Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Photo is from March 2011.

I forgot about doing this until right before bed, for a second week in a row. Oops.

Araceae Triumphant

For the first time in ages (possibly ever), the plants in my collection from the Araceae outnumber the plants from the Asparagaceae, by a 269 to 229 margin.¹

If you don't want to blow the picture up to read it, we're talking about the two columns at the far left.
How this happened is that I potted up a bunch more Anthurium seedlings (and one Aglaonema seedling) on Monday, winding up with 269 aroids as opposed to 229, um, whatever plants in the Asparagaceae are called. So I now have 127 baby Anthuriums in the basement, which is enough to put the Araceae over the top by numbers. Maybe also by weight (some of the Aglaonemas are pretty big), but thankfully my obsession with plant-counting does not yet extend to tracking their weights, just numbers.

Speaking of which, here's an updated graph of the number of plants in the house:

It looks from this like maximum capacity is somewhere in the 900s: more than that and the weaker or more demanding plants select themselves out of existence; less than that and I get itching to acquire or propagate more. It's nice to have an answer to that, finally. I'd been wondering.

Finally, here's a picture of the seedlings currently. It's not a great picture, admittedly (it's turned out to be incredibly difficult to get a decent picture -- this is my third or fourth try), but you'll get the idea.

They don't normally live outside; I was hoping this would be a good way to get a good photo of them all together, but it wasn't.
On the theory that I'm going to need mnemonics to keep track of which of these I've watered and which ones I haven't, I'm planning to give them all pretend cultivar names.² The first 31 got the names of real-life drag queens;³ I'm not sure what to do with the remaining 96, but I'm open to suggestions.

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¹ The top ten families:
1. Araceae (mostly Anthurium, Philodendron, Aglaonema) - 269
2. Asparagaceae (mostly Aloe, Chlorophytum, Alworthia, Agave, Dracaena, Gasteraloe) - 229
3. Cactaceae (mostly Hatiora, Schlumbergera, Selenicereus) - 83
4. Gesneriaceae (mostly Episcia, Nematanthus) - 69
5. Bromeliaceae (mostly Cryptanthus) - 60
6. Euphorbiaceae (mostly Euphorbia) - 46
7. Apocynaceae (mostly Hoya, Stapelia) - 37
8. Crassulaceae (mostly Crassula, Sedum) - 31
9. Piperaceae (Peperomia) - 27
10. Begoniaceae (all Begonia) - 26
² The tags in the pots have numbers, the name of the seed parent, and the date they were started, but only the numbers are unique, and I doubt numbers alone are going to be that easy for me to remember. There's very little chance that any of these will wind up as actual cultivar names -- it's something of a long shot to think they're going to make it to blooming size at all, much less be desirable and interesting -- so I may as well pretend if it amuses me to do so.
³ (Drag queen names just seem appropriate for Anthuriums. Maybe it's just me.)

Music video: Bad Lip Reading "Time to Rock"

Hooray! There's a new Bad Lip Reading video!

The original song, "Hot Problems," would be catchy except that no one present can sing; you can find it here. There is a significantly more palatable acoustic version here, though it's sung by a guy so it comes across as pretty but a little nonsensical.

But if you objected to nonsensical, I suppose you wouldn't be reading this post in the first place, so whatever.

Random plant event: Aloe harlana (?)

I've never known exactly what this plant is; it was sold as Aloe harlana, but from what I read on-line, it probably isn't. The leaves aren't as wide on mine as most of the photos at davesgarden.com, and the flowers on everybody else's seem a lot darker orange, and more solid-colored than striped.

The flowers, as of 19 May 2012.
On the other hand, we have to make allowances for the fact that mine's being grown indoors without quite enough light (probably), and that can make a lot of plants look funny.

Whatever it is, this is the first time it's bloomed, so I have one more piece of information towards an ID. Maybe someday we'll know.

Emerging bud, plus the whole plant, on 14 April 2012.

Pretty picture: Epicattleya Rene Marques 'Tyler'

How come there are no hybrid orchids with this color scheme, but big frilly petals and sepals like your standard corsage catt? Or are there, and I just haven't been paying attention? 'Cause I kind of like this, except for how skinny it is.

Random plant event: Hoya bella

The Hoya bella has bloomed again. The last time was two years ago, and I got a much, much better photo out of that one (below) than I did this year (above), but perhaps the important thing is that I tried. (Actually, the important thing is that I had decent light for the older picture, and for the newer one I was trying to make do with fluorescent light in the basement because it was after sunset already.)

As with the 2010 bloom, I could detect a bit of a smell, but it didn't smell like candy, and was pretty faint.

This year's bloom was about a month ahead of 2010's. Lots of things have been confused by the odd weather this spring, though, so maybe that explains it. Or maybe they're just not highly seasonal bloomers. Good timing in any case, because my relationship with the genus Hoya has hit a rough patch lately.