Random plant event: NOID NOID

The scale infestation continues. It is in fact looking like what people say is true: once you have scale, you always have scale. It's never very many insects, they're never on very many plants, I can occasionally even remove an infestation from an area entirely by repeated spraying with rubbing alcohol.¹ But it always seems to move somewhere else, and always seems to return to the plants I removed it from. Between the scale and the sunburn and rot caused by putting plants outside before they were ready, I'm on the verge of throwing out all my Agaves, Furcraeas, Manfredas, and Mangaves and being rid of those genera forever, the same way I abandoned Hedera and Codiaeum to the spider mites years ago. I mean, look what happened to my Agave lophantha 'Quadricolor' after two days outside:

September 2013:

April 2014:

I did salvage an unrotted offset from it, and I had a previous offset (taken over a year ago, when I'd thought the scale might lead me to throw the plant out), but that's small consolation for losing a specimen as large and pretty as it was. Especially since the offsets will likely die or get thrown out before reaching that size themselves.

But we're not here to mourn the Agave; we're here to marvel at the recuperative powers of my NOID fern.²

I discovered scale on several of the fronds around the beginning of March, maybe the end of February. I started cutting off any fronds that had obvious scale, and any fronds that were close enough to have had honeydew dripped on them. As I progressed, I realized that 1) this would result in me cutting off most of the fronds, and 2) any fronds that I left would probably have enough undetectable scale on them to launch a new round of infestation, so I'd have hacked my fern to bits but accomplished nothing. So, I cut all the fronds off down to the rhizomes. Maybe the plant would come back, maybe it wouldn't, but at least the scale would be gone.³

I'm not certain about the date, but my best guess is that I cut the fronds off on 28 February. By 18 March, new ones were coming up all over:

And by yesterday morning (26 April), it was back to what it had looked like before, pretty much:

That's an incredibly fast comeback.

I don't know yet whether this had the intended effect of getting rid of all the scale. I haven't seen any yet, but then I've also been too busy and too scared to look for it. I'm impressed with the plant's recovery either way, though.

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¹ If you want to recommend that I try pesticides, especially imidacloprid: been there. Done that. More than once. It costs too much for something that works as slowly and incompletely as it does.
² It was a hitch-hiker in a Rhipsalis I bought years ago. Took it out, nursed it along, and it is now much, much larger than the Rhipsalis ever dreamed of getting. Because the fern wasn't supposed to be in the pot, though, there was no ID for it. My best guess is that it's a Phlebodium of some kind, possibly P. aureum. When I expressed this opinion in a previous post, someone popped up to tell me that it was cleeeeearly a Hawaiian wart fern (Microsorum scolopendria or Phymatosorus grossus) and not a Phlebodium at all. Based on the lack of scent (M. scolopendria fronds are supposed to smell like vanilla.) and the less-orderly arrangement of its spores, I'm pretty certain it's not that particular Microsorum (or Phymatosorus). Though I don't rule out that it could be a Microsorum (or Phymatosorus).
³ In theory. I was assuming that the scale wouldn't be able to survive on the hairy rhizomes long enough for the plant to grow new fronds. This may or may not be a good assumption.

Random plant event: Agave americana

This doesn't, I think, mean much of anything, but I hadn't seen it before. One of my variegated Agave americanas grew a couple leaves that got fused together halfway down.

The new leaves on the Big Damn Screw Pine occasionally fail to separate from the leaves that precede or follow them, I think because the midrib spines get caught on the other leaves. If it were growing outdoors, where the wind and rain would move the plant around as it grew, this wouldn't be a problem, but indoors I occasionally have to unstick them from one another. So, I thought maybe the Agave situation was something like that, and tried to pull the leaves apart.

But I shouldn't have. Oh, well. The plant hasn't rotted or turned yellow or started to glow or anything, so it appears that I didn't actually hurt it.

New plants

Reader generosity (thank you, Paul VA!) has gotten me one of the plants that's been on my want list for a long time, Euphorbia leuconeura.

He even sent a slightly smaller duplicate, just in case.

Not a lot to say about the plant yet; I only just got them last Thursday. The only thing that's really jumped out at me so far is that they're a lot prettier in person than I was expecting from the photos I've seen on-line. (The above photos included.) Some plants just don't photograph well.

But wait! There were even more bonuses! Agave potatorum 'Kissho Kan' and a duplicate:

I hadn't asked for this specifically, but I'm always happy to make the acquaintance of more Agaves (with the possible exception of A. bovicornuta, which is much too stabby for its own good), so this is also awesome.

Four Questions for the Hive Mind

Question 1: Is it possible for fuzzy-leaved plants like Episcias to get scale?

I've seen warnings about mealybugs on Episcia, and actual mealybugs on similarly-fuzzy plants, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about scale on Episcia, Saintpaulia, etc. Does it happen? It seems like maybe the hairs would make it hard for them to sit on the stems and leaves like they like to, and I haven't seen any during the whole scale outbreak, is mostly why I'm asking.


Question 2: What was happening here?

The Calathea makoyana had been doing fine for quite a while down in the basement. Then, about a month ago, I had it switch places with an Aglaonema next to it, because the Aglaonema was getting too tall. The Calathea then wound up directly under one of the shop lights. Two weeks later, when I went to water it, the leaves were curled and beginning to wilt, and the undersides of most of the leaves were full of spider mites and sticky spots like this. Thinking "sticky spots = scale," I checked the plant thoroughly, but didn't find any. So I put it back, in its old spot. Two weeks later, I looked at it again, and it looked like the above photo. Still didn't see any actual insects, just spider mites. And unlike the scale on the other side of the basement, the stickiness was only ever on the underside of the leaves, never the top.

The plant was discarded anyway, on the grounds that several of its neighbors had detectable scale infestations, and that was long enough ago that I'm not upset about it now. But I am still wondering how I could have gotten scale without, as far as I can tell, getting scale.


Question 3: How do you keep potted plants upright when outdoors?

I intend to let some of the plants spend the summer outdoors again. The logical place for them to go is along the north side of the garage, which is shaded for most of the day but gets weak sun in the afternoon. Also the husband just poured concrete there, so it's a nice flat surface.

The problem is that the wind comes sweeping in from the west, with basically nothing to block it, and gets funneled between the garage and house, so by the time it reaches the driveway it's moving really fast. Consequently, anything with a high center of gravity gets knocked over every time we have a storm. And we have lots of storms.

Last summer, I had three basic approaches for dealing with this. 1) Put the pots really close together, so even if they catch the wind and want to blow over, they can't. 2) Put bricks on the rim and/or soil. 3) Keep the really top-heavy plants inside. Those kind of worked, but even so, I spent a lot of time righting pots, dashing out into the rain at 4 AM to rush a cart full of plants into the garage, and picking up shards of broken pots.

So I'm hoping that there are better ways that I haven't thought of yet. There is a plantable bed next to this spot, so it might theoretically be possible to plant something cheap or fast-growing to serve as a windbreak (currently, all that's there is grape hyacinth, Muscari something, so there's room), but all we actually have right now are a ton of Cannas and a random bunch of two- or three-year-old seeds.


Question 4: Are there ways to force Agaves to offset? Or even ways to encourage them to offset?

I ask because there was a spell in January when a bunch of Agaves I had all started to offset at once. It could be coincidence, of course, but a couple of the offsetters in January had never even done it before, so it seemed like there was a connection. If I did something to cause it, though, I don't know what that was. Does anybody have any idea how that works?

They Grow Up So Fast, Part 5

Another one of these, motivated mostly by the fact that I just took a round of new pictures a week and a half ago and clearly had to do something with them.

Unidentified fern
This was a "bonus plant." It came along with the Rhipsalis NOID, way back in March 2011. I didn't expect it to survive, but I was curious about what it was, and I figured it was worth a shot, so I removed it as carefully as I could from the pot and put it in its own 4-inch (10 cm) pot, with a clear plastic drinking glass over it to keep the humidity high while it recovered. For a while at the beginning, I thought it might be a Microsorum diversifolium, but I'm thinking now it's probably a Phlebodium aureum, or something very similar. Which is kind of nice for me, since the big huge Phlebodium aureum 'Mandianum' got thrown out in the scalepocalypse and I didn't have a back-up.

August 2011. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm).
October 2011. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm).
September 2012. Pot: 6 inches (15 cm).
March 2013. Pot: 8 inches (20 cm).

Agave desmettiana?
Another one that's changed size pretty dramatically, though in this case it took quite a bit longer. It would probably have gone a lot faster if I'd been letting it spend every summer outside, instead of just 2012.

I can't say enough nice things about Agave as a genus. They're among the least fussy plants I've grown, they get gratifyingly big, they're easy to propagate (once they decide to start offsetting), and they're neat-looking. I mean, sure, you do have to be willing to get stabbed in the face from time to time. But everything else about them is awesome.

January 2008. Pot: 3 inches (8 cm) along the diagonal.

November 2009. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm)?

August 2010. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm)?

July 2011. Pot: 6 inches (15 cm)?
March 2013. Pot: 8 or 9 inches (20-23 cm).


Epipremnum aureum 'Neon'
I'd had bad experiences with 'Neon' in the past; one 4-inch (10 cm) plant did okay for me until I tried to move it up to a 6-inch (15 cm) pot, and then it suddenly rotted and died. I couldn't even salvage any cuttings: they were somehow already rotten by the time I took them, even though they looked perfectly healthy.

However, I couldn't resist trying again last summer. It turns out that it's a much more forgiving plant if you give it things like light and fertilizer;¹ there's only nine months' difference between the two pictures below.

June 2012. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm).
March 2013. Pot: 6 inches (15 cm).

Anthurium schlechtendahlii
I've covered Anthurium schhlechtendahlii previously, but thought it was worth showing you again, considering how much it's grown in the last year and a half.

I'd been worried that this was going to be another situation like Anthurium "hookeri,"² where I wouldn't be able to provide it with enough light, so it'd get huge, weird leaves and never look quite right. But so far, it's been pretty happy with artificial light and regular room conditions. The husband's office tends to run colder than the rest of the house,³ even, but that hasn't seemed to be a problem. It's getting close to outgrowing its spot, and I'm not sure I have anywhere to move it when it does, but it surely has to count as a success to have gone from seedlings to monster in just under three years.


August 2010. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm).

February 2011. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm).

July 2011. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm).
March 2013. Pot: 8 inches (20 cm).

Unidentified Ficus benjamina cv.
This one started out as perlite-rooted cuttings from the ex-job, and I didn't give it decent light until very recently, because there's only so much light to go around and it didn't seem to urgently need a lot. But once I gave it one of the highly-coveted south window spots, it's filled out like crazy, much better than some of the other Ficuses I've started from cuttings. (How many times do I need to learn that even plants which tolerate lower levels of light might still prefer more light? I don't know. At least twice, apparently.)

Ficus benjamina is another one that I'm appreciating a lot more in the last year or so than I did before that. Sometimes the boring plants you see everywhere are everywhere for good reasons.


January 2008. Pot: 4 inches (10 cm).

October 2011. Pot: 6 inches (15 cm).
March 2013. Pot: 8 inches (20 cm).
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¹ (who knew?)
² (Sold to me as A. hookeri, but I understand it's pretty unlikely to be A. hookeri, hence the quote marks.)
³ We chose wrong when we were picking out rooms for ourselves. I'm always too hot, but I picked the hottest room; he's always too cold, and picked the coldest. In our defense, we didn't know any of this at the time we were doing the picking. We've both made enough changes to the rooms that it would be difficult to switch back.

New (old) plants

Among the casualties of the Scalepocalypse has been Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips.' It did pretty well outside last summer, but even though it was in a clay pot, it got blown off the cart a lot and never made a lot of progress in terms of overall appearance. It'd grow for a while, get knocked over and lose a couple leaves, then grow for a while, then get knocked over, etc. It was managing to accumulate some foliage after I brought it inside in the fall (long, floppy foliage, granted, but it was foliage nonetheless), but then it had to go and get scale, so it got thrown out anyway.

I've used the Scalepocalypse to get rid of some things that I wasn't that fond of anymore, so a lot of the plants that I've thrown out will probably stay gone, but the Manfreda really kind of bothered me. Fortunately, the ex-job still had them, so I could replace it. This one's actually better than the original, in that there are two plants in the same pot, instead of just one like the plant I bought originally.

I've only bought two plants in the last six months. The Manfreda is the more recent (20 February); the other (15 January) is an Agave victoriae-reginae 'Pinguino,' which I bought mostly because we somehow managed to go to Reha Greenhouses when they were closed again, and even though they weren't technically open, they still opened up the store and let me and the husband wander around the greenhouse for a bit. I figured I should buy something. (I actually wanted 3" square grower pots. Nobody seems to sell the size of those I need, though, so the Agave was Plan B.)

Taxonomic note: the tag said that this was Agave ferdinandi-regis 'Pinguino,' not Agave victoriae-reginae 'Pinguino,' but officially, the former doesn't exist, and is a synonym for the latter. It seems to be the same as any other A. victoriae-reginae, except that the leaf margins are a different color (red-brown on this, usually white), there are sometimes small spines near the terminal spine (easier to see in the first picture below), the terminal spine is dark brown or black instead of green and white, and there are fewer and larger leaves. (Ref.) It's still a little unclear what the correct ID is; the tag said one thing, and davesgarden.com says another, A. nickelsiae. At the moment, Plant List says both are synonyms for A. victoriae-reginae,¹ so that's what I'm going with.



In any case, I had six Agave victoriae-reginaes already. A couple different kinds, even, so there wasn't much point to buying a third type, but you know how it is in a time of crisis; you want to stick with the things you know.

Plus I was having an Agaveish phase anyway. The last purchases before these two were the original Manfreda (13 June), and on 25 June, an Agave vilmoriniana² and Epipremnum aureum 'Neon.' Apparently Agaves are comfort plants for me.³

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¹ Which Plant List doesn't even recognize the name "Agave nickelsiae," and suggests Agave nickelsii instead. Which is why we try not to rely too much on davesgarden.com.
² Which has been fine, though I realized almost immediately that size was going to be a problem sooner or later. This is in a 6-inch (15 cm) diameter pot:


³ (Not that Manfredas are Agaves. But they're pretty close.)

In Which I Nearly Achieve Houseplant Pest Bingo

There are too many plants in the basement, and too many plants needing water elsewhere in the house, for me to have been able to check everything in the basement this week. But here's where things are since my last post about the Great Purge of 2013:

I've discarded 125 more plants, 70 of which were Anthurium seedlings.

This is both worse than I had feared, and not nearly as bad as I had feared. I'd assumed that I would find a handful of locations that were just swarming with scale, but most of the collection would be clear. The reasoning was that there would be a lot of insects near the spots where they were first introduced, but since they don't crawl very far or very fast, they wouldn't have had time to spread very far away from those initial sites. And that actually is more or less what I found among most of the collection -- a few hot spots, but mostly clean. However, among the Anthuriums, it was basically the opposite: lots of plants that only had one visible insect, occasionally two, but no plant that was heavily infested, and the affected plants were sort of randomly scattered around the flats of seedlings. I don't know what that means, exactly, but it must mean something.

I also discovered, in the process of giving everything close inspections, that I have thrips. For sure. I'd thought this was possible, because I've seen damage on a few plants (especially the Anthurium seedlings) consistent with thrips, and on two occasions, I've seen fast-moving skinny insects that might plausibly have been thrips, but 1) they're so fast that by the time I realized that I had seen something, the something was no longer there to see, and 2) it's only happened a couple times over a long period of time, so by the time I saw the second one, I'd mostly forgotten about having seen the first.

As far as it goes, I only saw two thrips on this round, but I got a better look, and one thrips¹ actually held still long enough to be identified (though not photographed). So it's been confirmed.

Which means that, among other things, I have finally reached the point where I have had all seven of the major houseplant pests,² which feels like an accomplishment of sorts. I have not yet gotten Houseplant Pest Bingo, see below, but am now in a position where I'll almost certainly have Bingo with the next pest I see, regardless of what it is.

Slugs, earwigs, caterpillars, snails, root mealybugs, or borers/weevils would all get me a Bingo. And then I win! (Something!) C'mon, caterpillars!³
Most of the scale sightings were of the same species over and over again, which is what I'd expected. The species in question is nearly circular, brown, and very flat, and what makes me think that it's the same species consistently is that unlike most pictures of scale I've seen, on this one the legs are almost always visible through the shell. (In fact, seeing legs is as good as the squishability test, as far as determining if a random spot is scale or just a scar.)

The species of scale I've been seeing on everything. Left: younger one, on Eucharis grandiflora. Right: a couple more mature individuals on Alworthia 'Black Gem.'
However, I think there may be more than one species in the basement, because I found one plant that had these instead:

Many unanswered questions about this. Where did they come from? How did they get to be so huge without managing to spread to the plants around them? (I was being awfully thorough: if other plants had these, I would surely have seen them.)

But so the point is that in the course of trying to get one problem under control, I've discovered two more problems. Which is less depressing than you might think, because the stuff I was already planning to do should also get rid of the thrips and the new scale. The imidacloprid may yet do something, and I've decided to go ahead and keep spraying the Anthurium seedlings with neem oil, on the theory that it can't hurt, and may help. Plus I'm about to begin another sweep through the basement to check for scale (or whatever), and anything that has scale, or a major problem with something else, will be thrown out. There may be no magic bullet, but perhaps there's a magic shotgun shell.

As far as losing plants that cannot easily be replaced, there have been a few, but not as many as I was expecting. Most of the hard-to-replace plants were thrown out because they'd never done well for me, not because I saw scale on them. The only plant that really qualified as a sad event was a NOID Nematanthus with pink/orange blooms, where I lost all five plants I had. I also lost both the Murraya paniculata I'd propagated from a cutting, and the one I'd propagated from seed.

And then there were the three that I should have thrown out, but cheated and kept parts anyway:

1) I threw out the parent, but propagated an Epipremnum aureum 'Marble Queen' that had belonged to the husband long ago. It didn't seem like it was that badly infested, and although 'Marble Queens' are easily replaced, this specific 'Marble Queen' wasn't. I washed the cuttings off (including power-washing with the sprayer attachment set to "annihilate"⁴) and am water-rooting. I'll check them over a few times before potting them up, but considering the plant's history, I didn't want to get rid of it completely.

2) I also propagated Agave lophantha from offsets, after power-washing, though I did it kind of backwards. The main plant didn't have visible scale on it, but the offsets did. The weird part was where. My A. lophanthas have been producing lots of offsets (at least ten per plant) on long, skinny stalks, with thin, stunted leaves shielding the stalks all the way up. After the stalk is a certain length away from the soil, the offset starts growing thicker, heavier leaves, and settles down into a rosette form like the mature plants have.

I didn't think to take any pictures of the runners that had actual offsets growing at the end. This is a picture of one of the long, skinny stalks with the thin, stunted leaves, though.
On my plants, the parents were clean, and the thicker leaves of the offsets were clean, but there were scale hiding under the thinner leaves up the stalk.

This makes it sort of silly of me to spare the offsets, and there's a good chance that the scale kept appearing on the offsets because they were crawling over from the main plant, maybe beneath the soil. But, the parent plants had grown large enough to be dangerous and unwieldy, and I didn't want to throw out the entire plant, because I don't see them for sale very often. So power-washing the offsets and then potting them up was sort of the best compromise I could manage. I get to keep the species while shrinking it to something more manageable, and hopefully any scale present was either discarded along with the stalks and parent plant or washed down the drain during the power-washing. If scale show up on the offsets later, I suppose I'll throw them out, but I'm hoping the scale will let me get away with cheating, at least on this one species.

3) The non-variegated Agave americana was also spared. Again, the parent plant seemed to be clean, or at least cleaner, but the offsets had scale. So I pulled the offsets out, threw them away, and kept the parent. This is probably kinda stupid, but the plant has only just started to get big enough and healthy enough to resemble a full-grown plant: I didn't want to have to start all over again if there was any way to avoid it. And I have a soft spot for Agaves anyway.⁵

Pot diameter: 5.5 in / 14 cm.
So, overall, it was worse for the Anthuriums than expected, but better for everything else. There were several borderline cases, where I saw honeydew spots but couldn't actually find insects, so I don't know if those plants were infested or just near plants that were. So there will probably be more plants on the way out this week, when I recheck. Also, this round of inspections only covered the south and east sides of the basement; I have another 57 plants on the west side that need to be checked for the first time. But so far, things aren't terrible.

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¹ "Thrips" is one of those words that is both plural and singular. One thrips, two thrips. There is no such thing as a "thrip." It's especially confusing in this case because the words that do this don't generally end in "-s," so it seems like there ought to be a "thrip." But there is not.
² (spider mites, aphids, scale, mealybugs, whitefly, thrips, fungus gnats)
³ Also: I'm not 100% certain about the viruses, since I've never had that checked out by a lab or anything. But I've seen enough things that I thought could be viruses that I figure one of them probably was. The most recent has appeared on one of my seed-grown Aglaonemas:

As with the other occasions, I can't be positive that there's a virus here, but a Google search for "ring spot plant virus" turns up a number of photos that look like this. I haven't thrown the plant out yet, but I realize I probably ought to. Maybe in this next round.
⁴ It's one of those garden-hose attachments with multiple settings. The settings are something like: mist, gentle shower, cone, jet, pulse, julienne, stun, liquefy, annihilate. For watering, I pretty much only ever use mist (for seedlings) and gentle shower (everything else), but when I feel the need to really blast the hell out of something, I use one of the others.
⁵ Indeed, from the perspective of the Agaves, I am nothing but soft, stab-able spots.

The Very Slow and Occasionally Sticky Inferno

So here's what's been going on.

Watering the plants has always been time-consuming and tedious, but it got worse in April. I've been watering almost everything in the house on a 14-day rotation. A lot of the plants would prefer more frequent checks than that, but 14 days is what I'm able to do, so they either live with getting watered every 14 days, or they die, or I make a special exception for them and check them every seven days. Previously, the special exception category was limited to about 10-15 plants on a small table in the plant room, but in April, I decided that about 500 plants in the basement also needed to be getting checked every 7 days, because a lot of them were seedlings or newish cuttings or plants that are just really drought-sensitive, and they wouldn't survive if I tried to keep them on the 14-day schedule.

What this has meant is that instead of checking about 1000-1050 plants every 14 days, I was suddenly checking about 1500-1600 plants every 14 days. So I took the most tedious and time-consuming part of the hobby and made it like 50% worse, basically.

And because of the extra work, I thought to myself at some point in May or June or probably both: I bet I'm never going to be lying on my deathbed thinking, "Gee, I wish I'd spent more time watering plants." And as I started mailing out plants to people I was selling to or trading with, I started fantasizing about how I could scale back the collection in a way that didn't involve outright killing anything, because that always makes me feel bad.

Open this in its own tab and you can even see its disgusting little legs.
And then the scaling back started to happen, in the most literal way possible: I started finding scale insects on the plants. One plant at the end of March. A handful at the beginning of May. And then at the end of June, the floodgates opened and I was finding scale everywhere:

1 Alpinia zerumbet variegata (plant room; 31 March; discarded)
3 Alworthia 'Black Gem' (basement; 1 May; discarded)
1 Aloe NOID (basement; 8 May; discarded)
1 Albuca bracteata (basement; 28 May; treated)
1 Strelitzia reginae (plant room; early June?; treated)
1 Aloe polyphylla (basement; 26 June; discarded)
1 Philodendron squamiferum (living room; 27 June; treated)
1 Agave desmettiana, variegated (basement; 28 June; discarded)
1 Agave titanota (basement; 2 July; treated)
1 Agave americana (basement; 2 July; treated)
2 Agave 'Blue Glow' (basement; 2 July; treated)
2 Agave lophantha (basement; 2 July; treated)
3 Aloe vera (basement; 3 July; discarded)
3 Gasteraloe x beguinii (basement; 3 July; discarded)
1 Aloe x 'Silver Ridge' (basement; 3 July; discarded)
13 Alworthia 'Black Gem' (basement; 3 July; discarded)
5 Hoya polyneura (basement; 9 July; discarded)
1 Philodendron hederaceum micans (basement; 11 July; discarded)
1 Philodendron erubescens 'Red Emerald' (basement; 11 July; treated)
4 Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana (basement; 12 July; discarded)
1 Ficus benjamina 'Black Diamond' (basement; 12 July; treated)
1 Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x ? (basement; 16 July; discarded)
1 Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x ? (basement; 23 July; treated)

I think there were three separate infestations here, based on what plants were affected and when I noticed.

The first plant, the Alpinia, was I think was a single isolated infestation: I don't know where the scale could have come from, since I hadn't brought anything new into that area, but the plant was stressed, so it's possible it had a low-grade infestation for a long time, and then it got a lot worse really fast when it got stressed.

Scale on the Alpinia.
The second infestation barely counts: somebody sent me a cutting in June that had some scale on it, but I found them pretty much immediately, and it wasn't very advanced, so I think that's not going to be a big deal either.

And then the third. I think it came in on an Aloe polyphylla I received in December as a gift, because the outbreaks have all been taking place on plants that had been grown near the plant in question at one point or another. This is the infestation that swept the basement, might still be sweeping it, and what's caused all the troubles.

It's now been a couple weeks since any new scale was spotted, so possibly the worst is over. For a while there, though, I'd have to throw out more plants every time I watered, and that was depressing as hell.

But did I let myself sink into despondency and depression? Hell, no! I took action! For a few plants that I suspected had been exposed, but which I couldn't find any scale on, I decided to get out there ahead of the infestation and spray neem oil on them, to stop the infestation before it became visible. Which sounds like a good idea, right?

Yes. Well. You know how the directions on neem oil say not to use it on plants that are in direct sun, or that will be exposed to sun within a few hours of application, and all that? They should probably also add fluorescent lights to that warning, because within 24 hours, I'd completely defoliated two small Euphorbia trigona cuttings, and produced a few bleached spots and several ominous dark brown blisters on my baby Agave victoriae-reginaes. The former have bounced back, but the latter look to be permanently disfigured:

Agave victoriae-reginae, neem damage.
Which was even more discouraging, not that I learned my lesson. I then sprayed a plant room Euphorbia milii and Pedilanthus tithymaloides with neem because there was some kind of fungus that had been growing on their leaves. The Euphorbia responded by dropping about 95% of its foliage, immediately. The Pedilanthus was less of a drama queen about it, and only lost about 30% of its leaves, over the space of a month. Either way, though.

Euphorbia milii, after neem oil treatment for fungus. It was technically a success, I suppose, in that I'm no longer even remotely concerned about the fungus. Probably what happens next here is that I take cuttings and start new plants, but I haven't tried that yet.
Also, some of the Agaves I treated with neem and stuck outside also bleached (no blistering, though); they'll probably come back inside again in the fall, because the scale is probably not a problem anymore, but it'll be sad regardless, since they looked better when they had scale but no sunburn: I didn't really have the time or means to try to ease them into the outdoor light, and we don't have much for shady spots.

So then I started sinking into despondency.

All this was happening on top of the usual plant attrition, too. Not saying I encourage it or anything, but it's normal for me to lose a plant here, a plant there, for various reasons over time, and this was an exceptionally good summer for that.

I finally had it with Crassula ovata 'Gollum' and threw the lot out, because they persisted in developing a stupid fungus (maybe the same fungus, maybe a different one; I have no idea) even though I told them not to, and I didn't have a way to make them stop if they weren't going to listen.

The Salvia elegans all dried out (even getting checked weekly, they still dried out!) and died, save for one, which had a round of spider mites and is only barely alive now.

The Aeschynanthus radicans all gave up due to underwatering.

I threw out most of the Gynura aurantiacas I had when became clear that nobody was ever going to want to buy one. This is something I should probably have learned last year, but I'm slow.

The Fatshedera x lizei got spider mites and was thrown out. In fairness, I should note that I'd been expecting that to happen for almost two years, so it should probably get some kind of posthumous medal.

One of the Hatioras ("Easter cactus") imploded, the way they do.

And so on.

It was basically like the plant collection had caught fire. A very slow, and occasionally sticky, inferno. Everything was sort of slowly falling apart: scale, drought, scorching, defoliation, 50% more watering to do, spider mites, and fungus. It also wasn't getting any better. I had no way to know what plants might go bad next. There wasn't much I could do about it. And when I tried to do something about it, I mostly just made things worse.

The upshot of all this being that for about two or three weeks, I basically hated my plants. I didn't want to think about them, talk about them, or take pictures of them, and I sure as hell didn't want to water them, because the surest way to find something horrible hiding in your plant collection is to pick them up and look at them. Which you have to do, in order to water the way I water. (I still did take care of them, of course, because I recognized that I'd probably like them again eventually, and that there was no point punishing the healthy plants upstairs for the scale infestations of the plants downstairs. I just hated doing so more than usual.)

Echinacea 'PowWow Wild Berry,' at the ex-job, with what I believe to be aster yellows disease. PATSP has an official celebratory flower (Gazanias), so it seems only appropriate that PATSP should have an official flower of depression (It's pretty amazing that I've gotten by without an official depression flower for four and a half years, honestly.), and this was kind of the best I could come up with. My apologies to any Echinacea fans in the audience.
It's now been a couple weeks since I've found a new scale infestation. (New mealybugs as of last Wednesday, alas, but the scale seems to have slowed down.) In the last couple weeks, the plant collection has done two big things which I am choosing to interpret as apologies too. I won't tell you what those are yet, but there should be posts about them in the relatively near future. So we're getting back to the point where I'm able to appreciate plants again, somewhat, but I'd still rather not spend a lot of time thinking about them.

The blog, consequently, will be a bit up in the air for a while. I'm officially no longer on hiatus, but I'm probably not going to be posting very often, and I'll probably only be doing that when something exceptionally cool happens. And I'll keep going like that until . . . something changes and I start doing something else, I guess. Your guess is pretty much as good as mine right now.

New Plants

The lead-ban post continues to kick my ass behind the scenes. I know way more about lead, environmental science, hunting, fishing, and wildlife management than I did two weeks ago, but the learning curve has been steep, and I'm still not quite there yet. I'm hopeful that I will be able to post it tomorrow, though.

In the meantime, please enjoy these plants, which I've gotten since the last New Plants post:

Aglaonema 'Sapphire Suzanne.' Ace Hardware. $18.
I'd originally dismissed 'Sapphire Suzanne' as being the plainest of the "Jazzed Gem" series of Aglaonemas, but I ran into one that was unusually cheap (The same plant would have been $32 at the ex-job, and this is the only other place I've ever seen one.), and decided it was still a nice plant, and worth buying. I've had it about four weeks, and it's behaved itself so far.

Agave lophantha 'Quadricolor.' (Was tagged 'QuadrAcolor,' but Google calls that a misspelling.) Ace Hardware. $4.50.
I've seen this cultivar for sale a few times, but always more expensive and usually larger specimens. I had pretty much given up on getting one (and anyway I have two of the species to deal with, which are getting ever-larger and pointier, so I hardly needed another), but I couldn't pass up $4.50, especially since I know from the experience with the other specimens that it's likely to do well for me indoors.

Excoecaria cochinchinensis. Ace Hardware. $5.
This plant is relatively new to the area -- I don't think I'd seen them for sale prior to last spring -- and I initially had zero interest in it on the grounds that it was being sold as a "Chinese croton." I don't need any kind of croton, no matter what language it speaks, was my thinking, and it really did look a lot like one, particularly the cultivar Codiaeum variegatum 'Andrew,' which has the same bumpy leaves and marginal variegation but lacks the red underside.

But then a reader who'd just bought an Excoecaria e-mailed me to ask if I knew anything about them, and in the course of looking that up, I discovered that it was in fact not a croton. (Also not a Ficus, even though the tag on the e-mailer's plant said it was an "Exciting new Ficus Variety!") So I was like, well, maaaaaaybe, if I find one really cheap somewhere. And then I ran into the davesgarden.com page for it, where one commenter (of only two) said that s/he'd never seen any insect or mite activity on his/r plant.

I also found information that a different Excoecaria species is known as "blind-your-eye," which sounded a bit ominous, but I have so many Euphorbias already that poisonous sap is almost as much motivation to buy the plant as to not. (Excoecaria, like Euphorbias and Codiaeum, is in the Euphorbia family.)

So when I saw the above plant, tagged $5.99 but during a 20% off sale, I thought, sure, what the hell, and I bought it. The next day, when I went to take the above photo, I noticed what looked like spider mites on the underside of some of the leaves and felt a chill go through me. This may not mean anything: spider mites will sometimes live opportunistically on plants they don't especially like if they can't find anything better, and it's not like it was the cleanest plant area in the world. Maybe the mites wandered over from something else and were all, "What a dump! But we can't afford to move, so. . . ." Or perhaps I'm being uncharacteristically hopeful.

I've since realized that the davesgarden.com commenter hails from Garland TX and may well keep the plant outdoors for most of the year, in which case his/r spider mite experiences are not really relevant to my situation at all and I might have been better served going with my initial "It's a croton? Then I don't want it" impulse. I'll have to keep you posted.

Or maybe you'll have to keep me posted: anybody else have any experience with this plant, for good or ill?

Rumble Among the Jungle, Matches 3.15 and 3.16

Rules and Stuff
1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.
2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants, you are encouraged to do so.
3) You are also encouraged to leave comments on Rumble posts, if so moved.
4) All photos will enlarge if opened in a separate window/tab.
5) You can choose which plant is "best" according to whatever criteria you decide for yourself. My personal process is a bit convoluted.¹
6) All polls will be open for three days.

Results of matches 3.7 and 3.8:

In match 3.7, Schlumbergera cvv. stomped Platycerium spp. pretty hard (73 to 32), which is more or less what I expected to happen.

Match 3.8 was surprising only in how close it was -- I wasn't sure which plant I expected people to prefer (and personally had a hard time choosing), but I figured most of the votes would come down on one side or the other. Though basically tied for the first couple days, Hibiscus rosa-sinensis pulled ahead in the last half of the competition, and defeated Cordyline fruticosa 56 to 49.

Today's matches:

Match 3.15
Aeonium spp. vs. Tillandsia spp. (air plants)

Clockwise from top: Aeonium 'Kiwi,' 'Irish Bouquet,' A. arboreum atropurpureum 'Zwartkop.'

Left side, top to bottom: Tillandsia xerographica, T. capitata 'Peach.'
Center, top to bottom: NOID, NOID, T. ionantha 'Druid.'
Right side, top to bottom: NOID, T. abdita Mexican form.





Match 3.16
Agave spp. vs. Calathea spp./cvv.

Clockwise from top left: Agave victoriae-reginae, A. americana medio-picta alba, NOID (maybe A. desmettiana?), A. marmorata.

Clockwise from top left: Calathea ornata, C. roseo-picta 'Medallion' (?), C. makoyana, C. insignis, C. zebrina.





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¹ I'm deciding according to a hypothetical situation in which all of my houseplants are gone, as are all the other houseplants of the world, except for one producer/supplier/retailer. Said person is offering to restock me with one or the other of the plants in question but refuses to give me both. Which one would I choose?