Random plant event: Schlumbergera x buckleyi

I got this plant in September 2010, and have never seen it bloom. There was some brief excitement in 2010, when a flower bud formed, but it dropped without opening. In 2011 and 2012, I didn't even get a bud.

But this year, hey, finally a flower:

There might even have been two. (I'm writing this on 23 December, so I don't know how the other buds fared.) So what changed?

Well. In 2013, shelf rearrangements led to this particular plant being on a shelf about 2 feet lower than it had been previously. That's all that changed, as far as I know, but it seems to have been enough. It wound up further away from one source of artificial light, if only slightly, and a second source of artificial light was blocked by a bunch of too-tall-for-the-shelves plants next to the shelves. Plus, being closer to the floor meant it was a lot colder. Colder + darker = blooms. Apparently. So it can be done.

UPDATE (2 January): I think it wound up just being the one flower. Maybe two. I didn't keep as close of a watch as I probably should have.

Random plant event: Spathiphyllum seedlings

The Spathiphyllum seedlings are just full of surprises, it turns out. Only 14 months old, and two of them have decided to bloom already:

Spathiphyllum seedling number 7.

Spathiphyllum seedling number 16.
Another thing that's surprising about this is that at the moment, some of the peace lily seedlings are in 3-inch (7.5 cm) pots, and some of them are in 4-inch (10 cm) pots, and both of the ones that bloomed are in 3-inch pots.

The conventional wisdom about peace lilies is that they are more likely to bloom if potbound, but I'd always assumed that that was some kind of error, on the grounds that 1) they don't seem to have that much problem blooming if they're not potbound either, assuming that they're mature, healthy plants, and 2) there are no pots in nature, so why should the plants care one way or the other about being potbound. And those still seem like perfectly valid arguments to me, but even so: the ones I left in small pots are blooming, and the ones I moved to bigger pots are not.

So perhaps there's something to the conventional wisdom after all?

Pretty picture: Miltoniopsis Echo Bay

Previously.

Miltoniopsis Echo Bay = Miltoniopsis Woodlands x Miltoniopsis Rose Bay