Random plant event: Clivia miniata

In October 2007, Wonderful Co-Worker (WCW) gave me a Clivia offset. It looked like this:



I knew it was too small to bloom, but I like Clivia foliage anyway: it didn't matter to me whether it ever got around to producing flowers. And at this point you can probably tell where this post is going, so . . .

I don't know why it decided to bloom this year: it spent the winter near a window in the plant room, and I know cooler temperatures are necessary for Clivias to set buds, so that might be related, but on the other hand, it's been in the same general part of the plant room since we first got the plant room set up, however long ago that was (2010ish?). For several of those years, it lived on the floor in the corner of the room, which was surely cold enough in the winter, but might have been too dark. I don't remember how long ago it was moved up to a shelf, where it gets some direct afternoon sun, but that might have done the trick too.

Or, possibly, the plant was just picking up on the recent, much more Clivia-friendly vibe in the house since February.¹

In any case. The plant's only been an actual problem once: it got scale this winter. Hand-wiping the leaves, plus dosing the plant with imidacloprid, seems to have solved that problem. There has also been some thrips damage, which isn't quite a problem, but is still irritating. (The petals are too thick for the thrips to do deep damage, and it's not particularly visible from a moderate distance away, but I'm still not happy about it.)

I've tried to spray the flowers with soapy water and then regular water, once. It didn't completely eliminate the thrips, but it does seem to have helped, a little. I'd do it again, except the rinse cycle snapped a petal off one of the flowers. Not that one petal is that big of a deal, but between that and worrying that I'll wash all the pollen out of the flowers and be unable to pollinate them, I'm probably not going to try it again until the flowers are nearly spent.

Thrips-related disappointment aside, I've been really happy about the flowers. I sincerely do like the foliage for itself, and sincerely don't care all that much about whether the plants flower, but they're lovely, and it's been such a long wait that I rarely even thought about it as a plant that was capable of flowering. So the flowers have been a nice surprise.

They are, alas, not terribly long-lived -- I first noticed the buds on 5 June,

the first flower was open on 7 June, and the first flower started to shrivel and die on 16 June. As I write this, it is 18 June, and there are still three buds on the stalk that have not yet opened, so there should be something still there for another couple weeks, but the blooming process seems to zip by really quickly. Probably I'm just spoiled by the Anthuriums. In any case, having accidentally figured out how to get flowers once, perhaps I won't have to wait a decade for it to happen again.

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¹ May as well do a seedling update while I'm here, I guess. The February batch started with 77 seeds. Some failed to germinate, some germinated but then died, some started, barely, to germinate and then stopped growing. I currently have 64 seedlings from that group, officially (photo below), 61 of which have produced leaves, and I'm thinking the other 3 seeds are going to be thrown out pretty soon.

There were 65 seeds in the May group, and I was getting kind of worried about them toward the beginning of June, because it felt like they were germinating more slowly than the February group did, but I think the problem was that I had unreasonable expectations, not that the seeds germinated more slowly. Looking at the records I have, the February batch was sown on 7 February and potted up on 31 March (52 days later); the May group was sown on 4 May, and 52 days after that would be 25 June. It's totally plausible they'll be potted up by then, or at least that they ought to be.
Of the 65 May seeds, it looks like 61 have germinated, so if the same proportion survives, I should wind up with 51 or 52 plants from the May batch by 12 September. Which is a lot of seedlings, obviously.

Germinating Clivia seeds

This is the process to which I referred in last Saturday's post, the one that got me ~91% germination on a batch of gift seeds. (This is the last day to request your own Clivia seeds.) It works a lot better than the process I used on my Clivia seeds in 2013.

You will need: ripe Clivia fruits, a germination container, vermiculite, vinegar, a pot in which to boil water, a bowl, paper towels, a warm but not hot surface on which to set your container.

(EDITED to add photos, 4 May 2017)

1. Get ripe fruit that contains seeds. I'm not actually super clear on how you know when a fruit is ripe, but I figured it out in 2013 so I'm going to assume it's pretty obvious.

2. Boil some water. (Tap water is fine; softened tap water is not.) This is mostly for your germination medium, so how much water you need depends on how many seeds you're starting, but, you know, it's just water, and it's about as easy to boil a lot as it is to boil a little. Once that's done, cover it, set it aside to cool, and hope that it will be cooled down enough to use by the time you get to step 6.

3. Open the fruit. I just kind of squeeze it until it comes open; this is kind of messy, but not as messy as you'd think, since almost the entire volume of the fruits is dedicated to seeds, so there's very little pulp.¹

4. There is a thin membrane or skin covering each of the seeds individually, which will likely tear as you separate the seeds from one another. You need to remove all of the membrane from the seeds. It's fairly easy to see and feel the difference between covered and uncovered seeds, as the membrane is a little bit fibrous, and thick enough to be visible. It also peels off of about 80% of the seeds really easily, and is impossible to get off of the remaining 20% because the whole thing is kind of wet and slimy and the seed itself is round so there's no easy way to get a tear started. (I had some success with setting down a paper towel on the work surface and rubbing one particular spot on the seed lightly against the paper towel until a hole started.)

This is the most annoying step of the process; it's all downhill from here.

5. Next you'll need to get a container to start the seeds in, and a growing medium. I used vermiculite for my growing medium, and strongly recommend that you do too.² For a container, I used the same clear plastic containers I use for germinating everything else,

but there's a lot of leeway there. Mostly what you need is a container that allows light in, but not air (or at least, not a lot of air -- you don't want the seeds to dry out), and is deep enough to accommodate 1-1.5 inches of vermiculite at the bottom while still leaving a couple inches of room for leaves to grow.

6. You need to moisten the vermiculite. If your boiled water has cooled off to 90F/32C or below, go ahead and saturate the vermiculite. (90F/32C is a guess; I'm pretty confident it's safe, but that doesn't mean 95F/35C is necessarily not.) Pour off any excess water, then cover the container.

7. Rinse the seeds in dilute white vinegar. I was told 2% vinegar, but I didn't actually measure it out when I did it: I just filled a clean large bowl with water, added a couple splashes of the vinegar, and dropped the seeds in.³

8. Pour the vinegar solution off the seeds, rinse with more of the boiled water and pour that off too, then set the seeds in the vermiculite, eyes down. (The eye is a slightly-raised bump on the seeds; it's easy to locate because it's the only distinguishable feature they have.⁴)

9. Cover/close the container and set it in a location with bottom heat (on top of a refrigerator or hot water heater; maybe on a heat mat specifically for seed germination if you're fancy⁵) and wait.

I saw the first leaves and roots begin to appear after about two weeks. They won't necessarily all germinate at once. Some small percentage are likely to be duds, that do nothing at all (about 6% of the total, in my case), and a few others germinate but then just stop developing (about 3%). Since so many did work, I didn't bother trying to figure out what was wrong with the ones that didn't.

10. Seedlings are ready to transplant to individual pots of potting soil (about 2-3" diameter) when the roots are about an inch long. Usually you see the surface of the seed shrivel and dull a little, too.

It's fairly obvious where the soil level should be: the plant starts growing out of the side of the seed, with leaves going one direction and the root going another. Plant it so that the root is below the soil and the leaf is above the soil. The seed will usually wind up mostly above the soil.

My source recommends a mixture of orchid bark, perlite, and a little bit of time-release fertilizer like Osmocote, though I didn't follow most of those suggestions⁶ and my seedlings seem to be fine.⁷

11. I set my potted seedlings on a low shelf in the living room (which means strong air movement, cool temperatures, and brief morning sun) but I don't think they're super-picky about location. I do watch them pretty closely to see whether the soil is drying out, and so far have been watering them about once a week; if we didn't have the ceiling fan going, I could probably get away with less frequent watering.

And that's pretty much it. The tricky part, for me, is getting Clivias to bloom: they need cooler temperatures than we have in the house. I may try keeping some of them outside this year so they're properly chilled.

This is not the only process that people have gotten to work; my source reports being able to start them in damp paper towels sometimes, and that some people soak them in water until they germinate though that doesn't seem to work as well. A few people just plant the whole fruit in potting soil without doing anything else, and apparently get seedlings out of that sometimes. My source says that on at least one occasion, she didn't have time to sow the seeds after stripping the membrane off of them, so she put them in the bottom drawer of a refrigerator, in perlite, and forgot about them, and a substantial percentage of those germinated when she checked them later. But I can vouch for the method outlined above, not the others, so it's what I'm recommending.

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¹ Also, if you have problems with getting gross stuff on your hands from time to time, boy are you in the wrong hobby. I'm just saying.
² I've tried perlite and potting soil previously. Perlite doesn't seem to work for me, though some people apparently can use it successfully. They'll germinate in potting soil, but the main obstacle to germination is fungus, so things work out a whole lot better if you use a sterile medium like vermiculite.
³ I'm told it doesn't necessarily hurt anything to rinse the container out with some of the vinegar solution, followed by boiled water, at the beginning of step 5, but I was pretty confident that my container was clean already, so I didn't bother.
⁴ I'm not convinced that the direction of planting makes that much difference, personally, since the roots are bad at burrowing into the vermiculite. What winds up happening is that the seed scoots around on the surface of the vermiculite, or turns itself upside down, or whatever, as the root tries to grow downward but can't penetrate the surface of the vermiculite. I include it anyway because it was in the instructions I got, and I'm not sure it doesn't make a difference, either.
⁵ The light fixtures on the shelving units in the basement are warm enough that I just set my Clivia seeds on the shelves and let the light for the shelf below them provide the heat.
⁶ The roots were 2 or 3 inches long on most of the plants. (I potted them up on 30 March, about 7 weeks after sowing; some of them were probably ready to go after 4 weeks. Compared to Anthurium and Schlumbergera, Clivia seedlings grow very quickly.)
I did use 2.5" pots, but I used my regular potting mix (about 45% composted bark and 40% chopped sphagnum moss), and I fertilize with the Miracle Gro I use on my other plants.
⁷ I did lose a few. A couple were, I think, late germinators that weren't developed enough to pot up yet. I broke the tip off the root of one of them, which either set it back or killed it. (I'm not sure which one of them it is.) A couple got knocked out of place when I watered, buried under the potting soil, and may or may not be able to grow enough to dig themselves out. I'm still going to end up with about 60-65 seedlings, from an initial 77.

Clivia seeds available

A reader has sent me a batch of Clivia seeds, more than I can realistically grow out.¹ She also provided instructions for their germination that got me 91% germination, and 88% post-transplant survival.² If you're in the U.S. and have always wanted to try growing Clivias from seed, this is your chance to try it out.

How many seeds you get will depend on how many other people want them (and how many you want to get). If a lot of people are interested, I may have to ask you to cover the cost of postage, but if it's just 1 or 2 readers wanting them, I don't mind mailing them out for free.

Contact me by e-mail (mrsubjunactive@outalook.com, minus the two a's) if interested to get the addresses / quantities / money straightened out. I don't know how long they'll remain viable, and I was hoping to mail them out on Monday or Tuesday (1 or 2 May), so sooner is better than later.

Also if you have cats, you may want to pass. Clivia are toxic to cats. It sounds like fatalities are rare, but I wouldn't be comfortable taking the risk, personally. Clivia are also toxic to dogs, though I didn't find out how toxic until, like, today, and since Sheba's never shown any interest in the Clivias I assume she's not going to suddenly develop any. Decide for yourself how much of a gamble you want to take, but I figured I should say something.

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¹ Because I got a big batch of seeds in February already. I'm good for Clivias for the foreseeable future.
² About half of the first batch, as of 22 April (sown 7 February, so they're about 10 weeks old in the photo):

You were probably expecting to see the germination instructions down here. Sorry. I'll try to get a blog post up about this soonish.

Unfinished business: Clivia seedlings

The picture is six months out of date, and I've up-potted these since it was taken. The basic information -- that the self-pollinated Clivia 'Aztec Gold' seedlings are still alive -- remains true, though.

The seeds were sown in August 2013, and there was an update on them in April 2014.

My other Clivias -- the parent 'Aztec Gold' and a plain-orange offset from WCW in October 2007 -- are still around. The latter is fighting a scale infestation at the moment, which is upsetting,¹ but 'Aztec Gold' has continued to offset well since it started in January 2014, and the offsets are now large enough to consider potting up separately. Though I'm probably not going to, because it turns out that I like the fuller look one gets with multiple plants in the same pot.

The seedlings will probably not bloom light yellow like their parent did; I assume it's a hybrid. Not really concerned with it either way: I've had Clivias since 2007, and have only seen one bloom in that time. I mean, I'd eventually like to know what the blooms look like, but I'm not necessarily expecting to find out.


P. S.: In the course of trying to locate patent information for Clivia 'Aztec Gold,' I ran across a blog that consisted solely of two blog posts of mine, which had been copied almost completely -- photos, title, captions, and text -- though for some reason not the tags. The internet is infuriating, and full of terrible people.

I've submitted a takedown request to Google,² and I imagine it will be granted, but so much stuff of mine has been duplicated in one place or another (as I discover when I search for information about one of my plants) that it would take me a lifetime just to fill out the requests for getting it all taken down. This is not a good system for preventing content theft, and I am angry.

I'll let you know what happens. (It has probably already happened, by the time you read this: I'm writing on 20 August.)

UPDATE (22 Aug.): Google had taken the posts down by August 22nd. The blog still exists, which is mildly irritating to me, but at least it no longer has any posts.

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¹ This is the first time I've had a pest problem with Clivia, I think. I knew they could get scale and mealybugs, but since it hadn't happened before, I sort of thought that maybe my personal pet scale wasn't compatible with Clivias. So it's been disappointing to learn otherwise.
I removed a couple leaves and dosed it with imidacloprid. Ordinarily, throwing it out would have made more sense, but it's not like Clivias are widely available around here, and besides, this particular one has some sentimental value. So we'll see how far the imidacloprid gets me.
² Which is one reason why I'm not linking to the posts in question -- the links would soon be dead, assuming Google does the right thing and deletes the blog. And I have every reason to think they will. The other reason is that if Google doesn't delete the blog, then I'm loath to give the thief any credibility with search engines by linking to them.

Unfinished business: Clivia 'Aztec Gold' seedlings

Last summer, I started two batches of Clivia seeds from my 'Aztec Gold' plant. One batch, I put into a sealed glass jar and left them to sprout. The second batch, I just potted up in small pots full of soil like regular plants.

In the beginning, the glass jar seedlings appeared to have a substantial advantage. Not all of them germinated (I got maybe 75% doing something¹), but those that did grew well. Only about 40% of the ones in pots of soil did anything, so I concluded that the glass jar was the way to go in the future, should I be fortunate enough to get Clivias blooming again.

There was one significant flaw with the glass jar plan, though, which was that I assumed that the seedlings were fine there, well after it became apparent that they were not. And, being lazy, and having many other plants to deal with, I left them in there anyway.

So then one day, I happened to glance at the jar and saw that some of the leaves were yellowing from the bottom up, and took that as a sign that I should do something quickly. Unscrewed the lid, and then spent about half an hour trying not to throw up. Seriously. It was that bad. Not that rotting vegetation ever smells like roses (not even rotting roses), but this was actually worse than Dracaena marginata with Erwinia rot, which had previously been my benchmark for unpleasant rotten-vegetation smells.²

Not wanting to give up on the two seedlings in the jar that seemed like they might still be alive, I held my breath, reached in, yanked them out, quickly screwed the lid back on, ran out of the room, took a breath, and then ran back in and potted them up in soil as fast as I could.

Alas, 'twas too late. Not only did a trace of the smell linger on the seedlings after they were potted up, but they died anyway, by the next day. So the glass jar approach ultimately resulted in no seedlings, a 0% success rate.

The seeds potted into soil lived in the kitchen all winter, in a cold south-facing window. I had them in trays along with some Salvia elegans cuttings I was rooting, which needed to be watered pretty often during the winter, so the Clivias never got watered directly, but they had chances occasionally to pull water up from the tray. I started five seeds. Two germinated pretty early and grew a leaf apiece; the other three slowly hollowed out and died. Around March, the two survivors started to make new leaves, so the overall success rate there was 40%.

The larger pot has a diameter of 2.5 inches / 6.3 cm across the top.
So. Yeah. Kind of a disappointment overall; I had hoped to have a lot more seedlings to play with than just the two. But we'll call it a learning experience -- no more glass jars! -- and move on. Maybe next year it'll work better.

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¹ I don't remember the numbers precisely, but it was something like: I started eight seeds, six produced a root, four of the ones that produced a root also started growing leaves, and two of the ones that started growing leaves continued to grow leaves long enough for them to look like leaves.
² The Dracaena / Erwinia combination had a sharp ammonia note to it that wasn't so much gross (though it was gross) as it was painful. I mean, there was rotting plant smell in there too, but the ammonia smell was what was most memorable. Rotted Clivias, on the other hand, have a much richer, more complicated bouquet, with a dominant note of sickly-sweet. Not only worse than the Dracaena, but worse than anything else I have ever smelled in my life. Smelled like if you were standing right next to Satan as he visited the part of the Hell dump where they put all the rotten fruit, and one or both of you had a suppurating skin infection, and he'd just farted.

An Uncharacteristically Upbeat Post

Fungus
Anybody remember that Euphorbia fungus I've been having trouble with since forever? The one that makes the fuzzy white patches on Euphorbia, Pedilanthus, and Synadenium but not on anything else, and that doesn't go away after being sprayed with rubbing alcohol, peroxide, copper sulfate, or chlorothalonil? This stuff?

I think I may have figured out how to get rid of it. The secret might be strong sprays of tap water. Damaged leaves stay damaged, of course, but they don't grow new patches of fungus. I hadn't tried this previously, because usually the equation is fungus + water = more fungus. In fact, I'd been taking extra care not to get water on the affected plants. The only reason I ever tried spraying the plants with water was because I'd gotten so discouraged that I gave up on ever stopping it, so I figured I may as well make it worse so I could justify throwing the plants out.

Rain doesn't work, though: the fungus got worse on the plants that were outside last summer. Must be the chlorine?

The only plants that washing doesn't seem to be adequate for are the Pedilanthuses. Of the three I still have (P. tithymaloides, P. 'Silver Star,' and P. 'Jurassic Park 2'), 'Jurassic Park 2' seems to be cured, 'Silver Star' might or might not be -- it's hard to tell, because there was a lot of leaf damage, and the leaf damage is the same color as the fungus itself -- and P. tithymaloides is still having problems.


Hippeastrum
The Hippeastrum seedling I got three years ago from Kenneth Moore is 1) going to bloom, and 2) offsetting. I'm not sure I even knew that Hippeastrums made offsets before this; I never paid that much attention to the genus because I never thought I was going to have one.

The flower won't be anything terribly exotic; it's either 'Red Lion' x self or 'Red Lion' x 'Apple Blossom.' But it'll still be my first, which is special enough. And amaryllis blooms are pretty, even when they're ordinary.


Clivia
The rumors about Clivia are true. I'd started to think all the talk about Clivia offsets was some kind of elaborate prank aimed at me, to make me feel bad because mine weren't making any. But behold! (And it only took five and a half years!)

So this is a thing that can happen as well.


Araucaria
But the fun doesn't stop there! I also have an Araucaria seedling! (It's less blurry in person.)

Is it an interesting Araucaria seedling? Well no, not yet. But someday. The story is, I bought three seeds of A. bidwillii from seedman.com last September.¹

I started them on 17 September 2013. I got a clear plastic jar (formerly a Costco bulk pretzel container), put in about 2 or 3 inches of damp soil, then set the seeds on top, then added another inch of soil and sealed the top.

In retrospect, I wish I had used vermiculite, because there's a raging fungus gnat problem in the container now. Washing the seeds first might have been a good idea as well, since I've had bugs come in with previous seedman.com purchases. (Only springtails, but if washing might have prevented that, then washing would have been a good idea.) But in any case. They usually take 1-2 months to germinate, but can take up to 18 months to germinate, I've heard, so this may be a long-term dirt-filled pretzel jar.

And here's a bonus picture of my first Araucaria bidwillii, from last September:

In that photo, it's about six and a half years old, plus however old it was when I bought it.²

The advice I see on-line says I should move the seedling to its own pot as soon as it's large enough to be handled.³ I'm not sure how large that is, but the current plan is to give it its own pot once it starts growing some true leaves: currently it's just a short, bumpy stick. If that sounds wrong to anybody, please leave a comment. For that matter, leave a comment if it sounds right, too.


Coffea
Finally, I've seen the first germination from this year's round of Coffea seedlings:

That took a little less than two months to sprout. For this one, I used soil instead of vermiculite, and I didn't soak it in water for 24 hours after harvest, so I hadn't been sure it would do anything. But it seems the pre-drying soak is optional, and it doesn't matter tremendously what you try to germinate them in. For the moment, it's just this one pot, the six seedlings from last year's batch, and the parent plant (which is doing terribly and I don't know why⁴) but I started a pretzel container full of vermiculite and seeds⁵ on January 15, and have two more batches of seeds to sow (95 seeds next week, and 205 seeds in early March), so this is just a harbinger of the coming Coffea stampede.

Bonus picture of the remaining plants from last year's crop:

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¹ $5.95 plus shipping. That was the same order as the Strelitzia junceas (5 seeds for $2.95; previously), and I also got seeds of Calathea lutea (10/$3.95). Both Strelitzia and Calathea are supposed to be irregular germinators, but it may be time to give up on the Calatheas: they take a lot of space that could be going to Anthurium seedlings, and so far none of the ten have done anything. I can be pretty patient when it comes to waiting for plants to do things, so I'm not planning to throw them out immediately, but . . . well, they should start thinking about germinating, if they know what's good for them.
² There is not a lot of information available about how fast A. bidwillii grows once it's germinated, but based on this picture from Wikimedia Commons, I'm guessing mine was barely more than a year old when I bought it. My earliest photo is from October 2007, ten months after the purchase, when it looked like:

Best guess: the plant is now between 7 1/2 and 8 1/2 years old.
³ For example: " As soon as they are large enough to handle, prick the seedlings out into individual pots. The plants have a rather sparse root system and are best placed in their final positions as soon as possible." (From here.) The part about the roots seems correct, at least:

⁴ My best guesses: cold (it's in the plant room, on the floor, and the plant room floor has been very chilly, several times, because of the periodic blasts of cold this winter), dry (it dries out a lot faster than it used to, and probably needs a larger pot), and maybe hot, dry air (the only place big enough to put it is also pretty close to the plant room heater). There's a second plant in the pot, maybe half the size of the big one, and it seems to be doing fine, though, so none of the explanations completely make sense.
⁵ And I do mean full: 149 seeds. The pretzel jars aren't huge -- about 8-10 inches / 20-25 cm in diameter? -- so the seeds are packed in there pretty tightly.

Your Love is Like / a Rollercoaster, Baby, Baby

Weird times. The plant collection is at once thriving in previously unprecedented ways and going completely to hell, which I guess is something that can happen once a collection reaches a certain size. Sort of like how Texas can be a disaster area due to flood and drought simultaneously.

On the one hand, I've been finding scale infestations all over the house, including on some very special plants,¹ which has at times left me despairing of ever getting things under control. (For good reason -- this has been going on for almost two years already, and only seems to be getting worse. It's showing up in new rooms, it's showing up on plants I thought I'd cured, and it's particularly bad on the plants that were outside for the summer.²) I'm not seeing scale on that many plants, really (probably only about 50, in a collection of 955), but of course it's the scale you're not seeing that's the real problem.

Also the Euphorbia fungus has returned as well. It probably never left.

On the other hand, the Stapelia giganteas are blooming like crazy, which is delightful, in that special way that the smell of dog shit can be delightful if it's being smelled for the right reasons.³

Anthurium "Bijoux Tuit" is working on a second bloom, making it the second of my Anthurium seedlings to bloom twice. Three more Anthurium seedlings are producing first blooms,⁴ for a total of thirteen. I'm not completely used to the idea of the Anthuriums blooming, even though it's been a few weeks now, so this is neat every time I'm reminded of it. About 40% of the Clivia seeds I started are producing leaves.⁵ I just took a whole bunch of berries off the Coffea and started seeds drying.⁶

Seeds on lower right.
I had one Schlumbergera seedling, #55, produce a flower bud about 14 months after it was first sown.⁷ The Spathiphyllum seedlings are looking like actual plants now, and have been for some time.

They're even suckering!

So the teal deer here is that the most incredible, wonderful, and exciting things are happening with the plant collection, and I am honestly thinking about throwing it all in the trash, shuttering the blog, and taking up a less emotionally draining hobby, like competitive jam-jar rolling.

For the time being, I've just been throwing out plants⁸ and looking for sources for bulk imidacloprid.⁹ Should I find scale on the Anthuriums again, however, absolutely anything might happen.

LATE EDIT: While watering on Tuesday night, I found out Schlumbergera number 25 has decided to try and bloom as well:

Hopefully that bud will do better than #55's did.

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¹ The original Murraya paniculata, all four of the gray-variegated Yucca guatemalensis, and the Furcraea foetida 'Medio-Picta,' to name a few.
² Lesson learned: don't put scale-infested plants outside in the summer. I blame ants.
³ So far, I have six blooms open at once in the plant room, plus at least one on the smellier Stapelia variegata, and I'm not finding the combined odor objectionable or even noticing it much. Which might mean that I've just gotten used to it, but the husband hasn't said commented on any unusual smells, and he spends less time in the house. So I'm thinking maybe it's just really not that bad unless you're up close. They're not a flower you want to stick behind your ear or anything.
⁴ #118, "Elijah Sturdabowtit;" #46, "Aurora Boreanaz;" and #235, "Rowan DeBoate." Rowan is particularly of interest, as her spathe is sort of a pale peach/cream color, which I haven't seen before on my plants.
⁵ No, it does not seem to have mattered much whether I rinsed them with hydrogen peroxide before planting, though I can't say for certain that it doesn't matter at all. The un-peroxided group of five seeds currently stands at: 0 rotted, 3 inactive, and 2 germinated and producing foliage. The peroxided group of eight seeds has 2 rotted, 1 inactive, 2 germinated but not doing much of anything, and 3 germinated and producing foliage. If we're only counting the seedlings that are visibly growing and healthy-seeming, that's a success rate of 40% on the first group and 38% on the second.
⁶ I took one berry off on 7 October, which gave me two seeds. Then on 27 October, I removed a whole cupful, and got 138 seeds. Though at least three got washed down the drain while I was trying to clean them off, and I'm planning to give a few others away, so I'm probably going to wind up starting about 130 seeds from this batch on 22 December. And that's not even half the berries that are on the plant.
Unrelated point of interest: in large quantities, Coffea berry skins smell sort of oniony, it turns out.
⁷ No pictures, because the bud dropped. It had either already given up on further development when I took it out of the flat it was in, or I knocked it off the plant in the process of untangling it from the other seedlings, 'cause by the time I went to get the camera to take a picture, it was no longer attached to the plant. Considering that it had no business even thinking about blooming in the first place (it's in the basement, under artificial lights, so it doesn't get the long, cool nights it should require for setting buds, and it was also a couple years too young to be blooming besides, according to all the reputable websites), I figure this is a pretty good sign. The moral? Between this and the Anthurium situation, I'm thinking that it's best to ignore when people tell you that plants have to be X years old before they'll bloom, because plants can't read and will bloom when they feel like it.
⁸ I had 1017 plants at the beginning of September, 1001 at the beginning of October, and it looks like we're going to be somewhere around 950 at the beginning of November. Since most of the plants that were easy to get rid of got thrown out ages ago, every plant I discard now is like a knife to the heart, pretty much.
⁹ For comparison, I've been paying $8.50 for one pound of 0.22% imidacloprid; the stuff at the link is $3.08/lb for 0.5% imidacloprid, before shipping. Do I actually need that much in order to dose the entire collection all at once? No, probably not that much. My best ballpark guess is about 25 lb. of what I've been getting, or 11 lb. of the bulk stuff.
Some of you will, at this point, be thinking about telling me I should try something else, something other than imidacloprid, like neem oil or rubbing alcohol or whatever. The reason why I'm not considering these as options is because sprinkling imidacloprid granules on soil is fast, covers the whole plant, and only has to be done once. Spraying neem or rubbing alcohol, or anything else, takes much longer to apply, covers only the areas I can reach with the spray (not so bad for large-leaved plants like Strelitzia, but spraying every surface on a Polyscias fruticosa? Fuggedaboutit.), and has to be re-done at least every week or two to keep up with the freshly-hatched larvae. As the size of the collection decreases, rubbing alcohol or whatever might be more of an option, but at the moment, there's really no way I could keep up. It's not like I haven't tried before.

Unfinished business: Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold'

I'd thought maybe, but it looks like I don't get a repeat of the Clivia flowers this year. Ah, well.

The seedlings are doing all kinds of different things. Some just sit there. Some get periodically covered with a white fungus. Some have leaves. I started the first batch in a glass jar: I put in soil and some water, microwaved it to heat and sterilize the soil (which apparently didn't work, since the fungus keeps appearing), then allowed it to cool down. I then removed the seed coats from the seeds, rinsed them in a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide, and dropped them in.

The top-down angle isn't ideal for seeing how much growth there's been, but it's a bit clearer than shooting through the side of the jar. . . .

The second batch, I just removed the seed coat and dropped them into small pots of wet soil. Only one of that group has done anything --

-- and I'm afraid that taking the photo may have set it back, since I brought it outside for the picture, along with a bunch of other plants in a box. On the way back into the house, one of them started to tip over, so I shifted the box, so then others started to tip, and in short order I had dumped them all out onto the ground. The Clivia seedling appeared unharmed, but it did get knocked completely out of its pot, so I'm worried anyway. (Clivia roots are pretty sturdy, though, right?)

But the point remains that there don't seem to be any appreciable differences between the two groups, in terms of survival or progress, so perhaps the microwaving and peroxide and all that was overkill. Time will tell.

Random plant event: Clivia 'Aztec Gold'

You may or may not remember last summer's Clivia blooms. I apparently never bothered to say, officially, that the blooms had turned into fruits (or at least some of them did; I wound up with about a dozen), but that happened too.

In mid-May, I noticed that one of the fruits had begun to change color, which was exciting, because it signified that they were about to be ripe enough to plant up. I figured I'd wait until they turned red, like they're supposed to, then start a bunch of seeds and have a ton of new plants to play with, finally. (The "finally" is because neither of my Clivias have ever offset.)

Except that it didn't turn red. So I left it on the plant. And then more of them started to change color, but they didn't turn red either. And so I worried. Maybe they're never going to turn red. Maybe something is wrong. It's probably just as well; I don't know what to do with them once they're ripe anyway. Easy come, easy go. Etc.

But then:

Yes, that's a root growing out of the berry. Apparently this is a thing that happens sometimes, with Clivia. So the game, such as it is, is back on again. (Not that it was ever off, but I didn't know that.)

And it turns out that yellow-blooming Clivias were always supposed to produce lighter-colored fruit than the regular orange-blooming ones:

Clivia with yellow flowers will produce yellow fruit, while Clivia with orange flowers will produce red fruit. (Ref.)

It's just that nobody had ever told me.

So now I guess I have some Clivia seeds to start. I'm not going to get too excited about this just yet, since a lot of what I'm seeing on-line about starting Clivia seeds makes them sound very susceptible to fungal diseases, and goodness knows we have some fungal diseases here. But, apparently we're further along in the process than I realized, so I'd best hurry and catch up.

Top 18 PATSP Posts of 2012

2012 wasn't my, the blog's, or the plant collection's best year. I spent basically the entire year saying that I had too many plants,¹ and trying to reduce the collection to a more manageable size, and somehow managed to gain plants anyway (919 at the beginning of 2012, 1029 at the end). And then the scalepocalypse. And then I started having problems with fungus, a problem which is ongoing.² And then the scale came back.³

Also saying these are the top 18 posts is sort of misleading in two different ways: five of them are basically all the same post, so it's closer to the top 14 posts. Also "top" doesn't really mean anything except that I liked how they turned out and think you should see them if you happened to miss them the first time. They're not necessarily the most-viewed or most-commented or anything like that. Anyway.


18. Pretty picture: Cattleya aclandiae (16 April 2012)


I just liked how the photo turned out, basically.


17. Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica (4 September 2012)

Well, it was a big deal. You don't even know.


16. Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Peruflora's Cirila Alca (22 November 2012)


Also just a nice photo.


15. Random plant event: Spathiphyllum (5 December 2012)

In which I propagate a plant I don't even really like, at a time when I'm actually trying to reduce the number of plants I have, because I've realized propagation is possible. I still feel all conflicted about this.


14. Pretty picture: Rhyncholaelia digbyana (30 November 2012)


In which I attempt to liven up a dull blog post with an incomplete screenplay.


13. Random plant event: Aglaonema 'Maria,' with special guest star (8 March 2012)


The debut of the peat-bog-in-the-basement idea.


12. Cribplants, yo. (28 November 2012)

In which my thugged-out ass realizes that Snoop Dogg is a mothafuckin genius.


11. Elsewhere on the Web: Did We Win Already? (29 January 2012)

The sellers of the blue dyed orchids said, about a year ago, that they were going to admit on the tags that their plants wouldn't re-bloom blue. I wonder if that actually happened. Somebody should check.


10. Random plant event: Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold' (22 August 2012)

The rumors are true: Clivias actually can be induced to bloom. I was beginning to doubt.


9. The Very Slow and Occasionally Sticky Inferno (14 August 2012)

The scale outbreak depressed me. And led to all sorts of incidental badness. Which was also depressing. And is continuing to be depressing. And will likely be depressing in the future as well.


8. Pretty pictures: Masdevallia Sunset Jaguar 'Night Breed' (24 April 2012)


I really love this flower, though I'm unable to read the name without thinking about the "night cheese" joke on 30 Rock.⁴


7. Random plant event: Epiphyllum NOID (26 August 2012)

In which an Epiphyllum blooms in Iowa, and a family is brought together. (No, really.) Also there are many pictures.


2 to 6. Missing From Retail series
(Part 1, 25 November) (Part 2, 2 December) (Part 3, 8 December) (Part 4, 14 December) (Part 5, 20 December)

Sort of a weird choice, I guess, but it was nice to expand the horizons of the blog for a bit and talk about a new group of plants. Plus I learned some things about plants I was otherwise unfamiliar with.


1. The Brick Joke (16 January 2012)

And no, Pierson's Flower Shop and Greenhouses, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, never did contact me in response to the post, so I assume I'm still banned from the store. We never have occasion to go to Cedar Rapids anymore anyway (I'm sorry, Frontier! I miss you!), so this hasn't had much practical effect on my life. However, my initial feelings of well they kind of have a point and I understand why they might not want me there have had a year to . . . curdle.

And so now we have 2013. May I have less fungus and scale, fewer plants overall, and the same number of kidneys, next New Year's Day.⁵

-

¹ (Absolutely true, though!)
² The fungus story so far:
First I tried neem oil. That makes leafy Euphorbia and Pedilanthus types defoliate, and doesn't seem to have much lasting effect on the non-leafy stuff.
Then I tried spraying with basic copper sulfate in water, which seemed like the least nasty thing available for fungus control at the ex-job. Not only did that not help much, it clogged the sprayers almost immediately.
Then I asked for help from Cactus Jungle. They said hydrogen peroxide, so I've been doing that, but this doesn't seem to be helping either, especially since I can only do it every 14 days or so. And it makes the Pedilanthus defoliate.
The next thing to try is baking soda. That's not going to work either, but it's another thing I can spray inside the house that won't kill us all, so I'm going to try it anyway.
When baking soda has conclusively failed -- and it will -- only then am I going to allow myself to use an actual hardcore, mid-20th-century-type fungicide. I bought a bottle of chlorothalonil at the ex-job some time ago, then looked it up when I got home and kind of wished I'd bought something else, 'cause I don't want to use it in the house and it's too cold to use it outside.
If the chlorothalonil doesn't fix things -- and it's a polychlorinated benzene ring with two nitrile groups, so it ought to be able to kill everything -- I'm going to go back to the ex-job and buy some captan.
And if captan doesn't work either, I am going to burn the goddamned house down. THE MILDEW WILL NOT WIN.
³ (Truthfully, I'm depressed about all this. Probably going to take a hiatus for a while following today's post. I'd rather not think about plants any more than absolutely necessary right now. Plus, I have a bunch of plants in the basement that I need to dose with imidacloprid granules, and that's going to take some time.)
⁴ It's a throwaway gag where Liz Lemon is home by herself eating cheese. Getting the rights to use the song, even though it wasn't the whole song (or the right lyrics!), apparently cost the 30 Rock producers $40,000. That's some commitment to a joke, that is.
⁵ (For the record, I would also be okay with an increased number of kidneys, at least within reason.)