Random plant event: Aglaonema; Hiatus

Hi.

So, um, everything/everyone is okay, but I'm feeling very close to burn-out and need to take a few days off. (Sorry if this ruins anyone's life. It's unintentional.) I had a big thing written here with the four reasons why, but luckily, I realized that y'all probably don't care about the reasons so long as everything's okay, which it is, plus they weren't even especially interesting reasons, so even if you would ordinarily be inclined to care, you still wouldn't care.

Planning to be back Sunday.

As for today's plant-related content, the Aglaonema fruits I reported on in July are showing signs of ripening now.


A lot of the Aglaonemas bloomed this summer, at more or less the same time, and I tried making random crosses with everything that happened to be flowering at any given moment, but this is the only set of fruits I managed to get. This page suggests that I might have had better luck if I'd wrapped the flowers with wet paper towels and plastic after making the crosses -- apparently 100% humidity is important. Next year, perhaps.

I don't know exactly when these are fully ripe and ready to plant, but I've been having reasonably good luck with Anthurium lately (65 seedlings growing in vermiculite, plus I started about 100 more seeds a few days ago), and I figure Aglaonema is probably at least kind of similar. The mother is 'Maria;' the father I don't know, because I was basically trying to cross anything and everything, but there's a pretty good chance that it's also 'Maria.' In which case the seedlings will be boring and the whole project pointless, but I won't know if it was a waste of time or not for another 12-24 months. (The link above says you can't really know if you've produced a cross that's worth propagating until the plant's been growing for about a year, but I'm guessing that indoors, it'll be slower, so maybe 2 years.) I'll let you know how it goes.

Pretty picture: Cymbidium Starbright 'Sirius'

Lots of Cymbidiums for sale lately in the stores here, but they're all super-expensive. (The cheapest I saw was $50.) This means I will probably never find out whether I can grow a Cymbidium, but that's probably okay: based on my experiences with other orchids, I suspect the answer is yes, but not well.

I really like the way they look, though.