Work-related: everybody looks bad

This post is a little over two years old. I ran into it during the recent blog maintenance, and I was initially surprised that I hadn't posted it, because it looked like it was more or less complete: the pictures were already present, the code for the footnotes (usually the last thing I do with a post, because it's awkward to change once in place) had been done. It's rare for a post to reach this stage without getting posted.

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Zinnia 'Profusion Mix.'
Ouch. The first Saturday of May should not be sunny. It brings out too many customers all at once. It wasn't necessarily terrible to be busy, though I did something to my back early in the day, which hurts, and which would probably heal up just fine if I could rest it, but I've got (as I write this on Sunday morning) two more days of work, and then I have to water all the plants at home, so that's not looking too likely.

(Just FYI, though: the first Saturday in May is probably the weekend you want to show up to shop, if you live around here: our actual last frost date is May 15, give or take, but if you want to be able to buy before we're sold out of things, a couple weeks earlier is about ideal. And actually the first Friday is probably even better, if you can manage it.)

For as many as there were, the customers on Saturday were very well-behaved (better than the co-workers, anyway: one of the co-workers is closer than s/he realizes to being beaten to death with a shovel¹), with one exception:

One lady waved me over to the succulents while I was watering and asked for a price on a $9.95 Adenium obesum.

I told her $9.95.

Tagetes patula 'Little Hero Yellow.'
Oh, she said, well someone told me it was only $5.99.

I don't know what to tell you, I said back. The prices go by pot size, that's a 4-inch pot, therefore it's $9.95.

CUSTOMER: But someone said $5.99.

MR_S: Well, um, we do have $5.99 plants, but That. Is. Not. One. Of. Them.

[long pause]

CUSTOMER: Okay, well, thank you.

Euphorbia 'Diamond Frost.'
So then a couple hours later, one of the front counter people comes back to the greenhouse for something or another, and while s/he's back there, s/he says, so -- what's the price on those plants that have the big bulb thing at the base? Are those succulents or tropicals or what?

MR_S: Which ones? These? [pointing to a Beaucarnea recurvata]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Maybe. I'm not sure.

Then it dawned on me why s/he was asking, and I pointed to the Adeniums, and s/he was like, yes, that one. What price are those?

MR_S: $9.95.

Osteospermum 'Summertime Red Velvet.'
FRONT COUNTER PERSON: 'Cause I had a customer insist that somebody had told her $5.99.

MR_S: Yeah, I know which customer you're talking about. I told her $9.95 repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Wait -- you'd told her $9.95?

MR_S: Repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: [Expletives]²

Bracteantha bracteata 'Firey Orange.'
MR_S: Why? What price did you give her?

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Well she kept saying someone had told her $5.99, so we wound up giving it to her for $5.99. [pause] You know, I don't mean to talk bad about [customer's ethnic group],

MR_S: [cringes in anticipation]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: but . . . [proceeds to talk bad about customer's ethnic group]

MR_S: *facepalm*

Only 20 days left.³

Osteospermum 'Summertime Sunshine.'
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¹ Exaggerated for dramatic effect, but s/he has about a 50-50 chance of getting the verbal equivalent of being beaten to death with a shovel, whatever that would be, before I'm done with the job. S/he would be wise to stay out of my way. Tragically, s/he is not a particularly wise person, and probably will not stay out of my way.
² Also exaggerated for dramatic effect. I don't remember exactly what s/he said.
³ Unless I come back for June. Which I said I might do. Not looking real probable at the moment, though.

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For what it's worth, the one problematic co-worker didn't get beaten with a shovel. Still deserves it, though.

I'm not certain which front counter person was in the story -- my personal journal doesn't record the interaction -- but if it's who I remember it as being, then yes, s/he still works there.

Pretty picture: Bracteantha bracteata NOID

I know. It's been two days without a post. I feel bad, I do. But I have two very good excuses.

One, the plant room is officially ready for tenants, so I had to spend a lot of Thursday putting shelves together and arranging them just how I like it, and putting the various plants in just the right spots to meet their light and temperature requirements, and all that. And I did get the shelves mostly filled, and it was very pretty. Notice I said mostly -- I didn't get them all the way filled. I still had a little bit to do that I didn't get to because of the other very good excuse. So because it wasn't actually finished at the end of the day on Thursday, I didn't bother to take pictures, on the theory that pictures would be better if taken of the whole, completed arrangement, with everything just so. And then everybody would go oooh and aaah and it would be ego-boosting for me.

However. On Friday, the husband asked me to get the remaining plants out of the living room (where most of them wound up in the move from the apartment) so that he could do stuff with a wall, or something -- I'm not really all that clear on what the plan was. Sometimes I don't listen beyond the point in the sentence where I find out what task I'm supposed to perform.

So then I spent a fair chunk of Friday moving plants from the living room into the plant room, because they had to get crammed somewhere and that was the only space that was close to being big enough. Which means that now the plant room looks like crap, because it's crammed full of plants in ways that don't perfectly cater to their aesthetic and cultural needs, and things are crammed all cheek to jowl -- which is crazy, because PLANTS DON'T EVEN HAVE JOWLS -- and if any of them need to be watered anytime soon, they're going to be out of luck, because I can't even see several of them anymore, much less reach them. So I didn't take pictures again, and probably some of them will die.


But so that was one thing I did. The other thing I did was, I got embroiled in an internet drama, both as observer and (less significantly) participant, and continually monitoring that situation (I couldn't look away! The drama was dramatic!) has also eaten up a lot of my time, time which would probably in the long run have been better spent on moving plants from room to room or doing something unknown to walls.

The internet drama in question was, just for the record, at Shakesville, a lefty-liberal blog that I've learned a lot from and enjoyed reading. Although I didn't comment there much, I still considered it more or less my home away from PATSP, and it was important to me. The specifics of what went on have nothing to do with plants and are therefore mostly beyond the scope of this blog, and anyway I don't especially want to talk about it now because I've been doing almost nothing but talk about it, and move plants around, for the last two days and I do not want to have to start dealing with it here, too, for fuck's sakes, enough is enough, but yeah, so it was very dramatic and also depressing and now it appears to be over.

I see that I have written so much, so quickly, that I've left today's picture several paragraphs behind and now have to back up to talk about it. Um. It's a strawflower, Bracteantha bracteata, of some unknown yellow variety. I'm fairly certain I have the tag still, so I could look up precisely which variety it is, but I really don't think that would be a great use of my time (and I am so clearly a good judge of what is and is not a great use of my time), so I'm not gonna. I like Bracteanthas, though I think I like the buds better than the opened flowers. The flowers sometimes have screwy color sense. Like the one in the picture.

Pretty pictures: Orange

Mom was fond of the color orange when I was growing up: we had orange curtains in the kitchen, and orange Tupperware containers for flour and sugar, orange measuring spoons, just orange orange orange. (It was the 70s: people did that then.) I never really cared for it, personally, but I can see how orange flowers in the garden might be nice. A lot of them have been grabbing my attention lately.

Bracteantha bracteata 'Sundaze Flame.'
Younger Co-Worker told me a few days ago that she hated strawflowers. I don't recall her giving any reasons, when I asked why, she just kind of gestured at them, like it was just obvious. Possibly she said something about them being noisy. I told her that I'd heard that only stupid people hate Bracteanthas. Then the next day, Wonderful Co-Worker spontaneously expressed a dislike of Bracteanthas too. I don't know what it is. They seem like perfectly nice plants to me. Last year, they hung around forever, not really selling, and then all of a sudden I came in one day and they were all gone, all sold to the same person. I'm hoping history repeats.

Begonia NOID, possibly 'Britt Dark.' I usually take pictures of the ID tags after taking pictures of the plant: it's faster than writing things down. In this particular case, though, the pictures may have gotten out of order, and so I'm not sure what this plant's proper name is.
Rieger Begonias are one of those plants that have really, um . . . what's the opposite of "grown on me?" "Grown off me?" That doesn't sound right. In any case. I don't know why, exactly: they're tricky to water (too much and the leaves mildew, not enough and the edges of the petals turn brown and hideous), but that's not the entire story. I don't know. Whatever the reason, somewhere along the way I started referring to them in my head as "the vile Rieger begonias," and it's not entirely a joke.

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis 'Caribbean Breeze.'
Hibiscus, though, are fine. I was actually incredibly tempted to buy this one when it was around (it's since sold). The picture doesn't do it justice. I held off because of the price (not outrageous, but a little high for what it was) and because Hibiscus are so bug-prone that I'm not sure I want one. I mean, I want one, but not if it's going to get aphids, whitefly, and spider mites.

Calibrachoa 'Tequila Sunrise.' I recommend opening this one, in particular, in a new window.
I like Calibrachoa in general, but 'Tequila Sunrise' in particular. The colors!

Cosmos 'Cosmic Mix.'
Cosmos 'Cosmic Mix.'
'Cosmic Mix' is the only Cosmos we've offered for sale since I've had this job. I know there are other colors and mixes, because we have them for sale as seeds, but for some reason we don't bother with them. I don't know why not. I do love 'Cosmic Mix,' though. Yellow-orange, orange, red-orange. Pretty hot.

Zinnia 'Profusion Apricot.'
Zinnia 'Profusion Apricot' doesn't photograph well: the first batch I took came out looking kind of pink-purple, and the above photo, from the second round, is closer but still wrong somehow. It looks all . . . muddy in a way that the real flowers don't.

Gerbera jamesonii 'Festival Spider Orange.'
We haven't actually had this particular plant around for a couple months, but it's worth throwing in here anyway. Orange is orange. I'm not a big fan of Gerberas, for essentially the same reasons as the Reiger Begonias: they're not easy to keep going at this time of year, when so many other things need our attention too. They tend to either get too wet (in which case mildew) or too dry (in which case wilting). Though like the Riegers, they sell well.

Tagetes patula NOID, probably 'Safari Orange' or 'Durango Orange.'
I like the little marigolds. This year's crop turned out much better than last year's: they're very pretty. We maybe should have started more.

Thunbergia alata.
Got this one in pre-finished as a hanging basket. We started some of our own from seed, too, but they're not really doing anything yet, and I'm thinking by the time they're ready to bloom, it may be too late.

Pretty picture: Bracteantha bracteata 'Sundaze Flame'

These took a long time to get their act together and bloom (or maybe co-workers were de-budding them when I wasn't paying attention: the greenhouses were full of surreptitious de-budding of all kinds of things for a while in the spring, for complex reasons), but they're interesting all the same. I believe these are the flowers used in the heinous practice of gluing flowers onto cacti, though it looks like there are some intermediate steps between growing and gluing, like bleaching, dismembering, dying, and reassembling. Maybe not. I wouldn't know.


We didn't have a lot of problems with these, except for the fact that they hung around forever and ever and then sold all at once last week. Not sure who bought them all, or why, but they're all right. The color is nice. And anything that doesn't collapse at the slightest water imbalance, and tolerates sun, is okay in my book.