's spring, the days are longer, that's what plants do in the spring. But things are happening that have never happened for me before:

• The Musa x 'Cheeka' is re-suckering and may be growing bigger leaves again;
• the Tradescantia spathacea is blooming (hasn't happened in three years);
• the Coffea arabica grew, I shit you not, like six inches in a month, after a long period of slow, weak growth;
• the Cereus peruvianus started to grow after staying the same size for at least two years;
• the Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa cutting has started to grow after being the same size for at least two years;
• the Schlumbergera 'Caribbean Dancer' is on a third round of blooming for the year;
• the Euphorbia tortilis is growing again, after remaining the same size for almost two years;
• the Cissus rotundifolia had stopped growing for a while, turned yellowish, and a couple growing tips died, but is now producing rampant new growth;
• the husband's old Dracaena sanderiana that was about 60% dead is now producing new growing tips from its base;
• all the Ficus microcarpas have started to put on serious height, after a pretty slow last year;
• the Heliconia psittacorum 'Bright Lights' still looks kind of pitiful, but it's gotten greener and is poking up new shoots;
• the Phalaenopsis is producing more roots than I've ever seen it grow before;
• the Phlebodium aureum 'Mandianum' has HUGE blue-green fronds, instead of smallish yellow ones.
• the Rhapis excelsa is also suckering abundantly;
  
• the Platycerium stopped dropping fronds and is now growing new ones; and
  

Not all of those are necessarily because of the fertilizer, but that's a lot of unprecedented stuff happening all at once.

So I guess I've learned a valuable lesson about the importance of trace elements, and now so have you. Except you probably knew already. Or you suspected, at least.

I've been meaning to write a post about fertilizer for a long, long time, but a lot of the information I've seen about it is either the same thing everybody parrots ("Feed with a standard houseplant fertilizer every three months, or diluted with every watering.") or advice for people growing mass quantities of plants outdoors in a Florida shade house to sell wholesale, talking about parts per million of this and parts per million of that and Ca:Mg ratios and all that stuff. So this may be as close as I get to writing a fertilizer post.

-

¹ I know it contains trace elements because it's that pretty green-blue color of copper compounds; I know it's Miracle Gro because the plastic bags of fertilizer had Miracle Gro written on them. The missing part is the original box or whatever that they came in, which would have the full list of components and concentrations. In general, though, if copper is in there, then everything else will be too. I mean, there are exceptions, but I'd be surprised if Miracle Gro made a product that had copper but not iron.

Pretty pictures: Freesia NOIDs

I've learned, as of Friday, that I am unable to smell Freesias. This is not unheard of, though it's kinda sad, because everybody goes on and on about how wonderful the smell is. To me, it smells like cut grass, with a little bit of generic floral smell, but very far away. And it's not that I happened to catch them during a period of low fragrance output (which the link above says does happen), because Younger Former Co-Worker was right there, gushing about the wonderfulness of the smell, when I tried.


*sigh*

These are, I think, the first Freesias I've seen. The ex-job never had them when I worked there; I don't remember seeing them anywhere else.

(This one is my favorite.)
Those of you who can smell them, tell me -- what do they smell like? Does anybody grow them, indoors or out? How's that going? I'm curious.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I almost came up with a caption for this, but everything was coming out subtly wrong. Feel free to suggest something.

Nothing exciting with either pet this week, though it appears that Nina's Fittonia, the new one with the pink veins, is not going to root. The cuttings I'd tried to start in the basement didn't work either. Perhaps this is not the way to go about propagating Fittonias.

Random plant events: Assorted little things

I'm working on the Schefflera actinophylla profile, but it isn't done. Or close to done. I'll let you know. (UPDATE: Done!)

Meanwhile, I have a set of semi-recent random plant events; they're all noteworthy to me, but none of them seemed quite substantial enough to warrant its own post.


First up, one of the two very tall Cereus peruvianus plants (photo here) has decided to start growing again. I repotted them in October, which might be why. It could also be because the days have been getting longer (the one that's starting to grow is in the slightly brighter spot), or because I added fertilizer with trace nutrients just before the growth started. I don't know.

I have mixed feelings about this, since there's only just so much room left for them to grow, after which point I suppose I'll have to cut them back and start over. I've had them for seven years, so that will be quite the day.


When I was writing the Ananas comosus profile, I found a number of references to the leaves having spines along the margins, but my personal plant, an A. comosus 'Mongo,' has never had any. I assumed that was just a quirk of the cultivar, until a couple weeks ago.

They're not terribly intimidating marginal spines. In fact, they're pretty marginal marginal spines. But the plant remembers how to make them, I guess.


You're not going to think this is exciting at all, but -- I've had this Monstera for four and a half years, and only at the very beginning of its stay here has it ever grown split leaves. I've tried everything I could think of short of putting the plant outside (there's never been a good place to put it), but it's insisted on producing only smallish, unsplit leaves. Until now. Does this mean it's reconsidered, and is going to be making split leaves for a while? I wouldn't bet on it. But we're getting somewhere.


Finally, I'd started some Pedilanthus from cuttings about a year and a half ago, not long after we moved. By now, they're a respectable size, though some of them have been growing horizontally instead of vertically. (This seems to be on purpose, since they're well-rooted and get plenty of light. I have no idea what they're thinking.) This particular plant caught my eye when I was watering because, in the couple weeks since the previous watering, one of its branches has decided to revert to solid green.

The variegated variety is prettier, but I'm going to encourage and propagate this if I can anyway. I don't have a solid-green Pedilanthus yet.

Elsewhere on the Web

What with the shelf rearrangement and stuff last week, I haven't been keeping a running list of links, but I thought this post at Hort Log was worth pointing out before I forgot about it:

Giant gesneriads

Not an exaggeration, either. They're really big.

Pretty picture: Tulipa NOID

Not really part of the orchid show, but these were also at Wallace's on Saturday. I thought the picture came out nicely.

Fungus Gnats: Like Puppies That Try To Fly Up Your Nose

One of the things that eventually drove me away from the Garden Web House Plant forum (GWHPF) was the way people posted the same questions there over and over. It wasn't the same person asking the same questions, obviously, but, you know, you see anybody asking something you've answered thirty times already for other people, and you start to wonder why people think it's okay to ask you to type out an answer for their problem for fifteen minutes, but it's too much trouble for them to spend three minutes searching the archives.¹ Which leads to irritation.

And then my irritation would bleed through and I'd write subtly hostile, cranky responses, which would just convince the person asking the question that everybody in the Garden Web forums was hostile and mean.² I suspect I started writing PATSP partly so I could have a place to link to for questions I'd seen a million times already, rather than spending half an hour answering them all over again from scratch.

By far, the most frequently re-asked question at the GWHPF went something like, HELP!!!1!!!1!! I just bought this plant and I don't know what it is but there are all these fruit flies flying around it all the time and this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me so please please please can somebody tell me what to do to make them all die because they are ruining my entire life!!1!!!!!1eleven!! (And yes, some of them were actually that dramatic. You would be amazed.)

So.


First, don't panic. Or, if you'd already started panicking, please stop, 'cause it's annoying to read anything with that many exclamation points.

Second: they're not "fruit flies," (Drosophila) they're fungus gnats (Bradysia). I realize you probably don't see a difference or care, but you have to know your enemy in order to defeat them.

Where do they come from? Most likely, they came in with a recently-purchased plant. If you haven't brought in a new plant, but you've repotted something recently, then your potting soil probably contains gnat eggs. Miracle Gro potting mixes in particular are consistently about 67% gnat eggs by weight,³ but gnats are a risk you take with any high-peat mix.

Why? I dunno. They just like peat, I guess.

What do they want? The adults lay eggs on wet soil, the eggs hatch into larvae, the larvae eat (mostly decomposing organic matter, not necessarily fungus per se), grow, pupate, and then they're transformed into beautiful . . . fungus gnats.⁴ Adults don't eat,⁵ so they don't live very long: they're focused on mating and laying eggs. Since the survival of the eggs depends a lot on moisture, adults are very interested in things that strike them as potentially wet. Which means that sometimes, they will try to fly up your nose or in your mouth. Also one will occasionally find them drowned in unattended cups of coffee, or hovering near sinks.

Are they hurting my plants? Probably not. The larvae are capable of feeding on the fine root hairs of plants, but even if they do, this would only harm plants that were very young or very weak. Living tissue is probably not their first choice anyway.

How do I make them go away? You have many options here, with varying levels of ease, expense, and effectiveness.

Personally, I would recommend either watering less often or doing a soil change. If the soil the larvae are in goes completely dry, they die, and then you don't have a next generation of adults. It may take a while, especially if you have a lot of plants, bring home new plants often, or have a lot of plants that will die if they get too dry, but if you're consistent and patient, it should happen.

Letting plants dry between waterings is what I personally do. I bring in new plants often enough that we usually have a few fungus gnats around at any given moment, but considering the number of plants here, a few is as good as none. And honestly, I kind of like them.⁶

Soil change can be thorough (shake off every bit of soil from the roots and replace with all-new soil from a brand-new bag) or partial (shake off some of the soil and replace it with a faster-drying mix, like potting soil cut with perlite, coarse sand, aquarium gravel, aquatic soil, etc.). Thorough soil replacement may be more stressful for the plant, but it should stop the gnats immediately, assuming the replacement mix is clean. Partial replacement is easier on the plant, but won't fix the problem as fast. Some of the old soil will still be there; it'll just be drying out faster.

Another option: sticky traps. I don't like sticky traps. They sound good in theory -- they're just pieces of yellow cardboard with adhesive on them. Gnats land on the cardboard and then can't fly away again, so gradually you wind up with fewer and fewer gnats flying around.

In my personal experience with sticky traps at work, mostly the traps stick to leaves and hands, not to bugs, and when they do function as advertised, you then get to look at a brilliant yellow piece of cardboard that's covered in dead insects, which . . . makes a statement, certainly, but I don't think it's going to catch on in New York.

Soil drenches are another option. If you're going to go this route, a product based on Bacillus thuringiensis ssp. israelensis, or "BT," is probably the way to go. Some brand names are Gnatrol and Knock Out Gnats; several "mosquito dunks" also use BT and can be used instead, if you don't find gnat-specific preparations.⁷ BT is a bacterium that produces a protein which screws up the larvae's digestive systems and kills them. It's organic and safe around people or pets. One may have to re-treat once or twice before the gnats completely go away.

Several people at Garden Web swear by the potato method, which is: slice a potato in half. Lay the cut end on top of the soil. The fungus gnat larvae will find the potato, get excited, and start chowing down. After a few hours, you can pick the potato back up, with all the larvae now on it, and throw it away. Or you can slice off a section and put it back on the soil again. I'm not sure this is sufficient to eliminate a gnat infestation all on its own, but it might speed up the process if you decide to reduce watering, and the more larvae you can get rid of, the fewer adults you have to see.

A simple and fairly cheap solution for small houseplant collections: spread a thin layer (maybe 1/4 inch or 6 mm) of coarse sand on top of the soil in your houseplants. The adults can't get through the sand to lay eggs, and the larvae can't get through the sand to become adults, so the problem disappears in one generation. Plants so treated will stay wet longer, since water will have a harder time evaporating from the soil surface, but I suppose one could always scrape the sand back off again after two or three weeks, if it's really a problem.⁸


Actual pesticides like pyrethrins, imidacloprid, etc. are not, I think, necessary, nor will most of them even be effective, either because of their targets (if the label doesn't specifically say it will kill fungus gnats, it probably won't) or their mode of application (pyrethrins have to make direct contact with an organism to kill, and break down quickly -- they're useless for a fungus gnat larva an inch below the soil). There might be a role for a soil drench of neem oil with dishwashing liquid, if you're going to insist on a pesticide, but I think the other methods will probably work just as well as poison, and some of them are very cheap and easy. I mean, technically, watering less often should save you money. Just not very much of it.

That's pretty much everything I know about fungus gnats and what to do with them. If there's something I haven't covered, or if there's something I did address that you think I got wrong, feel free to leave a question or comment. Alternate methods of dealing with fungus gnats are welcome too.

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¹ Of course, the people posting questions sort of are being responsible and doing their own research, in a way -- if you have a plant problem, it makes sense to go to a plant-related forum to ask somebody about it. And if you've never been to GW before, you might not be able to appreciate how big it is, you might not be able to locate the search field, you might try to search and wind up getting gibberish back, if GW's code is being glitchy.
Really I was the one with the problem. I wasn't responsible for answering fungus gnat questions, and if I didn't want to answer them, then I could have just not answered them, rather than making it all about me and getting upset.
² Which, last I checked, was mostly true, actually, but it wasn't always that way, and it certainly doesn't have to be. The dynamics of online communities is perhaps a topic for another time.
That, plus feeling obligated to answer people's questions even though I wasn't, made it sort of a bad place for me to be, overall, and I'm glad I'm done with posting there. I do go back every few months to look around. Sometimes I look to see if I can find a blog topic, though I don't remember that ever actually working out.
³ (Exaggeration for comic effect; I'm sure it's less than 20%.)
⁴ Not every ugly duckling becomes a swan, yo.
⁵ (Pretty sure I read this somewhere at some point.) (UPDATE: Aralia left a comment with a link saying that this isn't true; adult fungus gnats do eat. So never mind.)
⁶ Yes, it's alarming to inhale one accidentally, or have one flying around your face for a few seconds like it's trying to figure out how to get in, but it doesn't actually hurt you. I mean, if you inhale a gnat, you're definitely getting the better end of that experience.
Around here, they come and go -- we are presently having a high-fungus-gnat period, which is why this post -- but I kind of think they're cute. Like puppies! Puppies that try to fly up your nose!
⁷ The difference, as I understand it, is that mosquito BT is made to dissolve slowly, over a long period, to kill mosquitoes that attempt to lay eggs in whatever body of water the "dunk" is sitting in, while gnat BT is usually either made to be dusted directly on the surface of the soil or made to dissolve more or less immediately in water. I'm fuzzy on this, though, having never used either product, and I've only occasionally seen the mosquito dunks.
⁸ This might be the place to note that decorative moss or stones on top of the soil will also keep the soil wetter longer. If you have such items on your soil, you should take them off at least until the fungus gnat problem is resolved. (I would actually advise not putting them back on again ever, but that's just me.)

Random plant event: Furcraea foetida offset

Happy Pi Day!

I'll admit that today's subject isn't a particularly exciting photo, but it's one of those cases where what it represents is exciting. This plant had been growing in the parent plant's pot for quite a while; I first noticed there was a pup last May.

At some point this winter, I noticed that it didn't seem to be doing so well -- the parent plant and I haven't figured out this whole winter-watering situation yet. I let it go for a long time, then water, but then when I water, a leaf or two will yellow and die. I haven't figured out whether that's because I watered, or if it's because I let it get really dry first. It's usually grown outdoors, so there's not a lot of information out there about how to do it indoors.

Anyway. So at some point I noticed that the pup seemed to be doing poorly, more so than the parent, so I pulled it out and gave it its own pot. I didn't figure the two-leafed pup would survive the winter -- bad time to transplant, it was already stressed -- but it seemed to be needing more water than what it was getting.

The news today is that the offset is growing a third leaf:


It's still tiny, obviously (the pot is 3 inches along the diagonal), and it's not clear that it's ever going to grow huge, healthy leaves like the parent, but at least it's growing, and I can still have hope that it will grow huge, healthy leaves someday. Considering that I was pretty sure I'd killed it by moving it, that's pretty good news.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum esquirolei

So. Went to the orchid show yesterday (it's still going on today, should you happen to be in or near the Quad Cities; check Wallace's Garden Center for hours and directions). I had a surprising reaction to it: I was disappointed.

I don't know why exactly. Some of it may have been that last year, I had basically no expectations (never having been to a plant show before), so what they had was surprising and impressive. This year, I remembered last year, and how it was surprising and impressive, so when it wound up being pretty similar to last year, I was disappointed. Expectations ruin everything, I tell you what.

Quite a few plants I remembered from last year were back again, too. I realize that it's unreasonable of me to expect the people putting the show together to get entirely new plants every year just for me, but I was, again, kind of disappointed. In a few cases, I maybe got better pictures than what I got last year -- as I write this, I haven't looked through all 322 photos I took to see how they turned out, though. Some of the preview photos on the camera display didn't look so hot. We'll see.

Technical difficulties, again

Blogger's post-scheduling function is not working for me tonight. I don't know if I accidentally told it to publish the post the first time, and the subsequent crap is because Google still recognizes the text as the same, or what, but it's very frustrating. Sorry for any confusion.

ALMOST IMMEDIATE UPDATE: F*#*@& Daylight Savings Time screws me up again. I can't schedule posts for 2:30 AM on March 13 if there won't be a 2:30 AM on March 13.

Why is it 2:30 AM in the first place, you may ask? Well, when I started working at the garden center, way back in the early history of PATSP, I was getting up at 5 AM for a while. I didn't want the posts to be up for a long time before I was able to check it and make sure it had all posted the way I wanted it to, so I scheduled it to post at 4:30 AM my time. This is 2:30 AM Pacific Time, which is for some reason the time zone Blogger has always thought I was in. And yes, I've tried to change the time zone thing.

Anyway. So twice a year, I get confused because I try to schedule a 2:30 AM post and Blogger won't accept it, and it takes me a really long time to figure out that it's because that time either doesn't exist (spring) or exists twice (fall) during the early morning in question.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I appreciate everybody letting me have a couple days off. It was seriously needed.

Our basement flooded at the beginning of last August. Since then, the husband has torn the basement apart and then put part of it back together, noisily. Only part of it, but enough that I was able to spend a solid chunk of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week disassembling and reassembling a bunch of plant shelves downstairs, which was ridiculously stressful. (Slightly more than half of all the plants in the house live in the basement, and of those, approximately 300 were affected by the move. I'd sort of been looking forward to the process, because some of the plants involved have been in spots that were less than ideal for them for some time, and I had thought that by starting over from scratch with the shelves, I could come up with a better setup than what I had. This failed, of course, and I suspect that the plants are going to be wandering up and down stairs for a long time to come before I'm satisfied with where everything is again.)

The reason why I bring this up is that today's Sheba pictures are from the period in between the completion of part of the basement and the dis-/assembling of the plant shelves. We took her downstairs a few times so the husband could throw tennis balls for her to catch, and I could try to get action pictures or something.

It didn't work out all that well, because there wasn't enough light down there to get decent pictures, but I did still get some interesting shots. E.g. Sheba blurry and levitating:


Or Sheba looking terrifying as fuck (would not want to be that tennis ball):


Also, since I've brought it up, this is what the new shelves look like at the moment, as seen from the south --


--and from the north (with bonus Sheba).


You may be thinking well what's so terrible about that, Mr. S.? It looks fine.

It may look fine, but by comparison to the previous set-up, I think there are a lot of plants which are now getting less light than they used to. I mean, it's the same number of shelves, and roughly the same number of plants, but somehow I couldn't put it all together again in a way I was satisfied with. This is maybe to be expected, since I wasn't entirely satisfied with the old set-up either, but the point is that a different set of plants will be suffering now, and they're not going to be prepared for that.

Oh, before I forget -- Nina has a new light bulb now. The package says they're good for a year, which means that the previous one was in use for a year longer than it should have been. (Maybe more like ten months, since she didn't have the special light bulb until she'd been here for a while, and the first one I got stopped working quickly and I had to take it back for a replacement.) But if she has rickets or something, it's not obvious, and hopefully it'll be corrected by this time next year.

Historical Illustration, and Site-Related: Post Frequency

Okay, so on Sunday I posted a new thing, which I'd hoped might be a way to save me time on the short posts so I could work more on the long posts (the plant profiles and etc. which were the original point of the blog), which I like doing more than I like trying to come up with the filler pieces between them.

And then a number of you left comments saying that you wouldn't mind less-frequent posts if that meant more-frequent longer posts. I had already been having thoughts about doing something different with the posting frequency: I've been thinking for at least a year that maybe I should cut back. I mean, back when I only had 250 plants and I could get all of them watered in like three days and then have 9 to 11 days off to write, that was one thing, but now I have four times that many plants, and it takes about four times as much time to water, and I have to water pretty much every day. It's not that I can't water and write in the same day, but that doesn't leave time for anything else, and there are times when I'd like to do something else.

For reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand, whenever I've thought about posting less often, I've consistently rejected the idea, but we're coming up on a time of year when it was going to be necessary to do, one way or another.

The reason is that I'm hoping to do some selling and trading of my plants, once the weather warms enough that I can start shipping them. We've also been talking about trying to do the Farmers' Market thing this summer, which I'm not 100% convinced that that's a good idea, what with the heat and all, but it seems likely that we'll try it at least once. These things could wind up being great, but they're also all time-consuming.

I haven't done one of these in a long time, mostly because it's hard to find usable images on-line, but I enjoyed them. I think my favorite is the one with the Young Realtors' Club.
For now, I think the plan is to take a couple days off (I kinda do need it, honestly), then come back on Saturday still trying to come up with daily posts, but not to the extent that I'm posting something I don't care about just to have a post. Which I have been doing. Which may or may not have been obvious.

There are some dangers to this plan. Sometimes the posts I forced myself to do just so I'd have something to post were popular. Sometimes pushing myself to find something interesting about a topic I found boring worked, and I liked what I came up with. I tend to rework posts longer than is helpful, and having to have something to post the next day, I feel, helped me curb that tendency, so I'm a little worried that not having to have a deadline will lead both to fewer short posts and to fewer long ones. But these are problems which I hope can be dealt with, and if I really hate how things turn out with the irregular schedule, we can always go back to daily posts.

Comments? Questions? Solutions? We've got a couple days for a conversation here, if people want to have one.

Technical Difficulties

We've had connectivity issues occasionally in the last few weeks, and my computer was also running really slowly yesterday afternoon and evening, plus I was sort of caught up in internet drama elsewhere for most of the day, so I just didn't get it together to do a post. I would have had time if the computer had been behaving normally.

It is not yet known whether this indicates that something is wrong with the computer or not; this sort of thing has happened before, though the degree and duration are sort of new.