Schlumbergera seedling no. 199

Unrelated thing: I still have way, way more Coffea plants than I probably ought to,¹ and this summer I decided to move them all outside because, I guess, I wanted them to get even bigger and more unwieldy than they already are. And then the weather forecast called for three nights in a row of temperatures in the low 50s (F; equivalent in C is 10-12). I've been assuming for quite a while that the lowest temperature they could tolerate was 60F/16C.

That first night, the low was only supposed to be 54F (12C), and I was like, well, they're under partial shade, near the house, they're pretty close together, so they probably won't get that cold, and it wouldn't necessarily be a terrible thing for me to lose a few of them anyway. Plus I don't want to drag 25 plants in the house and then out again three times. So I let them sit there. And the next morning they all looked fine. The following night, it was supposed to get down to 51F/11C, and they made it through that okay as well. So although I don't know exactly how cold they got, and the temperature was only supposed to dip below 55F for a few hours each night anyway, I feel like I've demonstrated to myself that Coffea can tolerate an air temperature of 55F for brief periods, possibly colder than that. (Davesgarden.com says they're okay down to 40F/5C, but that probably assumes that they're planted in the ground. I'll bring them inside if/when we go below 50F, whatever davesgarden.com says.)

I did have some sunburn on the two largest ones, alas. Should have turned the plants a couple times a day until they got used to it. They're all growing visibly already, though, so I imagine the damaged leaves will be replaced by shiny new ones in no time at all.

So that's the Coffea report. Now for the Schlumbergera seedling.

199A is nice, but nothing we haven't seen a thousand times before. Difficult to get excited about.

I'm badly pressed for time, so: Along For The Ride, Dusty Springfield, Second Love, and Usually Unmentioned are our candidates this time.

Second Love is sort of a nice idea. First loves are so idealized in movies and TV and whatnot that it strikes me as a little weird. I mean, if you're lucky enough to have a second, third, fourth, etc., they're all special also. First loves aren't necessarily better, just more dramatically interesting. So why not fly a kite for a second love every once in a while? Alas, I decided that while the name was fine, there wasn't really any connection between it and the seedling, so I could probably do better.

Usually Unmentioned seems like an okay name for a seedling that's just one more orange/pink in an increasingly ridiculous line of orange/pinks. (Of course it's usually unmentioned -- why would you mention it?) But I discarded this one too. This year's Schlumbergera seedlings have shown me that some seedlings are consistent from one year to the next, and some of them change pretty dramatically. It wouldn't do to have a fantastic, amazing, one-of-a-kind seedling be Usually Unmentioned.

Along For The Ride kinda worked, because when I was making these decisions I was in the car in Iowa City,² and although I had business in Iowa City and so had to go, I wasn't doing anything about it right then. The seedling, similarly, isn't doing anything incredible, but its siblings got to be potted up and show their stuff, so it got to be potted up as well. I don't dislike this name, but it's kind of bland, and I decided I liked Dusty Springfield better.

Well. Maybe it's more that I just felt bad, for considering Dusty Springfield repeatedly³ but not actually naming a seedling for her. What do I have against Dusty Springfield? Nothing. How would I feel about this if I were Dusty Springfield? I'd feel pretty bad. Why am I teasing Dusty Springfield this way? I don't know.

So, 199A Dusty Springfield. Finally.

Just four more Schlumbergeras and then we're done for the year, by the way.

-

¹ (25, including the plant that produced the berries that became the other 24)
² (technically North Liberty, but close enough)
³ For 106A Jaws of Elmo, 033A Clueless, and 178A Lulu's Night Off.

Unfinished business: Coffea arabica

My big huge Coffea is no more. Sort of. It always was multiple plants in the same pot, but the biggest one started dropping leaves and branches after it came in for the winter. Eventually I chopped off the top 5 feet / 1.5 m, give or take, but the leaves are still falling, just more slowly. I'm not sure what happened; my best guess is that having the plant sitting on the cold concrete floor of the plant room was too cold for too long. Though that wouldn't explain why the next-largest plant in that pot has done fine, and has added about a foot and a half (0.5 m) of new growth during the winter even though it was in the same soil.

The plant used to be slightly taller than the stake.
Possibly light was a problem too: the Coffea had been living in the northwest corner of the plant room, which was cold, but bright. It was too big to put back there this winter, though, so it wound up further from windows, getting a lot less light.

In any case. The plant is dead(-ish), but it lives on in spirit, because I'd harvested a ton of seeds from it before it died, and those seeds have been sprouting for a few weeks now. (The tiny first batch took 57 days before the first seed did something visible, the big second batch took less than 67 but I don't know how many exactly; the big third batch took 45 days, and I'm still waiting on the big fourth batch; so far it's taken about 44 days, so I should be seeing sprouts very soon.) I've been pulling seedlings out of the vermiculite and potting them into soil when I see the seed leaves, like this:

I've been putting three seedlings together per pot, and I'm already up to 26 pots, plus six pots from last year. It's theoretically possible, based on the number of seeds I harvested, that I could wind up with 150 Coffea plants at some point. I do like Coffea arabica a lot, and I never want seeds I start to fail, exactly, but in this particular instance I wouldn't mind if . . . fewer seeds succeeded than usual.

For sale

If anyone is interested in starting some Coffea arabica plants from seed, I have a lot more seeds than I'll be able to use. (I actually threw out the first group I harvested because I couldn't figure out how to germinate such a huge number in the limited space I had. That problem has since been solved, thanks to Costco and their semi-delicious pretzels.) The batch on offer is currently drying and will be ready to plant on 6 March. I'm thinking $5 (which includes shipping) for at least 10 seeds. The actual number of seeds mailed out will depend on how much interest there is.

I don't know whether going through the USPS will affect germination or not; my guess is that it probably won't (seeds are often more flexible about temperature than the corresponding plants are), and I'm fairly certain about that, but I won't promise anything. I got 100% germination from the seeds in last year's crop that had been dried for 8 weeks (these will have been also), so I would expect very high germination from these as well. All you'd have to do once the seeds arrive is soak them for 24 hours and then plant them in damp soil or vermiculite, then keep moist and warm. Germination will almost certainly happen by early June if it's going to.

Contact me by e-mail (the address is in the sidebar at right; note the instructions) if you're interested in getting some seeds.

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:

-

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.

Grab bag

Not much to report lately; I'm heavily preoccupied with trying to dump imidacloprid into all the plants. It isn't particularly difficult to do: it just makes watering take longer, so there's less time for anything else. And of course I'm still finding scale as I go, though less of it than I expected.

Here are five things I've found interesting enough to stop and photograph, but not interesting enough to write a whole blog post about, in the last couple weeks:

1. Coffea arabica

Of the eight pots of Coffea seedlings I started back in February, I still have six. (The other two got sold at a consignment store in Iowa City.) I up-potted them to 6-inch/15 cm pots a couple weeks ago, because they were drying out before their turn in the watering cycle came around. I've been surprised at how quickly they've grown: I once believed that the plants we got in at the ex-job, about this tall, in 4-inch pots, were probably about a year old, but it seems more likely now that they were only six months. If even that.


2. Corn

The cornfield behind the house got harvested yesterday.¹ Sheba sometimes worries when the machinery shows up to do things to the field (understandable: it's a large, blurry object making growling noises in the back of the house where she plays: I'd be alarmed too), but she either didn't notice it this time or she's getting used to it.

This is slightly sad for me; I like when the field is planted in corn better than I like when it's planted in soybeans. Since we've lived here, they've alternated plantings, so next year will probably be a soy year.


3. Neoregelia 'Gazpacho'

As expected, the Neoregelia 'Gazpacho' has continued to bloom. Less expected is the fuzzy white fungus that appears to be growing on the spent flowers. I can't recall seeing this before, and my ongoing battle with fungus on the Euphorbias has me worrying more about this than I otherwise would, even though I doubt it's the same fungus.

Aside from that, though, the Neoregelia is behaving normally. It already has two good-sized offsets on it.


4. Ananas 'Mongo'

Speaking of offsets.

This is a lot faster than I was expecting. The fruit is still on the plant and everything, though the reduced light indoors has made it lose a lot of its color. Pretty sure all the true flowers have opened and closed already.


5. Spathiphyllum NOID

Finally, one of my older Spathiphyllums (I got it in January 2007) has self-pollinated a number of times, and has produced a couple hundred seeds, but the seeds have so far mostly fallen to fungus, instead of germinating. I had been hopeful that this spadix, which appeared to have been pollinated successfully, and which seemed to be developing normally, might provide another chance, but instead it started to get these white cauliflower-like bumps, and then I accidentally broke it off its stem while I was trying to get it ready for photos, so I never got to see the cauliflowers develop into whatever they were going to develop into. This may be a good thing, depending on why the atypical growth was happening, but I was a little bummed all the same.

There is one exciting thing to report on the whole Spathiphyllum-breeding project, though: my biggest peace lily (likely 'Mauna Loa' or 'Sensation'²), which I've had since January 2003, is blooming right now, after a long bloomless period. The spathe hasn't opened yet, and I don't know for sure if it will be interfertile with my other plants when it does, but I've wanted to propagate it for years now. In almost 11 years, it has never offset, so the only way I'm going to propagate it appears to be by seed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

-

¹ (Also our first snow, though I didn't get a picture of that.)
² I'm guessing those cultivar names on the grounds that they're the main varieties of Spathiphyllum that I'm aware of which get really big. 'Mauna Loa' is one of the oldest and most popular of the big varieties, and 'Sensation' is the largest variety the growers' guide could come up with that's at all common -- supposedly 'Sensation' can reach 5 feet (1.5 m). Mine's not anywhere near 5 feet tall, but it's been indoors for 11 years, so some stunting would be understandable. Even under my non-ideal conditions, the leaves are all a solid 13-19 inches (33-48 cm) long, and it's vastly bigger than my other spaths.
Allegedly there are even peace lilies out there somewhere that can reach 9 feet (2.7 m) tall, though the largest I've personally seen was this guy:

Who was maybe 5 or 6 feet (1.5-1.8 m), and sold to us as 'Sensation.' Even if not the world's largest Spathiphyllum, I wouldn't want to run into it in a darkened alley or anything. Not considering some of the things I've said about spaths in the past.

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.

-

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: Coffea arabica

So I'm thinking it's time for an update on the Coffea arabica seedlings. The last time we checked in with them, in April, most of them had germinated, but there were no leaves to speak of.

My mid-May, the seed leaves (cotyledons) had pushed their way out of the seed coat, and there were the beginnings of some true leaves:

(18 May)
By early June, most of the seeds had produced some true leaves. I never did get germination from most of the group of seeds that I dried for four or five days (the three pots on the right), but the seeds dried for eight weeks (the six pots on the left) all did well.

(11 June)
By the end of June, I decided that they'd all pretty much done whatever they were going to do, and that it was time to transplant them to soil. I was really nervous about doing this, because they'd been doing so well in the vermiculite, and I wasn't sure how they would respond to the transplant, but I did it anyway --

(25 June)
-- and I think only one was lost, which was stunted to begin with. (One of the four-or-five-day group came up between the 11th and 25th of June, but it stalled; even after I removed its seed coat, it didn't grow or open the cotyledons or anything, and it died after transplant.)

So in summary: all 18 of the eight-week seeds germinated and survived transplant; only 4 of the 9 four-or-five-days seeds germinated, and only 3 of those survived transplant. Clearly an eight-week dry is better.

I moved them outside after transplanting, too, which seems to have been fine. By mid-July, they all appeared to be in good shape.

(12 July)
As of 2 August, there's some chlorosis starting on a few of them, which no doubt has to do with the fact that fertilizing the plants outside is a little more complicated than fertilizing the indoor ones, so I don't do it as often. Perhaps they should come back inside.

(2 August, with an adopted Murraya paniculata seedling that needed a place to live)
So they're not necessarily growing super quickly, or without any problems, but there's been a lot of progress since April, and I think the overall situation is still good. If nothing else, I've got a much better understanding of why small Coffea arabica plants are for sale everywhere I go: they're just really easy to produce, and you don't have to have all that many stock plants producing berries. Right now, my parent plant has at least a couple hundred berries developing on it, with a handful of flowers besides, and it can't be more than about eight years old. I don't know if I want to germinate all the seeds, when the berries are ripe, but I'm not ruling it out.

Scenes From the Garage

What a terrible time of year this is. So warm out (71, 80, and 87 F on Sun/Mon/Tue, which is 22, 27 and 31 C, for those of you in civilized countries) that I feel stupid if I don't have the plants outside, because obviously they'd enjoy themselves, but too cold at night to leave them there, so I have to haul them all back in the house or into the garage or something, then drag them back out again in the morning. Except last night I did leave them outside (forecast was for a low of 62F/17C), so they were probably all destroyed by a freak hail storm or something. (I'll add that to the end of the post, if the hail thing happened.)

Starting tonight, it's going to turn cold again, so all the plants that I've been carefully moving around every hour so they don't sunburn are going to have to come back inside and live in their old spots again for four or five days. There are obviously worse things than having to move lots of plants around, but I can't remember what any of them are, because I'm exhausted from moving lots of plants around.

About 75% of that last sentence isn't even a joke.

Therefore, today's post will be a lazy and poorly-photographed assemblage of things I've seen when transporting the plants from place to place.

First up is the big Coffea, which is . . . big.

Also a Coffea.

It's spent a long time in the corner of the plant room. This is because that's pretty much the only place in the house where it would fit, and it's done nicely there. But I decided I wanted to give it a chance to spend a summer outside for the first time since I bought it in December 2006, so I wrestled it out of the corner and brought it outside and stood it up, and, well:

This is an inaccurate picture in two ways. One, the top tier or two of branches got whacked by the ceiling fan or bent against the ceiling or otherwise broken, at some point a day or two after this picture was taken, so the plant is now slightly shorter than this.

The second way the picture is inaccurate is because the plant is more or less upright. That's not unheard of, but it's not been typical lately. Because it's been grown indoors for so long, the stem is weak, and any little breeze will tip it over 60 degrees. For the moment, the precarious-looking wobble is sort of serving a purpose. I don't have any good spots for keeping a plant this tall in total shade, but it's always waving around, so none of the leaves wind up staying in direct sun long enough to burn.

That, or Coffeas are just naturally sunburn-resistant, 'cause it's been fine. I prefer to think that it's the waving around, not natural sunburn resistance, because then that means the waving and bending is a good thing. In any case, I'm hoping that the plant takes this as a sign that it needs to invest in a thicker, sturdier trunk before the summer's over.

Next up, the Aloe harlana, or whatever it is, had started to produce some flower buds before it got moved outside, but they're getting bigger and starting to color up now.

The above picture was taken on Monday; by Tuesday morning, when I got the plant out of the garage, the inflorescence was nearly horizontal. It didn't seem to be creased or broken, so the flowers might still open, but I don't have an explanation for the sudden change, so I'm a little concerned. If the flowers open regardless, I'll be pleased.

If they open and I get to see a hummingbird, I'll be more pleased, but so far since we moved, I've gotten an average of one hummingbird sighting per year, and I'd just as soon not use mine up so early and then have nothing to look forward to.

Next. Have I told you lately how much I love my Araucaria bidwillii? 'Cause I do. It's been around long enough now that I'm actually starting to think of it as a friend. Even by normal plant-personification standards (or, you know, "normal" plant-personification standards), that's a bit much. I guess it's true, what Bob Dylan said: the plants are my friends; they're blowing in the wind.

Puns aside, the A. bidwillii is putting on a bunch of new growth all of a sudden. Some combination, no doubt, of the longer days, brighter light, better air circulation, and increased root room -- I repotted it on 11 April.

Not all of the news is good. The goddamned fungus on the Euphorbias is not getting any better, despite pretty liberal application of chlorothalonil, and I'm alternating between rage and despair about that whole situation. (I suppose it's probably too early to give up just yet, though.) Also I was throwing the tennis ball for Sheba on Monday and mis-aimed it into the plants. Blew some leaves off of the big Agave victoriae-reginae, as well as partly pulping some of the weaker Aloes, which was a bummer. But these things will happen. And I've learned some sort of valuable lesson, I'm almost certain.

Random plant event: Coffea arabica

It's been a couple weeks now since the first Coffea seedlings emerged from the vermiculite, which may be a good time to report on what's happened since then.

The news I find most interesting is that, of the two groups of seedlings (those dried for eight weeks prior to sowing, and those dried for only four or five days prior to sowing), the eight-week group is clearly and obviously doing much better than the five-day group. By this point in the process, I've gotten 100% germination (18/18) from the eight-week group --

-- and only 11% (1/9) from the five-day group:

Obviously there's still time for the remaining eight seeds to sprout, but they only have a month left, and I'm not optimistic about them. So we've learned something. If you're going to sprout Coffea seeds from berries, here's a procedure that works:

1) Remove the seeds from ripe berries.
2) Soak the seeds in water for 24 hours.
3) Remove the seeds from water and let dry for eight weeks in a warm, dry spot with good air circulation and no sun.
4) At the end of the eight weeks, soak the seeds in water again for 24 hours.
5) Plant the seeds 1 1/2 inches (~4 cm) deep in damp but not sodden vermiculite, ideally in a pot that's taller than it is wide, and cover the pot to keep in moisture.¹ Place under a light source, in a warm location,² and wait; you should see the first sprouts in about a month.

But the specific occasion for the post is that there are now cotyledons³ visible:

Which is exciting.

Also noteworthy: a lot of the seeds had some gray fuzzy fungus on them once they emerged from the vermiculite. This doesn't appear to have affected the seedlings or their germination any, however worried I was to see it initially.

It's possible that the black stuff on the seed coat, two pictures up, is another fungus, or is related somehow to the first fungus. All I can tell you at this point is that it's surprisingly fine and sooty.

The next Coffea update will probably be when they all get transplanted to soil; I have no idea when that will be, though. I'm not sure how long they can (or should) continue to grow in the vermiculite, and I don't want to try to transplant until I'm fairly sure they have root systems that can handle the shock. So we'll have to see how it goes, I guess.

-

¹ Because I didn't want to have to worry about watering them, mine were actually completely enclosed: the black tray they're in has no holes in the bottom, and then they were covered with a tight-fitting clear plastic top. I'm not sure if this particular detail of my process should necessarily be imitated by others.
² The basement's not really all that warm. Maybe 72-76F / 22-24C.
³ ("Seed leaves")

Random plant event: Coffea arabica

And now there are Coffea arabica seedlings.

Those of you who were following along were probably expecting to see this post sooner or later, and may not find it that interesting, but it's a big deal to me, 'cause I've been nervous about it for the last few weeks.

I'd let the first batch of seeds dry for eight weeks, because I had read that that was the way to get the best germination. Then when it came time to sow the seeds, I looked online for information about the best planting depth, and all the sites I found were warning me that internal moisture was critical for germination, and if I let the seeds dry out for more than like 12 hours then I may as well just throw them away, because they'd never sprout.

I'm pleased to report that those websites are full of crap. Not only is it possible to sprout a Coffea arabica seed after drying it for eight weeks, but the seeds I treated that way are the only ones that sprouted at all. So far, at least.

As of last Wednesday night (27 March), I had six sprouts, which I have helpfully circled in the photo because you probably wouldn't be able to see them otherwise:

They were started on 18 February, so that means 37 days from sowing to seeing something happen, which is within the usually quoted germination time of 1-3 months. So everything seems to be happening as expected so far. The non-sprouters have another six or seven weeks to go before I start thinking about giving up on them, and probably another three or four weeks after that before I actually give up on them.

Not that all would be lost if these six are all I get; the parent plant is forming a new crop of berries already, so I will have another set of seeds to plant around December, no matter what happens with this first batch.

EDIT: As of Saturday morning, there are eight seedlings up, in total. The two newest ones are also from the dried-for-eight-weeks group.

EDIT: As of Sunday evening, there are fourteen seedlings emerging. They're all from the dried-for-eight-weeks group. Drying them for eight weeks before planting may or may not be how one is supposed to do it, but it seems to work.

Random plant events: white flowers

Nothing gigantic and incredible going on exactly, but I've got three plants blooming recently that are all notable in some way or another, and as it happens, all three have white flowers, so it seemed reasonable to group them together into one post.

First up is the Coffea arabica, which struggled a bit this winter (dropping the lowest leaves, mostly, which for all I know is normal) but just got super excited and put out a huge flush of flowers.¹

I counted flowers at 38 separate nodes. If each node produces 2.5 berries (previously, either 2 or 3 seemed to be standard), and each berry produces 1.9 seeds (also based on previous experience), that's roughly 150-200 seeds.


The husband pointed out that 150-200 seeds might actually be sufficient to make a cup or two of coffee. I'm a little bit tempted, but I'd be more inclined to plant the seeds and get more plants. Assuming that there are seeds. Also assuming that the seeds will germinate.² (Obviously there's a great deal of premature chicken-counting going on in this paragraph.)


I tried, but was unable to get any smell from the flowers at all. (The husband could, so I'm not sure what my problem is.)

Next up, I've got flowers on my Haworthia limifolia var. limifolia. This isn't the first time that one of the Haworthias has attempted to bloom, but usually the flower spike shoots up into the fluorescent lights and then burns before I notice it, or it starts to grow deep within the leaves and then stalls and dies for some reason. I don't know for sure that this is the first time I've ever had one reach full bloom, but it's the first in a very long time, at least.


There is a chance that H. limifolia var. limifolia may be self-fertile: some Haworthias are and some aren't, from what I hear. I won't be attempting to get seeds from this one, though, because the flowers are so tiny and easily damaged that I doubt I have the necessary visual acuity and fine motor control. (If you've got a flowering Haworthia of your own that you want to try with, you'll want to check this out.)

Finally, I think most of us have seen Cryptanthus flowers before, and I've never found them all that interesting or attractive, but these made me do a double-take:


I think Cryptanthus flowers are always white,³ so the color's not a big deal, but I was struck by the size and shape: ordinarily they're small, flat, triangular things that are easily overlooked. This particular plant (a NOID), though, produces flowers that are a bit larger, and more trumpet-shaped. It's not a huge difference, but it was enough to make me think, oh, those are really pretty, for a Cryptanthus.

I won't be collecting seeds from this either, first because there are no other Cryptanthuses blooming at the moment so I have nothing to cross them with, second because the recent failure with the Cryptbergias has made me doubt I could pull it off, and third because there are much easier ways to get more Cryptanthuses, if more Cryptanthuses is what you want, and I've already got so many baby plants from offsets that I have no idea what to do with them all. But let the record show that I totally thought about it.

-

¹ Google says that the bloom season is "mid spring" or March, both of which apply. So I guess everything's normal.
² This might be a good moment to update you on the progress of the Coffea seeds I started on 18 February. It's an easy update: absolutely nothing has happened yet, as far as I can see. This is not surprising; Coffea seeds are slow germinators, and right now, at one month, is the very soonest I could have expected anything to happen. Two months seems to be typical, according to Google; some sources say as long as four. (Nobody claims anything faster than 1 month.)
I'm also wondering if I maybe got some bad information; a lot of the sources I found while googling for germination times also say that seeds that have dried out too much are generally non-viable. The plan I was working from initially said that viability was best with seeds that had been dried for eight weeks, so somebody has to be wrong here. I'm starting to get a little anxious.
³ (I've never seen them in any other color, anyway.)