Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Another kind of rough week for Sheba, the most noteworthy event of which was a bit of carsickness on Wednesday. This photo isn't from that trip, but it easily could have been: this seems to be one of her favorite sleep positions.

New (old) plant: Salvia elegans

We've been without a pineapple sage here since last fall, when my only surviving plant fell to a surprise frost before I could try to get cuttings to overwinter. There had been backup plants, of course, but those all pooped out because of drought or spider mites (or both), so when the one outside died, that was my whole stock.

Naturally I questioned whether or not I wanted to try to get another one. I mean, it had been a plant I liked, before all the unpleasantness, but nobody else seems as interested in it as I am, the mite thing was really annoying, and it grows a little too fast to keep up with effectively, so I wasn't going to.


But you know how it is. You run into one another again, exchange pleasantries, start feeling those feelings again, and before you know it you're going home together. (Also some money changed hands, which kinda ruins the metaphor, but whatever.)

Pretty pictures: Epidendrum Rose Valley 'Caribbean Dream'

The orchid show had two different-looking plants that were both identified as Epidendrum Rose Valley 'Caribbean Dream,' which was confusing. One is the one shown here:


And the other [EDIT: NOT SHOWN IN THIS POST] was the same shape and size, but the flowers were orange-red instead of pink.


Both colors show up in a Google search, so it could be that there's a pink form and a red form of the same flower. Which would be strange, but it's hardly the strangest thing I've ever heard of from the orchid world.

(The orange-red version gets its own post, but that's scheduled for December.)

Another sale/trade preview post

I'd hoped to get this year's sell/trade post up a couple weeks earlier than I did last year (25 April), but it's looking like I'll be lucky to post it at the same time. Deciding which things to offer took a very long time on its own, and then everything had to be photographed, and I spent a day trying to make sense of the USPS's shipping charges from last year, in hopes of coming up with a better approximation for this year, so on and on it goes.

But! I do at least have a few early pictures, which I may as well share, since I don't have much else going on anyway. Prices are still being determined, and obviously I'm selling more than four kinds of plants (about 80, with another 10 that aren't ready yet but will be by the end of the summer -- or at least I hope they will be), and I may as well admit now that these are some of the better-looking plants I have to offer, and they don't all look like this. But as a taste:

Episcia NOID.

Gasteraloe x beguinii.

Hatiora salicornioides.

Nautilocalyx forgetii.

Peperomia pereskiifolia.

Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum malipoense

Whoops. This was supposed to have gone up yesterday; I forgot.

Maybe I've been watching too much RuPaul's Drag Race, but I can't help but think of what a strange shoe design this could become, in the right hands.

P. malipoense is sometimes called the "Jade Slipper Orchid;" there were two at the show, and neither one looked green to me, but the greenish color is more obvious in some of the other photos on-line. The species wasn't described until 1984, and is from China and Vietnam (this link is more specific).