Unfinished business: various

One of these again.

The first bit of unfinished business that I should bring up is the announcement I hinted at last Monday. I am really, no fooling, finally in the process of writing a book, as of Wednesday night.

I am doing it entirely wrong, of course. I have no idea whether it will wind up being a book. I have no publishing deals. I've not even talked to any publishers since a couple years ago, nor are there any plans to do so soon. And I don't know whether it will ever be for sale as a self-published thing either. I also don't know how long it's going to take me to write or how long it will be. Basically, I have no idea what I'm doing at all. But the thing is: I have been intending to write something for a very, very long time now. You're surely tired of hearing me say this; I'm definitely tired of saying it. And I haven't been writing anything, all this time, because I've been trying to get everything lined up properly in advance. What do I write about? How shall I format it? Should I try to write a book proposal up for a real publisher, or plan on self-publishing? Etc.

As of Wednesday, I am officially no longer caring about any of that. Those are not fun things to think about, and I don't know how to make those decisions with the information I've got at the moment anyway. So I am going to write a thing, and then I will try to decide what to do with it after that. At this point, I'm only planning to do plant profiles, and I have twenty-one candidates.¹ Probably not all of those are going to happen, and others will turn into something else. Also I might well give up on the whole idea before finishing any of them, but: what little vision I have of the future is currently revolving around those twenty-one plant profiles. For whatever it's worth, I'm starting with Madonna.

I'll eventually set up a progress page or sidebar or something to let you know how it's going.

I do not know, at this point, whether this is going to affect blogging frequency or quality. The hope is kind of that writing the profiles -- which I always used to enjoy, however much I also complained about them -- might make me more excited about, and interested in, plants again, so you may not notice a difference.

And now some plant-related content.


Random plant event: Columnea orientandina (30 August 2012)

The near-perfect pentagon formed by the leaves of the Columneas wasn't planned; I didn't notice it until after I uploaded the photos.
A few of the Columnea orientandina seedlings I started last summer are still with us, though most aren't -- I transplanted twelve pots' worth of C. orientandina seedlings, I think, and only three of those still contain living plants. Eight of the remainder got too dry or too wet or both; one got thrown out because of scale.

I've started two additional rounds of seedlings since then, but the sprouts are so tiny and stringy when they first emerge that I'm scared to handle them. Consequently, I haven't transplanted them yet, and they're probably going to die before I can psych myself up to do it. In the future, I'm going to try starting them directly on soil, rather than trying to start them in vermiculite and then transfer them. If it works, then I don't have to worry about hurting them during transfer, and if it doesn't, well, there will be more seeds later.

Though it sort of doesn't matter anymore, since the seedlings in those three pots are large enough to take cuttings from. I don't have to start them from seeds if I don't want to.


Selling and Trading (30 April 2012)

For all intents and purposes, I won't be selling or trading plants in 2013. It's the whole scale-and-thrips business, mostly: the worst of that seems to be over, but I don't know if I've actually gotten them all. There are other reasons too (mailing plants is a big time drain; sometimes people are supposed to pay for their plants and then don't; I don't always know what I'm going to get when I agree to a trade), but not wanting to mail bugs to people is the main thing. And anyway, I supposedly have a new project now; see above.

Having said that, I'd now like to undercut it by saying that if you've seen a plant on PATSP that you're desperate to have, and you've checked the "Plants I've Tried" list and I'm still claiming to have one, feel free to e-mail and ask about it. (Especially if it's something I've talked about offering for sale in the past.) I'm not going to try to be all organized and official about selling and trading this year, but there are still a few plants I could send out, and maybe a few plants I'd be interested in bringing in, so we'll see what happens. If you're looking to trade, you should check out the "Plants I Want" page first, because there's a whole big list there at the bottom, of plants I am definitely not interested in, and checking that could save us both some time.


Somewhat last-minute grab bag (3 April 2012)

The Philodendron bipinnatifidum sucker is still there. Not growing very quickly, but still there, and the parent plant keeps getting bigger (very slowly), so I guess it didn't signify anything bad.

The poor plant has been terribly, terribly abused, so it's a wonder it's even still alive, never mind growing and self-propagating and all that.

Euphorbia milii 'Candyland' eventually succumbed to the Euphorbia-ravaging fungus. The leaves kept fuzzing over. I pulled them off, but it kept happening. I tried spraying with various things. It kept happening. Finally, in frustration, I cut the top off the stupid thing. The theory was that if there weren't any leaves to infect, the fungus would give up and go home. Instead, the plant got upset about being beheaded, and rotted, and I wound up throwing it out anyway. Oh well.


Unfinished business: various (6 March 2012)

The Excoecaria cochinchinensis lasted until February 2013, so not quite a year. It wasn't dead, and I didn't have a strong recurrence of spider mites (there were occasional small infestations), but it had dropped a lot of leaves, it wasn't replacing them quickly, and it had gotten floppy in a way that was inconvenient. I could have let it stay if it had continued to be pretty, but it wasn't even doing that, and this was during the spell when I was trying to get rid of a bunch of plants I didn't like anymore, so out it went.

The Hatiora with magenta flowers is still around, but it obviously hates it here. Only two of the original four salvaged pots are still around, and one of those just shattered because I moved it up to a bigger pot. Also it's never rebloomed, though that's probably because it's in the basement, where the days are always too long for it to set buds.

The Ananas lucidus is still doing nicely. Here it is in March 2013:

Random plant event: Crassula perfoliata var. falcata (5 March 2012)

And now I'm like 0 for a billion, on Crassulas. This was the one Crassula that was halfway working for me, but then I had to move it out of the south window because it got too big, which it didn't like. Then in the late fall I dropped it, or something fell on it, or something like that, and the main stem broke off. The remaining branches grew for a little while after that, but since they weren't getting the same amount of sun, and the plant was taking up water more slowly (both because there was suddenly a lot less plant there and because it was colder), they eventually wound up rotting. So I'm just done done done done done with Crassulas. They have nice qualities, but they're not well-suited to what I can do here.

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¹ The "people:"
Juliet Capulet • Little Brother • Drag Queen • Patient Zero • Sinead O'Connor • Night Owl • Character Actor • Madonna • Lab Assistant • Stunt Double • Wanker • Fish Out of Water • Understudy • Michelle Rodriguez • Real Estate Developer • Joan Jett • Rosemary's Baby • Labor and Management • Stick in the Mud • Yayoi Kusama
I'd list the plants that go with those, but at the moment, I'm thinking I'd rather not give too much away in advance. Even if I gave you a random-order list of the plants involved, some of them are obvious enough that you'd be able to figure them out, ruining the surprise anyway. So for right now, I'm not going to say which plants, other than to note that two of them are plants I've already written profiles about, but I think I can improve on those so I'm going to attempt to write them again.

The Very Slow and Occasionally Sticky Inferno

So here's what's been going on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So then I started sinking into despondency.

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

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

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

The Aeschynanthus radicans all gave up due to underwatering.

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

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

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

Random plant event: Crassula perfoliata var. falcata

Crassulas and I do not work well together, as a rule. My Crassula ovatas get spots of fungus on them, the Crassula arborescens barely grows (and what growth it has is disproportionately small, and it drops leaves a lot besides), Crassula rupestris (or maybe C. perforata) lived for years without ever growing a root, and Crassula muscosa just dies over and over.

They're all my fault, to some degree or another: the C. ovata problems are likely because the way I water -- in the tub, with a shower head -- makes it impossible to avoid getting water on the leaves; I suspect the C. muscosas weren't solidly rooted when I bought them;¹ the C. arborescens is likely not getting enough light. But still. This seems like a lot of problems to be having, for a genus that's supposed to be easy.

Crassula perfoliata var. falcata² has been the exception, so far: no fungus, it has roots, it grows, the new growth looks like the old growth, etc. It's never even had a setback, in the almost two years it's lived here (I got it in June 2010).³ On the other hand, I was getting a little nervous, watching it get taller and taller: what was the end game here? How much taller can it get before something . . . happens? And what something will that be? Is it going to tip over? Branch? Bloom? Rot?

And now I have an answer:


That's a teeny-tiny offset (branch? Is there a technical difference?), beginning to grow from the base of the plant. So not only does it have no immediate plans to die, but it's actually interested in expanding. Nice to know. Here's a photo that shows a bit more context:


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¹ There's a good chance that this could have been overcome if I'd had a nice south window to put it in, but there's very, very little south-facing space here, and much of what there is is blocked for some of the day by our neighbors' house.
² This plant is still better known in the horticultural world as C. falcata. I'm basing the ID off of information from The Timber Press Guide to Succulent Plants of the World (Fred Dortort), confirmed by Plant List.
³ In fairness to my other Crassulas, C. perforata var. falcata has one of the rare and coveted south-window spots. So it has unfair advantages.

Rumble Among the Jungle, Matches 2.1-2.4

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

Results for matches 1.49-1.52:

In match 1.49, you bastards chose Adenium obesum over Episcia cvv., by a margin of 73 to 44, in what I am forced to conclude was a horribly misguided attempt to upset me. WELL IT DIDN'T WORK! I'M FINE! NOT UPSET AT ALL!²
Match 1.50 was quite close, a lot closer than I expected it would be, but in the end, Zamioculcas zamiifolia scraped together a victory over Alocasia amazonica 'Polly.' The score was 63 to 49.

Adenium and Zamioculcas will throw down in match 2.25, on 13 October.

Ficus benjamina cvv. defeated Begonia rex-cultorum in match 1.51, by a score of 70 to 44.
Finally, match 1.52 looked for a while like it was going to be a blowout -- Haworthia cvv. was at one point getting nearly 81% of the vote against Asplenium nidus / A. antiquum -- but some Asplenium supporters showed up at the last minute and reduced Haworthia's lead. Haworthia still wins, though, 80 to 39.
Ficus benjamina cvv. and Haworthia cvv. go up against one another on 13 October as well, in match 2.26.

And now, we begin round two.

Match 2.1
Clivia miniata cvv. vs. small hybrid Vriesea cvv.

Top: Clivia miniata. (Picture by Guérin Nicolas at Wikimedia Commons.) Bottom: NOID cv.

(All unidentified Vriesea hybrids.)





Match 2.2
Cryptanthus cvv. (earth star) vs. Tradescantia pallida (purple heart)

Clockwise from top left: C. 'Elaine,' C. 'Black Mystic,' NOID, NOID, NOID.

(Both T. pallida.)





Match 2.3
Saintpaulia cvv. (African violet) vs. Echinopsis spp.

Saintpaulia cvv.
Top row, L-R: NOID, assorted NOIDs, NOID.
Middle row, L-R: NOID, NOID, NOID.
Bottom row, L-R: 'Harmony's Red Star,' 'Mellow Magic' close-up, NOID.

Unidentified Echinopsis sp. Probably.





Match 2.4
Epipremnum aureum cvv. (pothos) vs. Crassula ovata/argentea/arborescens (jade plants)

Clockwise from top left: Epipremnum aureum 'Neon,' 'Marble Queen,' 'N'Joy,' trained on a totem.

Clockwise from top left: variegated Crassula ovata, C. ovata 'Gollum,' C. arborescens var. undulatifolia, C. ovata.





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¹ I'm deciding according to a hypothetical situation in which all of my houseplants are gone, as are all the other houseplants of the world, except for one producer/supplier/retailer. Said person is offering to restock me with one or the other of the plants in question but refuses to give me both. Which one would I choose?
² (*sob*)

Rumble Among the Jungle, Matches 1.5-1.8

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

Match 1.5
Saintpaulia cvv. (African violet) vs. Hemigraphis exotica (purple waffle plant)

Saintpaulia cvv.
Top row, L-R: NOID, assorted NOIDs, NOID.
Middle row, L-R: NOID, NOID, NOID.
Bottom row, L-R: 'Harmony's Red Star,' 'Mellow Magic' close-up, NOID.

Hemigraphis exotica, species.





Match 1.6
Cyclamen persicum (florists' cyclamen) vs. Echinopsis spp.

Assorted NOID Cyclamen persicums.

Unidentified Echinopsis sp. Probably.





Match 1.7
Pachypodium spp. (Madagascar palm) vs. Epipremnum aureum cvv. (pothos)

L-R: P. lamerei, close-up of P. lamerei trunk, NOID.

Clockwise from top left: Epipremnum aureum 'Neon,' 'Marble Queen,' 'N'Joy,' trained on a totem.





Match 1.8
Scindapsus pictus (satin pothos) vs. Crassula ovata/argentea/arborescens (jade plants)

(All Scindapsus pictus, possibly different cvv.)

Clockwise from top left: variegated Crassula ovata, C. ovata 'Gollum,' C. arborescens var. undulatifolia, C. ovata.





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

By request: Crassula ovata

The more I think about the Crassula ovata problem I mentioned on Wednesday, the more I'm thinking that even if it's possible to save the plant, I don't necessarily want to. It's not as though I don't have plenty of its offspring, and it's never been exceptionally beautiful or anything. I mean, I still want to know what's going on, so I can do something if it begins to happen again, but saving this particular plant is maybe not a high priority. Just so we're all clear.

(Though I suppose it may be necessary to save this plant, or at least try to, in order to know how to save plants with this problem.)

Anyway. Pat had asked for a photo of the whole plant, so here's a photo of the whole plant:


This may or may not tell you what you need to know. For one thing, I cut off several branches when I took the close-up pictures, because I figured it was better to cut off the worst-afflicted branches than to keep them on, so the effective size of the stems and leaves is bigger than this. But then there's the issue of the root ball being much smaller than it should be for the plant's (previous) size, because whatever happened to it did away with a lot of the roots.

I also wanted to try to clarify something about the watering: ordinarily I determine whether to water a plant by feeling its soil with a finger, and if it's an ambiguous situation then I lift the pot to try to determine how wet it is by weight. If it's still questionable, then I usually go ahead and water, because the cycle is such that I won't come around to give the plant another shot at water for two weeks. With the plant in question, most of this determination was thwarted: the original pot was plastic, and large enough that I knew the soil surface could be dry while the interior of the root ball could be wet, so I tended to try to err on the dry side. I also had a lot of aquatic soil mixed into the potting mix, to promote drainage, which means that the plant tended to be heavier than it would be with a more standard mix, so when I tried to gauge moisture by weight, I probably tended to think it was wetter than was actually the case. (Also soil mixes with a lot of aquatic soil tend to be more difficult to stick a finger into, so I might not have been able to judge the surface moisture very well either.) And if it was ever questionable, I tended not to water, on the grounds that waiting an extra couple weeks wouldn't hurt it that much. So I think I thought it was staying wet for a long time, but it may not have been.

Question for the Hive Mind: Crassula ovata

I am beginning to think that maybe the entire Crassula genus is just not for me. First there was all that business with C. rupestris and C. muscosa, and my C. arborescens is acting weird lately (dropping leaves, not growing), and now the parent C. ovata from which all my other C. ovatas come is being strange.

There are two things going on, one I think I understand and one I don't. The one I think I understand is this:


To me, this looks like a fairly open-and-shut case of fungus or mildew (also a fungus) or whatever. I don't really understand how it happened -- the plant in question is in a spot with better air circulation than the cuttings I've taken of it, and similar temperatures and humidity, but the cuttings are fine. I'm not happy about it, at all, but I feel like I understand it.

The one I don't understand is this silvery/cracked thing, which is happening on the same plant:


We used to get questions about this at the garden center every once in a while, and I never knew what to say. The plants we were selling did it occasionally, but it never affected the whole plant at once, it happened at about the same rate year-round, and it went away on its own, so I never developed much of a theory about what was going on.

Since my plant is doing it now, it's occurred to me that maybe I could ask y'all for theories about what's going on. If it helps, the plant was bone-dry when both of these things happened. (I pulled it out to check the roots. Not only was the soil completely dry, but there weren't nearly as many roots in it when I pulled it out as I know there had been when I first put it in that pot.) It had been in a west window, where it got some direct sun in the afternoon. It was watered about every four to six weeks, and was in a plastic pot. (Which is why it was only watered every four to six weeks -- it seemed to stay wet forever.)

I'm sure someone out there must have an answer about what this is. And if you could work in a cure that would also take care of fungus at the same time, that would be awesome. For the moment, I've put it outside (under a chair -- we don't have suitable shady spots), on the theory that the extra light will either vaporize the fungus or kill the plant outright, which solves at least some of my problems either way.

Walkaways Part 13, and One New Plant (Part 1 of 2)

Tragically, Lowe's has new succulents in, at the same time that I have no money to buy them. I did get pictures of a lot of plants, which is fifth next-best thing to buying,¹ and I wasn't actually interested in all of the plants in the post, but having to leave a few of them behind really did hurt. (The blow is softened by the idea that I might be able to get some of them elsewhere, or elsewhen, and by the fact that the husband did buy me the one that I really really wanted.)

Part 2 will be posted this afternoon.

Crassula perforata variegata.
Not particularly tempted, owing to my previous bad experiences with the "stacked" Crassulas, but there's no denying it's very colorful and pretty.

Aloinopsis rubrolineata.
What an incredibly dull and stupid-looking plant. I want one. So much.

Though it was in the "mimicry" tray, along with Fenestraria rhopalophylla and Argyroderma. This suggests that I would probably find it difficult.

Aloe x 'Minibelle.'
I got an Aloe 'Minibelle' in one of the first trades I ever did, but somehow killed it. Never figured out what I'd done wrong. I'd like to try again at some point, though it's not urgent. I have some Aloes already that look something like this.

Argyroderma NOID.
I don't understand the appeal.

Sedum rubrotinctum NOID.
After a long, long period of struggling with a light-starved, leggy S. rubrotinctum, I finally started putting them in the basement under lights. They liked that. Since then, they're still not my favorite plant, but they've definitely moving up in my estimation.

xGraptosedum 'Alpenglow' / 'Vera Higgins.'
Mildly tempting. The whole Sedum / Pachyphytum / Echeveria / Sedeveria / Pachyveria area is full of some attractive plants, but I've had problems getting them enough light, and I grew disillusioned with them quickly at work, because it was impossible to move them around without knocking a bunch of leaves off, and they don't look so good when they're partly naked. But I'm not ruling them out forever, and this is an awesome color. (Note to self: get more lights and shelves.)

Aeonium arboreum atropurpureum 'Zwartkop.'
I think they're gorgeous plants, but I don't ever even consider buying one, ever since WCW told me years ago that she'd had one years before that, and it had fallen apart on her during the winter. All I needed to hear.

Aloe x 'Crosby's Prolific.'
Another one I would like to retry, despite having killed it before. Though the one I killed never had any of the reddish color this one does, so maybe it was mislabeled? Or maybe this is?

xPachyveria glauca.
This is just begging to be planted with an Agave victoriae-reginae. See the little outlines on the leaves where they were pressed together? SO CUTE.

Stay tuned for the remaining walkaways. That post will include the succulent I actually bought.

Oh! I should maybe also tell you that they had new cacti in as well, but I didn't take pictures of any of them, because all the cacti had glued-on fake flowers. (Most were cacti I already have pictures of, too.) I hate the glued-on fake flowers. Still. Why have the plant producers not bowed to my wishes yet? Is it because I'm hating too many things at once?² I'm putting as much negative energy out there as I can, per The Secret. It should be working by now.

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¹ Best: buying. Second-best: buying cuttings. Third-best: stealing cuttings. Fourth-best: renting. Fifth-best: getting pictures.
² Besides hating glued-on fake flowers, I hate glued-on rocks, plants that have been spray-painted and/or glittered, foil-wrapped pots, pots without drainage holes, and anything "lucky." And I'm probably forgetting a lot of stuff.

Zombie (Crassula rupestris and C. muscosa)

¹

You know how sometimes you get a plant that never seems to do any more than just barely stay alive from one week to the next? I had a Crassula rupestris² that was like that, from June 2007 until November 2009.

It's not that it didn't grow. It did. But branches also kept drying up. I'd snap them off and throw them away, and then a couple weeks later, there'd be more dead branches. The plant seemed to be able to produce enough new growth to break even, but still: it was annoying, and messy. Finally, one day in November 2009, something amazing happened: I tugged on one dead branch to snap it off, and the entire plant lifted up out of the soil cleanly, like a toothpick out of a cake. No roots at all. Checked the other plants in the same pot, and they didn't have roots either.

Crassula rupestris, before the long slow decline.
Now, I'd gotten it originally as unrooted cuttings, and hadn't messed with it much after sticking them in the pot, other than to water every couple weeks or so. It seemed to be okay with me not paying it a lot of attention. I mean, new leaves were forming. It was getting taller. So I thought we were fine, and it was just not a terribly impressive or interesting plant.

When I found out that these cuttings survived for two and a half years without ever even getting roots, it became much more impressive and interesting, in the way that you'd find your next-door neighbor more impressive and interesting if you discovered that s/he was missing all his/r internal organs or wanted to eat your brains or something. By which I mean that it kind of creeps me out. Plants are different enough from people that "undead" doesn't exactly apply here -- it can still be alive without roots -- but even so, alive without roots for more than two years is a pretty extreme situation, even by plant standards.

[no comment]
Upon making the discovery, I threw the plants away. My logic in the heat of the moment was that if they hadn't grown roots after two years, clearly they were never going to do so, and I needed the space for other, more appreciative, plants. The space part was true, but the rooting part probably wasn't. Maybe something could still have been worked out.

But I doubt it.

Crassula muscosa. This is the first one I tried.
This is sort of the way it goes with all my "stacked" Crassulas, like C. rupestris and C. muscosa.³ I really like the look of C. muscosa,⁴ and have bought it repeatedly, but basically the same thing happens with muscosa that happens with rupestris: a long, slow decline that eventually ends with the stems dying, one by one, from the soil level upwards. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes slowly, but inevitably, the plant dies. Some of this may be the fault of the sellers: I bought one muscosa that probably shouldn't have been sold until it was quite a bit better established, because it didn't have much for roots.

In any case, I'm probably not the person you want to be looking to for specific, helpful growing advice. Even when my plants survive for a long time, they're not in particularly good shape. Unfortunately, you don't have a lot of other options. I've googled. Lots and lots of sites, but most appear to have copied from the same original source or from one another, and the instructions are mainly for outdoor growing. This is the best I could come up with:

LIGHT: Outdoors, a lot of people say that direct sun all day long is too intense for C. muscosa, and it benefits from a bit of bright shade.

C. rupestris can handle more light outdoors. In very bright light, it will turn yellowish with red leaf edges, reverting to green if the light intensity diminishes.

Indoors, you probably want as much light as you can get, for either plant. When we lived in the apartment, I kept both in an unobstructed south window, and that appeared to be fine, though they both still stretched a little. You might want to consider growing your plants under bright artificial lights, if you don't have reliable sun or an unobstructed south window.⁵

My third C. muscosa (there are no pictures of the second), not long after I got it home.
WATER: Everybody contradicts one another on watering these plants. A few people even manage to contradict themselves in the same sentence (e.g. "Water sparingly or abundantly."). So I don't know. There does seem to be consensus that you should cut the water way back in the winter, if the plant's going to be at all cold (below 60F/16C). This doesn't explain my plants, though: I don't think any of them ever went below 60F. One of them actually fell apart in the summer, when I know it was never below 70F/21C.

I tried to water mine as I would for a jade plant (Crassula ovata): let it get almost completely dry, then drench; use a gritty, quick-draining soil; and water less in the winter. That doesn't appear to be quite right, but I don't know what I did wrong, exactly. Both species are from Southern Africa, so I suppose if you're in doubt, err on the dry side.

Really big C. muscosa in a garden center.
TEMPERATURE: C. muscosa is said to be able to survive temperatures down to freezing, but that only applies if they're dry. Plants that get chilled while in wet soil are likely to rot.

C. rupestris, in its native habitat, is supposed to be able to go even lower, to 25F/-4C, but I would assume that the same applies, that this is only doable if the plant is dry.

In neither case would I recommend that you actually let your plant freeze just to see how low it can go. If you're growing your plant indoors, then I hope finding out how close your plant can get to freezing without damage is hypothetical anyway.

HUMIDITY: Usually dry air is best, though see PROPAGATION below.

PESTS: I've personally had mealybugs on C. muscosa before; C. rupestris never had any bugs while in my care, but I would assume mealybugs would be the main problem there as well.

PROPAGATION: This may be where I went wrong with my C. rupestris cuttings: both species do best if propagated from pieces of stem that have been allowed to callus for a week (give or take), then stuck into coarse sand or some other very fast-draining mix, with good air circulation, bright light but no direct sun, and -- against all succulent-plant logic I'm familiar with -- misted a few times a day. Rooting is slow, and may take up to three months. Once the plant begins to produce new growth above ground, and doesn't pull out of the soil, you can move it to a spot with some sun.

I have successfully rooted C. muscosa before, both at home and at work, but I didn't have a particularly high success rate. I didn't do anything like the above instructions, though: I just cut (or pulled) a piece off and stuck it in dirt, which I watered occasionally. Better luck at work than at home, probably because of the higher humidity and bright, diffuse light in the greenhouse.

C. muscosa with flowers. They're unbelievably tiny.
GROOMING: I don't really have any grooming stuff for C. rupestris at all. Mine never actually did anything except lose branches.

C. muscosa has bloomed for me, which isn't exactly a grooming issue, but it deserves mention somewhere. I found the smell of the flowers somewhat unpleasant. This was actually PATSP's very first random plant event, and in that post, I initially described the smell as being like a private bathroom someone has just used, then sprayed a heavy, floral aerosol air-freshener around in. Later, I amended that to "a kind of musky, guy-put-on-cologne-six-hours-ago smell." I don't know whether the actual fragrance changes over time, or my perception of it changed as I got more accustomed to the smell. Either way, though. Strong, and borderline unpleasant. It only happened the once, though.

C. muscosa will also trail as it grows; the stems never get much taller than maybe four or five inches (10-13 cm). This is only worth noting because plants are usually sold as small, upright cuttings: if you expect your plant to maintain its upright habit, you're going to be disappointed very quickly.⁶ Pinching the tips might help induce more branching. I've never tried pinching personally, but Proven Winners suggests it, and pinching usually works with Crassulas.

C. muscosa #3, when I first got it. Notice how upright and branched and full it is. That didn't last long.

FEEDING: For both plants, feed lightly (half-strength or a quarter-strength) with every watering, except during the winter.

I've seen variegated versions of both plants. C. muscosa leaves are too small for the variegation to be particularly noticeable, and the plant just winds up looking like a lighter version of the species. Variegated C. rupestris, on the other hand, are kinda pretty, especially if they're getting red margins from being in bright light. (You have to get close to see it, but it's pretty.) There are a few varieties of C. rupestris with different-shaped or -sized leaves, as well, plus a decent number of hybrids with other Crassula species. Some of these can be seen at the davesgarden.com link from footnote 3.

I don't like C. rupestris nearly well enough to try it again. I don't think I'd even asked for it in the first place. So no big loss there. I like C. muscosa quite a bit better, apparently, since I've tried it, on purpose, three times, but I don't think I like it four times' worth. There are too many possible good houseplants to keep failing with the same one over and over. At the same time, though, if somebody's got C. muscosa all figured out and wants to let me know what I'm missing, well, I'd be an attentive listener.

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Photo credits: all my own.

References:
Plantzafrica.com (C. rupestris)
Houseplantz.net (C. muscosa)
Plantcare.com (C. muscosa)
Desert-tropicals.com (C. muscosa)
San Marcos Growers (C. muscosa)
Davesgarden.com (C. muscosa)
Davesgarden.com (C. rupestris)

¹ I consider C. rupestris slightly easier (3.9) than C. muscosa (4.2), but it screws up the formatting if I try to put more than one difficulty ranking at the top of a post, plus the numbers are only very rough guides in the first place, so that's an average.
² There's some uncertainty about whether this is C. rupestris, C. perforata, or something else. I sort of had to pick something for purposes of the post, and I found more photos of C. rupestris that matched my plant than I did of C. perforata, so that's what I decided it was. I wouldn't be heartbroken or anything if it turned out to be perforata, though.
³ Those two are the only ones I've tried, but there are a number of Crassulas with this general "stacks of leaves" look. Pictures of several such plants can be found at this davesgarden.com post by Palmbob.
⁴ Sometimes C. lycopodioides; I've seen conflicting opinions about whether lycopodioides is its own, separate species or just an obsolete synonym for C. muscosa. Davesgarden.com says synonym; I actually can't understand what Tropicos.org says but my guess is that they're saying synonym; and GRIN says synonym, so I think I'm on fairly solid ground to call C. lycopodioides and C. muscosa the same plant. In a retail context, you may see either name being used, though, so it's good to know both.
⁵ Sometimes this is necessary. I've had a few succulents that just weren't happy with me, even when I gave them a really good spot in a really good window, and didn't shape up until they were sitting a couple inches under a pair of shop lights. Sedum x rubrotinctum is one of those: I've had it forever, and it's always looked miserable in the window, but it's doing really well now under lights in the basement.
⁶ So of course one of the names the plant is being sold under is "princess pine," which to my mind implies an upright, conical plant with needles for leaves, not a trailing, snaky one with leaves so small they're barely visible. [shrug] I didn't name it that.
"Watch chain Crassula" is a much better name; the pattern of leaves does sort of resemble a small, thin chain.

Question for the Hive Mind: Crassula rupestris?

I either need the help of a Crassula expert or a person who is not a Crassula expert but has the ability to talk about them in such a way that everyone will think s/he is correct. I don't particularly care which.

The reason is, I need someone to settle for me, once and for all, whether this is Crassula rupestris or Crassula perforata.


It was identified as C. perforata when I first got it, but then I've subsequently seen plants called C. perforata that looked very different, with much larger leaves and longer internodes (distance between leaves):


The above pictures could be different varieties of the same species; I saw a picture on line that made me think C. perforata 'Tom Thumb' was a possible ID for this plant, but I don't remember where it was, so I can't link to it. And, unfortunately, this page at Dave's Garden says that 'Tom Thumb' is a variety of C. rupestris, not C. perforata.

I've been confused about this for quite some time, but it's suddenly important that I figure it out, because whatever the plant in the top photo is, I'm going to write about it for the next plant profile. (UPDATE: Which has now been written.) So I have to settle on an ID before I can start, because search-and-replace on blog posts is a pain. Please help.

New Plants

I guess it's been a while since I did one of these posts. I haven't been doing that much plant-buying lately, I thought, but I seem to have a lot of "new" plants anyway. (Some of these have been around for a month and a half, so they're not exactly "new," but they're still new, in that I have not previously mentioned them on the blog.)

Gasteria bicolor var. lilliputiana.
The florist in town also sells some outdoor stuff, mainly (entirely?) annuals, during the early summer, and I got the first three plants of the post from her. Unlike some people, I like Gasterias, though I have a lot less experience with them than their close relatives Haworthia and Aloe.

Pilosocereus pachycladus.
She also had some cacti in 6-inch pots for $15, back in May (there are still a couple left, last I looked), and I'd sort of been looking for a Pilosocereus pachycladus for a while (since seeing one in Cedar Rapids, at Pierson's, several months ago). It was a good price, there were two plants in the pot, and they were reasonably good-sized. I don't know if Pilosocereus is easy or difficult, for a cactus, but so far, so good.

Agave lophantha.
This plant, too, was a $15 6-inch plant from the flower store in town, and I'd also been looking for an Agave lophantha since the same trip to Cedar Rapids when I saw the Pilosocereus. These have since been divided into separate four-inch pots, and appear to be doing well in the basement under lights.

Crassula falcata.
Crassula falcata is a plant I'd asked about in a walkaways post, and then went back to get after being told what it was. Crassulas and I have a very mixed history together, so I don't know that I expect this to work out particularly well in the long run. But it's an interesting plant: I figured I had to at least try.

Aloe haworthioides. (Aloe descoingii x Aloe haworthioides?)
This came from the hardware store that was selling the 'Jenny Craig' Dracaena. Andrew purchased one of these (or something very similar) recently, too, and came up with the ID of Aloe descoingii x Aloe haworthioides for his. Possibly this is a cross, and not a straight A. haworthioides, but that was the first ID I ran across that looked rightish to me, so that's the ID I'm going with until I get a clearer sense of the difference between the two, and/or see some good pictures of the two side-by-side.

Peperomia orba.
Not a lot to say here. This was another plant I previously posted about as a walkaway; it was cheap, I have mixed but mostly positive results with Peperomia (though my P. argyreia is extremely unhappy with me for the last . . . ever), and I'm interested in what this will look like six months from now. So we're trying it.

Didymochlaena truncatula.
Didymochlaena truncatula is also called the "mahogany fern," I'm assuming because of the brownish-red color of the newest fronds. We had a few when I was working in the garden center that got pretty big, and they were pretty nice-looking. Ferns are sort of a gamble, in that a lot of them also need conditions which are cooler or damper than I'm able to provide year-round. So I'm not sure how this will turn out. Googling about the plant turned up a 50-50 mix of sites saying that they're difficult (mainly talking about outdoor care) and sites saying they're easy (primarily talking about indoor care). Which is interesting.

The botanical name drives me crazy, by the way. I first learned the species name as trunculata, and I've also seen it as just plain truncata, but it's actually truncatula, which I try to keep straight with the mnemonic, "the cat you love is in my Didymochlaena." Mixed results so far, with the mnemonic: I still have to check every time I type it.

The genus name is problematic as well, but in a different way: I've never had any trouble remembering how to spell it, because I learned that correctly the first time, but my brain played with the pronunciation. Davesgarden.com says the correct pronunciation is "did-ee-moh-KLAY-ee-nuh," but my brain first pronounced it "DID-ee-MO-ka-LAY-nuh," which, I have discovered, easily corrupts into part of the Los del Río song (and cultural sensation) "Macarena." (DAle a tu CUERPo aleGRIa, MAcarENa / Heeeeeeey, Macarena --> DAle a tu CUERPo ale DID-ee-MO-ka-LAY-nuh / Heeeeeeey, MO-ka-LAY-nuh) Which is, obviously, super-annoying.

Even if I used the davesgarden.com pronunciation, I'm pretty sure "Macarena" would sneak in somehow ("DAle a tu CUERPo ale DID-ee-MO-klay-EE-nuh?"). It's probably hopeless. Perhaps in this one case, I should go against all my principles and call the plant by its common name, not the botanical one.

Polypodium grandiceps.
The Polypodium, like the Peperomia and Didym mahogany fern, came from my ex-job. They have a lot of ferns right now, because the tropical plant situation in Florida is still suffering the effects of last winter's freeze. (Florida: you get freezes every few years. How can this always surprise you? You have to prepare for these things.) Which meant not much of an availability list, and every box of "assorted" anything had ferns filling in for whatever frozen tropicals were missing.

So they now have basically all the ferns: elkhorn (which is our boy P. grandiceps, above), rabbit's-foot (Davallia), bird's-nest (Asplenium), mahogany (Didymochlaena¹), crocodile (Microsorum musifolium 'Crocodyllus'), Boston (Nephrolepis), 'Austral Gem' (an Asplenium cross), button (Pellaea), tiger (variegated Nephrolepis), upside-down (Arachniodes), holly (Cyrtomium), staghorn (Platycerium), bear's-paw (Polypodium), table (Pteris), possum-tail (Scyphularia), tree (Blechnum and Cyathea, among others, though they're not actually ferns) -- basically everything except maidenhair (Adiantum).

Which perhaps makes the fact that I bought a second fern, one I had never particularly cared about or wanted, somewhat more understandable. The odds said I was going to buy some ferns, 'cause that's what they had.

Agave bovicornuta 'Reggae Time.'
The last two plants came from Wallace's, in Bettendorf, IA, last Sunday. We hadn't been there since the orchid show in March, and the weather was such that I could survive outside the house without air conditioning (barely), so it seemed like a golden opportunity to go somewhere. And we did. Oddly, all the purchases from Wallace's had Jamaica-themed cultivar names.

I think I'd seen 'Reggae Time' at Wallace's before, maybe last October, but I asked someone and she thought they'd gotten them in new for this year.² Either way, it's a big plant for the price ($7.99) -- nearly a foot (0.3 m) in diameter now, and the tag says to space them at least three feet (.9 m) apart. (It actually says 36-60 inches, or 0.9-1.5 m.) So it could, theoretically, get very large, though indoors it probably won't. Still, it's a big, scary, angry-looking plant, and I like those.

Dracaena reflexa 'Song of Jamaica.'
Finally, Dracaena reflexa 'Song of Jamaica,' because they had fairly cheap 3-inch plants I could buy and then pot together. It's not a plant I was searching for especially, but my little 'Song of India' has done well enough inside that I've concluded that Dracaena reflexa is not as much trouble as the rumors say, and I wanted a multiple-plant pot because D. reflexas tend not to be that interesting individually. So I made one, when we got home.

There will probably be a post about the walkaways from these trips within the next week or two.

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¹ (Heeeeeeeey Mo-ka-lay-nuh!)
² The ones I remember were definitely not this big, though plants do grow. So these may or may not be the Agaves I remember.