Random plant event: not a Schlumbergera or Anthurium (!)

You may have gotten the impression that I no longer have any plants that are not Schlumbergeras or Anthuriums. If so, you are wrong, but I forgive you, because it's . . . basically true.¹ There are, nevertheless, other kinds of plants here, and sometimes they still do things. No Eucharis has bloomed for me since June 2013, and this particular Eucharis hasn't bloomed since December 2010. I wasn't trying to make this happen, so it was a pleasant surprise:

And they still smell wonderful, of course.

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¹ 754 Anthurium seedlings, 25 specimens of named varieties used to generate seedlings (though some of the named varieties' names are not actually known -- I'm assuming they have names -- and some of the named varieties have not yet actually produced any seedlings); 193 Schlumbergera seedlings, 26 cuttings of seedlings, and 10 named varieties. As of February 20, this means that 65% of the individual plants in my collection are either Schlumbergeras or Anthuriums. Expand that to include the other plants I'm producing from my own self-generated seeds (32 Spathiphyllums, 34 Coffea arabicas, and 4 Euphorbia leuconeura) and about 70% of my plant collection is self-produced now.
And that's me being slightly restrained -- I have a whole fruit's worth of Leuchtenbergia principis seeds I could start but haven't, plus a bunch of Salvia elegans seeds I collected in late fall that I'm not sure how or when to start, and I have enough Canna seeds that I could just about fling them throughout the house and then skate from room to room:

Pretty pictures: Miltoniopsis (Dearest x Butterfly Primrose)

I'm assuming that the reason for the two sets of flowers being different colors is that they change over time, like so many other kinds of flowers do. (The lighter-colored ones do seem a little more beaten-up than the darker blooms.)

Another explanation is that the darker ones are just in shadow, or that my camera is making up colors again, as it often does when photographic subjects are at the extreme red or violet ends of the spectrum. Either way.

Miltoniopsis blooms are nice, but the ones at the orchid show always seem to be basically the same flower -- red or magenta, with varying degrees of spots and stripes near the lip -- with one yellow exception (Miltoniopsis Andrea West).

More typical: Keiko Komoda (from the 2010 show), Morris Chestnut (2010), Arnold Linsman (2011), Lennart Karl Gottling (2012), Echo Bay 'Midnight Tears' (2013, Echo Bay (2013). Surprisingly, most of the ones that come up in an image search are white, which I think I like better than the red / magenta? Not sure.

Schlumbergera seedling round-up

Okay. So I think we've seen all the Schlumbergera seedlings we're going to see until the fall. Could be wrong, but that's how it looks right now. So here are all twenty-nine of them together:

#008A "Frightened Dog"

#008B "Candor"

#010A "Semantic Satiation"

#012A "Sofa Fort"

#019A "Belevenissen"

#021A "Spider Crab"

#021B "Birthday Dinner"

#022A "Sad Tomato"

#023A "Stoked"

#024A "Safety Vest"

#024B "Bryce Canyon"

#025A "Clownfish"

#026A "Brick Wall"

#027A "Kiln"

#028A "Phil Collen"

#028B "Neon Like"

#030A "Diwali"

#031A "Baby Carrots"

#054A "Helpful Gesture"

#055A "Pumpkin Festival"

#057A "Pyrotechnic"

#060A "Wet Dog"

#061A "Leather Fairy"

#064A "Rose Hoses"

#078A "Art Party"

#083A "Psychedelic Bunny"

#083B "Guy Fawkes Night"

#084A "Downward-Facing Dog"

#088A "Cyborg Unicorn"
And for what it's worth, some of the variation in colors here is because of differences in lighting or camera settings, or the plants just being naturally variable in their bloom colors (both from bloom to bloom but also according to the age of the flower: Schlumbergera blooms don't change as much with time as Anthuriums can, but they do change some), but the seedlings really didn't all bloom in the same shade of orange. Most of them fall pretty neatly into a handful of categories: orange/pink ("Neon Like," "Sofa Fort"), orange/white ("Belevenissen," "Baby Carrots"), red-orange ("Sad Tomato," "Phil Collen"), dark orange ("Clownfish," "Stoked"), light orange ("Bryce Canyon," "Leather Fairy"), and "other" ("Psychedelic Bunny," "Helpful Gesture").

I've started cuttings of ten of these and expect to offer them for sale through this blog at some point, if they don't die and I'm convinced that they've rooted adequately. I haven't done cuttings for every one of the seedlings: some of them just suck and why would you want cuttings (e.g. #060A "Wet Dog"), some of them aren't large enough yet to be able to spare cuttings (e.g. #028A "Phil Collen"), and some of them finished blooming before I came up with a way to keep track of which seedlings were which, so I actually can't take cuttings yet (e.g. #054A "Helpful Gesture"). I'm expecting to be able to take cuttings from three more fairly soon, and if the plants keep blooming sporadically during the spring and summer, I should have most of the good seedlings in propagation, if not actually ready to sell, by the end of summer.

I'll have a post about buying the cuttings once it's warmed up outside, outlining which ones are available and how to go about purchasing one. (There may also be some Anthurium seedlings available in the summer, but again, I don't know for certain that there will be any, and if there are, I don't know which seedlings they'll be.) For the moment, though, posting will slow down until I can get some new material together, and when I do, it's likely to be pretty Anthurium-centric.