Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum lobbii

I responded to some of the comments people left on the previous post, but if you don't feel like checking on them:

The U.S. has not devolved into a Mad Max-style wasteland full of people shooting at one another, as it appeared might be the case following Dallas. So we have that going for us, at least, and I'm genuinely a little surprised. I remain really anxious about next week's Republican National Convention -- it would be difficult to create a more powder-keggy situation on purpose -- but maybe that, too, will pass without the country falling to pieces. Maybe there will even be no bloodshed. We can hope, at least. 2016 really should throw us a break sooner or later.

And as far as taking comfort from nature goes, of course that's a good thing. Election years are always¹ hard on me, but this year has been especially bad. It's much easier for things like Orlando / Philando Castile / Alton Sterling / Dallas to knock me off balance if there's also an election happening. And things get even worse if I start making weird assumptions like "calm" = "unconcerned," as I was kind of doing in that last post. So if looking at pictures of orchids is part of how you manage to stay functional, I apologize for making it more difficult to do that.

At the moment, I would really like to find something to do, but either don't have the resources or the temperament or both for most of the Black-Lives-Matter-related things I can think of, and to be honest I'm probably not in the right frame of mind to be useful at the moment even if presented with something useful to do.²

But we have an orchid, at least. And it's a pretty nice one, even. Bulbophyllum lobbii is apparently another really variable orchid species; the previously-seen B. lobbii specimens haven't looked much like this at all:

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Kathy's Gold' (2013)

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Sonoma Gold' (2015)

I suppose the other possibility is that some of these are misidentified, but on-line image searches show a lot of different-looking plants. I'm assuming it's probably just that variable.³ This year's plant is easily the prettiest of the three. Lucky for us.

In other news, I can now report that all five Amorphophallus are alive and working on leaves (or maybe blooms, but I'm assuming leaves):

It's still ridiculously late for this to be happening, and some of the leaf buds are still so short you can barely see them in the picture, but everybody's accounted for, and at least I don't have to worry that they've rotted. Hopefully they'll have time for photosynthesis before fall arrives.

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¹ (For values of "always" greater than or equal to 1998.)
I paid attention to elections, and cared who won, prior to 1998, but it became personal in '98 because that was the year that all politicians of both parties ran against Ellen DeGeneres, and I was pretty newly out to people myself, and it was really, really tough to hear some of the things people were saying about LGBT Americans.
2004 and 2010 were also unusually difficult -- '04 because that was the year of "maybe we need a Constitutional Amendment to prevent the gays from getting married," and '10 because that was the year when Iowa's elections were partly focused on recalling the judges who had ruled in favor of gay marriage in 2009. So every six years, I guess, is an especially bad election for me, but none of them are ever actually good. And none of the especially bad ones were competitive with 1998 until this year.
² But e-mail or comment anyway, if you hear of something.
³ Like Rhynchostylis gigantea, it has a pretty large natural habitat -- Borneo, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines -- which probably explains a lot of the variation. It's also possible that they look different depending on growing conditions; I believe the 2015 and 2016 specimens were entered in the show by different exhibitors, based on how they were tagged and displayed.

Pretty picture: Dendrochilum latifolium / Random plant event: Amorphophallus konjac

Most of the photos of this plant I found on-line show the flowers closer together than on this particular specimen. I don't know if this is significant or not, but it seemed worth noting. The species naturally varies a bit, and D. latifolium has at least two natural varieties (D. latifolium var. latifolium and D. latifolium var. macranthum, so the difference could be genetic, cultural, or both.

Though the individual flowers aren't particularly beautiful, the sheer number of them is striking.

In other news, one of my five Amorphophallus tubers has pushed above the soil line, finally. They're all running very late this year, which makes me either anxious or angry or both, depending on how responsible I feel for the delay.

I've also recently discovered the Amorphophallus offerings at Plant Delights Nursery, and am very tempted by A. henryi and A. ongsakulii in particular. Any readers have experience with either of these?

Failing that, would anyone like to try to reassure me that the rest of my A. konjac (plus one A. bulbiferum) bulbs still intend to do something?

Anthurium no. 0501 "Freddie Prinze Charming" / Question for the Hive Mind / New Plant

I have news and a question, so let's zip through the critique of Freddie as quickly as possible:

Freddie's pink/pink, which is boring, but still maybe worth a second look, since he appears to be more thrips-resistant than average, and is much more resistant than his siblings. This is particularly the case with the spathes,

but the leaves are less terrible than usual as well.

Don't know if this will be enough to keep him around over the long-term, but he'll survive the next purge or two.

The news: for reasons I may or may not ever explain, I've bought a new houseplant book last week, and in the course of reading it to determine whether I approve of it or not, the bit about calla lilies (Zantedeschia cvv.) jumped out at me. I've long admired Zantedeschias, but had been under the impression that they wouldn't be good plants for me to try, because of the dormancy period and general fussiness, so I've never attempted it, but the author of the new book is very enthusiastic and encouraging about them. And I've been doing okay with a few winter-dormant plants lately (Amorphophallus,¹ Eucodonia), so when I saw one I liked at the ex-job last Friday, I went ahead and bought it.

Since the purchase, though, I've noticed a few things that make me wonder whether this was a bad idea. First, the author of the book is pretty enthusiastic and encouraging about everything. As far as I'm concerned, it's irresponsible to suggest that anyone grow Hedera helix indoors, and recommending Selaginella or (oh my goodness) junipers (!) is criminally so, so I probably should not have trusted the author's judgment on this to the degree I did.

On-line advice about growing Zantedeschia indoors comes from sources I consider questionable as well, but they can't agree on whether it's a good idea: advice ranges from yes, it'll live for years and produce breathtaking long-lived blooms every time you sneeze, they're wonderful, go for it to it's absolutely not worth the trouble, throw it in the garbage when it goes dormant.

So I'm looking for advice from people who have actually grown Zantedeschia before. Could you overwinter one and get it to resprout in the spring? What about reblooming? Will it work if they're indoors all year, or do they need to be outside during the summer? Was your plant(s) prone to pests?² Rot? If it's dead, what killed it? Etc.

Whether it's a permanent resident or not, it's lovely. I just need to know how low to set my expectations.

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¹ Though I'm beginning to worry about the Amorphophallus bulbs now. I dumped them out of the pots a couple months ago to divide them, and there were five bulbs total, so I gave them each a pot of its own and have had them outside for a while, figuring that the heat would encourage them to get moving, but we're about a week late now, so I'm worried that they've all rotted.
² My plant, unfortunately, has spider mites or thrips or both, because it did not occur to me to check inside the flower until I'd already brought the plant in the house. I have some optimism that it might be possible to end this with frequent soapy-water sprays, since the infestation appears to be pretty small and isolated to the bloom.
Then I remember how frequently I've been optimistic about thrips before, and how that optimism has never not even once been justified, and . . . well, you know.

Unfinished business: Amorphophallus

The plastic foam pipe insulation tubes sure seemed like a good idea, but the leaves on both Amorphophalluses died anyway, before the A. bulbifer could grow a replacement bulb. Which is the bad news.

The good news is that the A. bulbifer, at least, is willing to grow a replacement leaf in the same season, so I haven't lost the plant entirely after all.

The A. konjac hasn't done anything yet to indicate that it's thinking about replacing the leaf that died. I can see the top of the original tuber when I look down into the hole left by the leaf, and it's at least not dead. Which is something to cling to for the moment, I guess.

One of the A. konjac offsets also got a wind-bent leaf, which subsequently came off, but two remain. At least in theory, they should be able to hold on until the fall, and then I will have more than one konjac. Which I will put outside in a timely fashion next year even if it means I have to move them in and out a lot, because that's how excited I will be about having more than one konjac.

Unfinished business: Amorphophallus

I had what seemed like a pretty good idea for staking --

which was to use the hollow foam insulation tubes people use to insulate pipes as my stakes. They're strong enough to hold plants up in reasonable amounts of wind but flexible enough not to introduce new kinks; they're slit down one side, making it possible to slip one on around the petioles without further damaging it (though that did take two people to do); and they're fairly cheap.

Unfortunately, it appears that this idea came too late to be helpful. The A. bulbifer appears to be producing a new bulb, but its petiole was pretty badly damaged and the leaf is severely wilted (worse now than in the pictures), and it's not clear whether it's going to be able to finish making the bulb before the leaf dies.

The A. konjac was also more badly damaged than I had initially thought, and I suppose the process of wrestling it into the insulation tube probably damaged it further even though we were trying to be careful. The wind has also blown hard enough to shove the petiole through the slit in the insulation a few times. (I should have taped it up once we got the insulation on; I didn't think the wind would be strong enough to push it through.) So it's probably just dead, and the plant will have to carry on through the three bulblets it produced this year. Which is not so bad, as consequences go. I suppose I've learned a valuable lesson about putting Amorphophallus outside as soon as it starts to sprout.

Question for the Hive Mind: Amorphophallus

The Amorphophallus konjac is back for another year, and for the first time has produced multiple leaves, which is exciting. The main leaf is at least double the size of last year's.

In addition, 2014 is seeing the premiere of Amorphophallus bulbifer, which I got from a reader. Its leaf came up first, before there was enough light for it, and as a result the petiole was stretched and floppy. It also had a mysteriously bad spider mite infestation flare up just before I put it outside for the summer. But these things do happen, and it didn't seem likely to affect the plant in the long term, so I was willing to roll with it.

Last year, there had been a problem with the A. konjac blowing over in the wind, so this year, I prepared for that by setting both plants in tall, heavy cachepots. And that lasted for maybe four days.

Left: A. konjac. Right: A. bulbifer.
And then there was some wind one evening, not even very strong wind, really, and I awoke the next morning to this:

I guess the leaves are going to die then. I suppose that means the tubers are gone too. Oh well, I thought, suddenly nonchalant at the prospect of losing plants I'd been very happy about a few days prior.

Except that the leaves haven't died. The petioles are still bent, but a few days after bending, they still appear to be functional, even after a second evening of wind blew them back the opposite direction. Which leads to the questions:

1) If the leaves did die, does that automatically mean that the tubers will die too? Will they try to make replacement leaves? If so, should I be cutting them off now so that the tubers can send up a (hopefully sturdier) replacement before the summer's over?
2) Should I be trying to, I dunno, put a splint on the petioles or something? I figure sticking in an actual stake is probably no good (since any stake shoved into the soil next to the petiole will hit and maybe damage the tuber), but I could surely find something to attach to the petiole to keep it straight, if that's something I should be doing.

EDIT: The species name is actually A. bulbifer, not A. bulbiferum. PATSP regrets the error.

Random plant event: Eucodonia NOID

I got this plant from a reader (who can choose to reveal him/rself in the comments if s/he wants to), in the form of tubers that were just beginning to break dormancy, and it's been a very up-and-down kind of emotional experience thus far.

It grew fine throughout the early summer, and produced its first bloom in mid-August.

(17 August.)
Which was nice. And even the buds are kind of attractive. Or at least I think so.

I tried to get a decent picture of the whole plant, but the lighting wasn't great, so it didn't completely work.

A few days after that, I had the photo-taking area set up, and tried to get a better picture of the whole plant, with partial success. Though the color was still not quite as accurate as it could have been:

The close-up pictures were way better, though.

Then as I was bringing the plant back inside, I dropped the whole box of plants I was carrying (described here), and the Eucodonia got knocked out of its pot. I scooped everything back up as well as I could, but it seemed like it never fully recovered from being dropped. The problem is that for all I know, it might have peaked in late August anyway -- most of what I've read about Eucodonia on-line suggests that they do start to go dormant pretty immediately after blooming. So I don't know if it's just doing what it's supposed to do, or if I actually hurt it somehow. We'll have to wait until next year, to see what happens when it doesn't get dropped. (Assuming that I can refrain from dropping it.)

I don't have a picture, but the Amorphophallus konjac leaf has yellowed, and has almost fallen off, as of the last five days or so. I don't know if this is when that's supposed to happen or not, since I apparently didn't bother to record the event last year. I'm worrying less about the Amorphophallus these days, and the Clivias almost not at all, so apparently I can learn to be less anxious about plants that have winter dormancies, given a few years of things working the way they're supposed to. May the Eucodonia live so long.

Unfinished business: Amorphophallus konjac

Back in February, I asked the hive mind whether my bulb was coming out of dormancy; I haven't had it that long (since April 2012), and am still getting used to what it does, and when. The response from readers was somewhere between "not necessarily" and "probably not."

I went ahead and potted it up anyway, about six weeks after that, but it took forever to do anything visible. I started to get worried that it had rotted by late May / early June, just because it seemed like it had had more than enough time to grow, if it intended to, and I still wasn't seeing anything. Out of laziness and hope, I left it alone, and finally, on 11 June, I saw the tip of a leaf poking out of the soil. After which point things progressed more or less normally.

11 June 2013.

16 June 2013.

22 June 2013. This is possibly my favorite stage of development for this plant. Like somebody stuck a squid headfirst into the soil.

25 June 2013.

27 June 2013.

13 July 2013.
I'd thought, when this all started to happen, that it had started significantly later than in 2012, but when I checked the old posts here, it was basically the exact same date: the "squid" Amorphophallus picture in this post is dated 19 June 2012, as opposed to 22 June 2013. With any luck, I'll be able to remember this next year, and not spend so much time worrying about it.

Speaking of Amorphophallus -- did everybody else see Zach's recent posts about propagating A. atroviridis from leaflet cuttings? If not, you probably should: the first is here, and the second is here.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work on A. konjac, so I won't be able to try it for myself. (Unless I find some way to acquire another species of Amorphophallus, which I'm looking into. . . .)

Question for the Hive Mind: Amorphophallus

Actually two questions.

The first: is this tuber coming out of dormancy?

I don't recall the little pink-purple cone being there before, but I also haven't paid a lot of attention to the Amorphophallus konjac since unpotting it last fall. So I'm not sure if this is new, or just something I've failed to notice for several months.

The second question: is this thing on the bottom of the tuber an offset I can divide off, or is it something else?

I ask because when I went searching for pictures of offsets, it looked like several small offsets is the usual way of things: I couldn't find pictures of any single large ones. Also it's sort of weird because I think it shrunk? Or else the parent tuber grew during dormancy. Which doesn't make any sense. Here's what it looked like in October:

Assorted Stuff / Hiatus Announcement

SPECIAL NOTE: I try not to go two consecutive days without a post, but a bunch of stuff popped up on Monday that made it impossible for me to get one together for Tuesday. And then Tuesday was complicated as well (malware on a computer -- not mine, but one I use for Sims and Hulu -- plus unprecedented levels of family drama¹ and the usual barely-doable-within-the-time-available watering), and none of those problems have been resolved yet, so we may as well treat this as the beginning of another long hiatus, 'cause that's what it's going to turn into whether I like it or not. (You can't say you weren't warned.)

Orchid pictures will probably continue to go up about every four days, with minimal commentary, since they're already uploaded and scheduled.

Previously-arranged plant sales, blog comments, and e-mail correspondence should all continue to happen, albeit possibly a bit slower.

So here's the last regular post for a while. I was trying to make up for missing Monday and Tuesday by cramming lots of little fragments of posts together into one (Sort of like a blog-post McNugget.), until my Tuesday went to hell and I ran out of time.

1. Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips'
Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips' is the first plant I've bought in two months, and only the third plant I've purchased in the last six months. (The previous two purchases were the Salvia elegans, which I'm now thinking was a bad decision,² and the Ananas lucidus, which is doing quite well.)


Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips.'
I wouldn't have gotten this one either -- it was on the pricey side,³ and is a genus I haven't tried to grow before -- but I've been wanting a Mangave to try for a very long time, and this is the first thing I've seen for sale that was even close to a Mangave. So we're trying it. So far, so good, though it's lucked into one of the outdoor spots, so I really won't have any idea what it's like to grow indoors for another six months.


2. Amorphophallus konjac
I got an Amorphophallus konjac bulb from a reader at the end of last summer, as part of a trade. Stored it in the plant room on a low (cold) shelf, then potted it up this spring, around the end of April. And then there was a lot of waiting for it to do something.

It still has a ways to go, but I should be seeing an actual unfurled leaf fairly soon. Kind of excited.


The one bad thing about Amorphophallus is that plants with pronounced dormancies, that need to be stored dry during the winter, make me really nervous -- I'm always scared that I'll kill the plant accidentally and not find out until I go to start it again. I don't know why this is more scary to me than the plant-killing I do all the time, but it just is.


3. Grocery Store
Saw some unusual houseplant-related items in the produce section of the grocery store last week; Hylocereus fruits --


-- and Aloe vera leaves.


I knew Hylocereus ("dragon fruit") were sold, though I don't think I've ever seen any around here before. Didn't see a price on them. The opposite is true for the Aloe -- I've seen plenty of Aloes, but never expected to see the leaves for sale without the rest of the plant being attached.


4. What Fresh New Hell is This?
From the ex-job:


The plant looks fine -- some kind of NOID Rhipsalis, I'm guessing -- but what the hell is it growing in? Is that all coconut fiber? Can epiphytic cacti live in something like that?


5. Zea mays
One way to know that you live in Iowa next to a corn field is to check your lawn for . . . hmmm. I don't know if there's a term for these or not.⁴ I'm going to call them "cornweed," until I hear a better name.


There's also a few in the garden along the fence, though you can't see them clearly from this photo.
Squirrels drag unharvested corn cobs from last year's crop into the yard, then scatter the seeds around as they eat them. The corn these will produce isn't likely to be anything we'd want to eat (field corn is gross), so it's kind of pointless to leave it, but all the Iowanness in me rebels at the idea of pulling up a cornstalk, so they stay.


6. Gomphrena 'Audrey White'
In other news, Gomphrena now comes in white. Maybe it always did. I wasn't aware of it until this year, though. I don't know how I feel about it.




I guess that's it for now. See you when I see you.

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¹ I and the husband are personally fine, and don't expect to be directly affected by any of what's going on. Just in case you were worried.
² I had a bunch of cuttings going in the basement, which were doing fine, and then I let them get too dry and lost 4 out of 5 of them. There may have been spider mites as well. This is exactly what happened to the previous batch of S. elegans, as I described back in April, so it's possible that it's just not a plant I can grow anymore.
³ ($14.99 plus tax for a 5-inch pot)
⁴ (There's "volunteer corn," which are the seeds that fell into the soil instead of getting harvested, which come up the following year and are generally removed, but I'm looking for something more specific to the situation of having corn spontaneously appearing in one's lawn.)

Elsewhere on the Web

Decorah Eagles
Summary: Somewhere in Decorah, IA, someone put a webcam in a Bald Eagle nest and is broadcasting the activities of its occupants (two adults and three eaglets) to the world. This is shockingly popular.

OSU College of Biological Sciences Greenhouses
Summary: A titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) named 'Woody' at Ohio State University, in Columbus, OH, is in the process of blooming. There's a webcam for this one too, which seems a little unnecessary but whatever.