Materials and Techniques: White Oil

As you have probably guessed, I've started spraying the "white oil" on the plants in the basement (as of August 4). This leaves me basically no time to do anything else, so I'm not doing anything else.

Points of interest about the oil-spraying process so far:

1) It is very messy. Oil and soap and water gets everywhere. I'm still doing it inside, because . . .

2) It's also very time-consuming. Watering a round of plants (bring plants to the tub, put plants in the tub, water, drain, take plants out of tub, return the plants to their original location) normally takes me about 15 minutes. Having to bring every plant to the tub means more trips, and then spraying all surfaces of every plant makes each round of watering take longer, so watering is now happening at less than half the usual speed. Taking the process outside would only serve to make a time-consuming and messy process more so: having oil, soap, and water dripping on the plant room floor is the lesser evil.

3) Emulsification is totally real, you guys. When I started the whole process, I had the oil and the dishwashing liquid in a milk jug, and I shook the jug around to mix the two together, and they mixed, but the mixture wasn't stable, so by the time I was ready to dilute and spray a new batch, the stuff in the jug had mostly separated into two layers again. When it was freshly shaken up, it poured pretty much the same as the oil -- noticeably thicker than water, but not by very much. At some point, though, I shook it up and it thickened into something very different, roughly the consistency of mayonnaise (which is also an emulsion made of about 70-80% vegetable oil, water, and an emulsifier¹), yogurt, or thick shampoo. Pourable, still, but much slower, and it sticks to the measuring spoon terribly. That's gotten a little thinner over time, but it's still very different from the oil I started out with.

White oil concentrate (left) and in the spray bottle I actually use (right).
4) I'm also using roughly three or four times more of the oil/detergent mixture than the recipes I found on-line recommended (I'm using 3 Tbsp in a little less than a quart of water; they recommend 1 Tbsp in a full quart), because after a few test sprayings on a Gasteraloe, I wasn't convinced that there was enough oil in the spray to be accomplishing anything. It is possible that this will turn out to be a disastrous decision, but the plants haven't reacted badly so far, aside from the Breynia disticha, which may have been having other problems.

5) And I'm still seeing new thrips and scale, though I wasn't necessarily expecting them all to vanish like magic at the first application. Not sure I expecting them all to vanish ever, as far as that goes.² But I am having a more difficult time locating thrips, if not scale, so maybe progress is being made.

6) Because of the slowness and messiness, posting is likely to be light for the next couple weeks, as much of my free time will be spent drunkenly sliding around on the plant room floor in a pool of soybean oil and soap,³ and/or cleaning up from same. There'll still be orchid posts every five or six days, unless I forget.

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¹ The emulsifier in mayonnaise is egg, not dishwashing liquid. Or at least it's not dishwashing liquid in your better brands of mayonnaise.
² There's a post to be written, sometime, about the claims I found in a number of sites that were pushing the white oil, that because the oil wasn't a chemical, and because it works by suffocating the insects, there was no way they could evolve resistance to it. Sadly, that is not the case: 1) any atom, whether alone or in combination with other atoms, is a chemical of some kind or another. Vegetable oil is not an exception; it just happens to be one of the chemicals that we can eat large quantities of safely. 2) No, thrips are not likely to evolve beyond the need to breathe oxygen, but they can still evolve resistance to white oil. If I ever get around to writing that post, I'll describe some ways that that could happen. But don't hold your breath, no pun intended.
³ (Not that I'll actually be drunk. Though that may not be the worst idea I've ever had.)

Another sale/trade preview post

I'd hoped to get this year's sell/trade post up a couple weeks earlier than I did last year (25 April), but it's looking like I'll be lucky to post it at the same time. Deciding which things to offer took a very long time on its own, and then everything had to be photographed, and I spent a day trying to make sense of the USPS's shipping charges from last year, in hopes of coming up with a better approximation for this year, so on and on it goes.

But! I do at least have a few early pictures, which I may as well share, since I don't have much else going on anyway. Prices are still being determined, and obviously I'm selling more than four kinds of plants (about 80, with another 10 that aren't ready yet but will be by the end of the summer -- or at least I hope they will be), and I may as well admit now that these are some of the better-looking plants I have to offer, and they don't all look like this. But as a taste:

Episcia NOID.

Gasteraloe x beguinii.

Hatiora salicornioides.

Nautilocalyx forgetii.

Peperomia pereskiifolia.

Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana.

List: PATSP All-Stars

"All-Stars" are those plants for which:

1) I have had at least one specimen, continuously, for at least three years,

2) which is still living,

3) and looks as good as, or better than, it did when first acquired, plus:

4) no specimen has ever had spider mites, scale, mealybugs, thrips, aphids, whitefly, cyclamen mites, or fungus (Fungus gnats are excluded, because fungus gnats don't do enough damage to the plants to count as pests, and it's often difficult to tell what plant they're residing in anyway.),

5) no established specimen has ever gone into an abrupt and irreversible decline (new cuttings/divisions/offsets may still do so, 'cause that's part of the process of getting established), and

6) the plant has been successfully propagated,

7) more than once.

I have something in the neighborhood of 400-450 distinct kinds (species / subspecies / cultivars / hybrids) of plants in the house right now, and I don't have any idea how many other kinds of plants I've attempted to grow in the past, but I figure it has to be at least a couple hundred. Out of all those, a mere nineteen meet the above criteria at the moment.

(NOTE: The pictures which follow are not necessarily of the original plant nor particularly current; even those photos which are of the original plant and current may not impress, because looking better than when the plant originally came to live here is a lower bar to clear for some of the plants than it is for others. Also the Philodendron hederaceum 'Brasil' picture isn't even of my own plant.)

Aloe 'Walmsley's Blue.'

Anthurium 'Gemini.'

Anthurium 'Orange Hot.'

Begonia NOID, rhizomatous type.

Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash.'

Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana.'

Gasteraloe x beguinii. (Aloe aristata x Gasteria batesiana)

Nematanthus 'Tropicana.'

Peperomia obtusifolia, variegated.

Philodendron hederaceum, chartreuse version. (Possibly 'Aureum' or 'Lemon-Lime;' I've never had an official cultivar name.)

Philodendron hederaceum 'Brasil' or 'Brazil.'

Philodendron hederaceum micans.

Sedum morganianum.

Sedum rubrotinctum.

Synadenium grantii (green version).

Syngonium podophyllum NOID (possibly 'Neon').

Yucca guatemalensis, gray version.

Yucca guatemalensis, green version.

Yucca guatemalensis, yellow-margined version.

I don't know whether this would be useful information to anybody else, but there it is. Ordinarily with the List posts, I recommend three good ones and warn against one, but these are obviously all recommended, so we'll skip that part.

What are your All-Star plants, according to the above criteria?

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Honorable mentions:

Honorable mentions are those which meet 6 of the 7 criteria. Depending on their reason for disqualification, some of these may move into the All-Star list eventually.

• Aechmea fasciata (only one successful propagation)
• Agave desmettiana (?), variegated (have only had ~1 1/2 years)
• Agave victoriae-reginae (one's been here 4 1/2 years but never propagated; the other's been propagated more than once but has only been here for 2 years)
• Aloe NOID, possibly 'Blue Elf' or A. x humilis (have only had 2 years)
• Anthurium NOID w/ purple flowers (original is not as attractive as when first brought home)
• Anthurium 'Pandola' (have only had ~2 1/2 years)
• Begonia NOID cane-type (only one successful propagation)
• Begonia x 'Erythrophylla' (have only had for 7 months)
• Breynia disticha 'Roseo-Picta' (has had spider mites)
• Codonanthe serrulata (have only had for 8 months)
• Columnea microphylla (have only had for 8 months)
• Echeveria coccinea (have only had 1 1/2 years)
• Ficus elastica (has had spider mites)
• Ficus microcarpa (has had spider mites)
• Furcraea foetida 'Medio-Picta' (have only had for ~2 1/2 years)
• Guzmania cv. (original is not attractive)
• Hatiora salicornioides (has had spider mites)
• Haworthia attenuata (specimens have abruptly declined)
• Hoya carnosa 'Chelsea' (only one successful propagation)
• Hoya carnosa 'Krimson Princess', solid-green revert (have not propagated >1 time)
• Justicia scheidweileri (have only had 1 1/2 years)
• Murraya paniculata (only one successful propagation)
• Nematanthus NOID, orange-yellow flowers (specimens have abruptly declined)
• Nematanthus NOID, orange flowers (have only had 2 1/2 years)
• Pandanus veitchii, variegated (specimens have abruptly declined)
• Peperomia pereskifolia (original plant got chopped back severely for propagation, so it doesn't look as good as it did initially)
• Philodendron erubescens (?) 'Golden Emerald' (have only had 2 1/2 years)
• Sansevieria trifasciata 'Hahnii' (have only had about 2 1/2 years)
• Selenicereus chrysocardium (have had about 2 1/2 years)
• Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Tilt-a-Whirl' (has only been an official plant for less than one month; have likely owned for less than a year but I'm not actually sure when I got it)
• Synadenium grantii, red/purple version (have only had for 1 1/2 years)
• Tradescantia pallida (original plant has been restarted repeatedly, and at the moment does not look better than it did when new)
• Tradescantia zebrina (original plant is not attractive)
• Zamioculcas zamiifolia (specimens have abruptly declined)

More corrections

Readers have alerted me to two more errors on PATSP, having to do with one of the profile posts and one misidentified plant. Then I ran into another thing all on my own, where something in one of the profiles needed a bit of clarification. So here we are again.

1. Ficus elastica and isoprene

In the Ficus elastica profile, I sort of implied that the people making natural rubber extract isoprene from the sap of Hevea brasiliensis and other plants, then polymerize it into natural rubber. This is not the case.

Model of isoprene. Black balls are carbon atoms, white are hydrogen, and the gray connectors represent pairs of electrons. This is my own photo: I would have used it in the Ficus elastica profile, except that I'd forgotten I owned a molecular model set.¹
Straight-up, pure isoprene can and does exist. It's a colorless, low-boiling liquid which is mostly obtained either as a byproduct of oil and naphtha refining, or by heating natural rubber until it starts disintegrating into smaller molecules. The isoprene so obtained can then be polymerized into a substance with properties very close to natural rubber.² Readers who collect oxymorons will be pleased to know that the term for this artificially polymerized, artificially obtained polyisoprene is "synthetic natural rubber."

However. Natural natural rubber polymerizes within the plant, forming small globs of polyisoprene that float around in the sap. When the sap is collected from the plant, these globs are then coagulated, washed, filtered, pressed, and stretched to form blocks of rubber. So it's still technically correct of me to say that isoprene is polymerized to form natural rubber, but the polymerization has already happened by the time the sap is collected.³

2. Persea americana toxicity

Next up, in the Persea americana profile, I devoted footnote 2 to the toxicity of the plant, saying that all parts of the plant except the fruit should be considered toxic, particularly to pets. Then Poor Richard's Almanac had to go and spoil that one for me by writing a post about the culinary use of avocado leaves.

My Persea americana, as of yesterday morning. I had two plants to begin with, and planted them together in this pot to try to make it fuller. That's mostly worked, but the two plants together seem to dry out a lot faster than they did when separated, so there have been more dropped leaves and
This sent me deep into the bowels of the internet to do research. I won't bore you with all the twists and turns, but the gist is:

Yes, people really do cook with avocado leaves.

No, not any avocado leaf will do: the variety used in Mexican cooking is a specific race of the avocado (according to some sources it's a separate species, Persea drymifolia, but others consider it just a race of P. americana).

Avocado leaves should still be considered toxic to all pets, especially especially especially to birds: ALLLLLLLLLLLL the bird-toxicity lists say Persea fruit or foliage is potentially lethal for at least some species of bird, and they say this over and over again, in extremely shrill and insistent language.

Humans don't seem to be as affected by the toxin in avocado leaves as animals are, and animals aren't all affected to the same degree. Wikipedia's article on persin, the actual toxic agent in Persea americana leaves,⁴ reports that consumption of avocado leaves produces a wide array of unpleasantness in a whole barnyard full of animals (cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, mice, cows, goats, horses, pigs, sheep, ostriches, chickens, turkeys and fish), ranging from reduced milk production all the way up to asphyxia and death. (Wikipedia's original source is a bit more detailed, q.v.)

The way to tell whether you have one of the cooking-type avocado leaves or the useless and/or poisonous avocado leaves: leaves which are okay to cook with will smell like anise, and the fruits will have much thinner skin. Generally, if you start an avocado plant from a supermarket fruit's seed, you're not going to end up with leaves you can cook with.

So I was partly wrong: a subset of avocado plants have leaves which are not toxic, at least not in the small quantities needed to flavor food. (I don't recommend sitting down and eating ten leaves in one sitting, even if it is the drymifolia variety.) In the context of a houseplant that was started from a supermarket avocado, though, you're better off treating it as toxic. Even if it doesn't hurt you, it's not likely to do anything for your food.

3. Aloe aristata isn't Aloe aristata

Finally, I've found out from Taylor Holzer (a reader) that I've been calling the below plant Aloe aristata when it is in fact a hybrid of Aloe aristata and something else.

My Aloe aristata x whatever, in January 2011.
The most likely candidate, I think, is Gasteria batesiana, which cross is called Gasteraloe x beguinii, but a similar hybrid is formed by A. aristata and A. variegata, and I'll probably never know for sure which cross I have.

A. aristata is apparently distinguishable by the dead tips on the ends of the leaves, and the thinner, less fleshy leaves. (I'd thought that maybe the differences just depended on cultural conditions -- since I'm not growing them outdoors, a lot of my plants don't look quite like they ought to. But sadly, no.) It's also reluctant to offset, is the rumor, whereas my plant offsets more or less constantly. My guesses about the actual ancestry are based both on Holzer's own guesses and on this discussion thread at davesgarden.com.

Aloe aristata hybrid (L), Aloe aristata species (R). Photo credit: Taylor Holzer. Used by permission.
I will go through the blog and change the name at some point, but I just finished a few rounds of name-changing, and am pretty sick of it, so it might take me a while. (It's bad enough that I have to go change two profiles.) Since some of you got offsets of this plant from me, though, I figured I should let you know that it was half-misidentified.

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Photo credits: Mine except where noted.

¹ Yes, I am that nerdy. In fact, it's actually quite a bit worse than you think, because I don't just have a molecular model set, I have six, which were purchased between my senior year of high school and my sophomore year of college. (The first one, in high school, was I think actually a birthday or Christmas present from Mom and Dad, but I think I bought the other five. It's been a while; some of the details are fuzzy.) So I can model anything up to about 80 carbon atoms. Here is a short segment of a natural rubber (cis-polyisoprene) molecule, for example:


² It's not exactly the same as natural rubber because natural rubber contains impurities from the original sap: fatty acids, proteins, inorganic compounds ("ash"), that sort of thing.
³ (If you want to be even more technical: the plants don't polymerize isoprene, but its phosphorylated form.)
⁴ Regrettably, in the course of editing this post, I lost a "persin"/"person" pun I was very proud of. I could put it here anyway, but it was context-dependent and wouldn't be funny without the set-up. I just wanted you to know.

Really, Really New Plants, plus bonus pretty picture

After a very long period (a couple weeks?) of neither gaining nor losing any plants, the count ratcheted up a couple times last Thursday and Friday. They're not all incredibly interesting, but a few of them are unusual enough to be noteworthy.

Also I should show you the new Iresine herbstii 'Blazin' Rose' that I got at Wallace's when I went there for the orchid show, just because I think it's cool. Are Iresines supposed to be huge like this, or is this something specific to this variety? 'Cause seriously, some of these leaves are like five inches long, and almost as wide. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that. It's practically a croton.

Iresine herbstii 'Blazin' Rose.' The pot is five inches (13 cm) in diameter.
But better, obviously, on account of not actually being a croton.

Then the batch from last Thursday came from Jake Henny, of the blog Plant Daddy (that's right: the Jake Henny! E-mailed me!), who offered to send an Aglaonema 'Golden Bay,' since I said a few posts back that I didn't have one yet, in passing, while complaining about the disappearance of Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest.' I expect to like 'Golden Bay;' other white-stemmed Aglaonemas ('Peacock,' 'Brilliant') have done really well for me, and 'Golden Bay' was well-behaved at work when we had them.

Aglaonema 'Golden Bay.'
That was nice enough on its own, but then as a bonus, he threw in a couple plants of a new variety of Philodendron hederaceum, 'Frilly Philly,' which I had seen on-line a few times but had not yet viewed in person. It didn't look quite like I expected: a lot of the on-line photos were unclear, or had the plant trained vertically, so I couldn't really tell what it was like.

So what's it like?

Philodendron hederaceum 'Frilly Philly.' (Henny uses P. scandens oxycardium as the species name. Tomato, tomahto.)
Well. You wouldn't think it was a P. hederaceum to look at it. The leaves are narrow, and fairly small, not even remotely heart-shaped. When I showed the husband, his comment was that it looked almost like a trailing bamboo or something. Everything about it on-line so far appears to be press releases, so it's very new, but 'Frilly Philly' was developed via irradiation (a mutation technique touched on in the profile for Begonia rex-cultorum, q.v.) of P. hederaceum (see .pdf file) and the mutation is apparently stable. It's also supposed to branch a lot more freely than other varieties of the same species. Do I like it? I'll let you know. For right now, I'm mostly just surprised at how different it is, both from the parent plant and from my expectations.

Then on Friday, I was going a little crazy from not getting out of the house since the trip to Wallace's, so we went to Iowa City and I stopped at my former workplace. I had every intention of not buying anything; I was just going to take pictures to use on the blog, talk to whomever was around, and then go, but you know how these things work.

So I got a replacement Crassula muscosa (I'd had one a while ago, but I pitched it when it got mealybugs) --

Crassula muscosa. Sometimes also Crassula lycopodioides. I'm not sure whether lycopodioides is an obsolete synonym or a different species entirely.
-- and an Agave victoriae-reginae. I had one of these already, but this one -- which has been at the store for years, by the way; I was the one who divided it off its parent and potted it up originally -- looks like it's offset seven or eight more rosettes, which in theory could be divided. Even if I lose half and only get four plants out of it in the end, that's still a pretty good deal, for a plant that's not found that often around here.

Agave victoriae-reginae. The pot is three inches wide diagonally. I haven't tried to count up how many offsets there are here, but it's a lot. Some are just very very tiny.
Also I bought a plant that was labeled only "Haworthia hybrid."

"Haworthia hybrid."
I suspect it is actually an intergeneric Aloe x Haworthia ("Alworthia") or Gasteria x Haworthia ("Gasterworthia") cross, rather than a hybrid of two Haworthia species, mostly based on the flowers.

The flowers on the "Haworthia hybrid." It was, obviously, already in bloom when I bought it.
All the Haworthia flowers I can recall seeing are small white five-petaled things with a greenish stripe down the center of each petal; all the Gasteria flowers I can think of are pinkish-orange tubular things with a slightly bigger base (the botanical name comes from the Greek gaster, meaning "stomach," and refers to the shape of the flowers). The flowers on this seem like a pretty straightforward compromise between the two things, being tubular five-petaled flowers with a pinkish-orange, slightly bigger base, shading to white with greenish stripes, so I suspect Gasterworthia more than Alworthia. But there are Aloes with tubular pinkish-orange flowers that end in green-striped white as well; witness Aloe 'Doran Black:'

Flowers from Aloe 'Doran Black,' or something I think might be Aloe 'Doran Black,' photographed in front of Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender' flowers. Secondary colors!
Which means that 'Doran Black' is a cross-generic hybrid too and I've just misidentified it, that Aloe is a really variable genus, that flowers are not sufficient to identify specific genera within the Asphodelaceae family, or some combination of these. So I don't think I'm ever really going to know what this is. But it was a largish Haworthia-oid thing, so I had to have it. Because that is just how I roll.

[UPDATE: There appears to be agreement that this is a Gasterworthia / Gasworthia / Gasterhaworthia, possibly 'Banded Pearls' or 'Royal Highness.' Neither appears to be especially common, so there aren't a lot of photos to investigate in either case, and the photos I did manage to find are fairly variable, suggesting that there's either a lot of misidentification going on out there or that they're highly variable plants. So for now we'll call it Gasterworthia cv.]

[ALSO: Gasworthia, Gasterworthia, and Gasterhaworthia all appear to be used to describe Gasteria-Haworthia crosses. Searching Google for each turns up 245 incidences of Gasworthia, 984 Gasterhaworthias, and 13200 Gasterworthias, so Gasterworthia is the one I'm going to use.]

And speaking of large, and really, really new: Philodendron 'Spicy Dog.'

Philodendron bipinnatifidum (?) 'Spicy Dog.'
This is so new that there's basically nothing about it on the internet (I found exactly two mentions on the whole internet, neither one of which contained any useful information beyond confirming that the plant exists), so I have no idea what kind of ride I'm in for, whether it's available under a different name, whether it's a hybrid or a variety of Philodendron bipinnatifidum, or basically anything else. All I know at this point is that the pot had a sticker on it identifying it as P. bipinnatifidum, it looks like the P. 'Xanadu' that ate Cleveland (the longest leaf is 14 inches / 36 cm), the petioles are spotted, and the name makes no sense whatsoever -- there's nothing spicy or canine about it as far as I can tell. (I checked with Sheba, in her capacity as resident canine expert, and she concurs.) It looks like injury to the leaves and the consequent leaking of sap leads to a mold problem sooner or later; the undersides of some of the leaves had the sooty black mold on them that I've seen on other plants. But it came off.

I don't, of course, have room for it, but it's getting warm enough to be thinking about keeping some of the plants outside, so maybe some of them will move out, leaving room for new indoor residents. We can hope.

Newish plants

(Sorry this is up late. Daylight Saving Time is responsible.)

Happy Pi Day!

Fervor's left me both pretty exhausted and without as much time as I'd hoped, so the posts for the next couple weeks might be a little lighter on text and photos than had previously been the case, except for Part II of the Phalaenopsis profile, which is already written. Maybe there'll be something more substantial if I can clean up one of the essays I've been sitting on.

I don't think this will be permanent: we just need to get some kind of routine established, and then posts will return to normal. It's probably good that this is all happening around the PATSP spring hiatus, when I wouldn't be posting anyway.

So what I've come up with for today are the recent acquisitions. Some of these I bought last week (6 March) and some I bought two weeks ago (27 February). I seem to be over my cactus phase, and back to the tried-and-true Euphorbias and Aloes again.

IDs are from the plants' labels and are not necessarily guaranteed to be correct. If you think that one of them is misidentified, please let me know.

Ardisia crenata.
I bought this one to replace an Ardisia crenata I lost during the winter. It needed to be repotted, so it dried out fast, and then it wound up in a spot next to a heater in the plant room, which dried it out faster. Do this enough times, and you wind up having to replace them.


Crassula arborescens var. undulatifolia.
I wasn't even completely certain that Crassula ovata and Crassula arborescens were different things, until I saw otherwise at Life Among the Leaves. And then I wanted one. So I think this counts as a blogalong plant.


Euphorbia flanaganii.
Because how could I not? Just look at it, will you.


Euphorbia horrida var. noorsveldensis.
I'd wanted to get one of these last summer from Lowe's, but the one they had also came with aphids, and I didn't especially want the aphids. I waited for several months for Lowe's to notice the aphids and do something about them, but they did not. So this one, I figured I should buy before the inevitable Lowe's deterioration. Alas, it's doing the least well of the new arrivals, possibly because it got jostled half to death as we brought it back home.


Euphorbia tirucalli 'Firesticks.'
This came from the ex-job, and I would have preferred to leave it there for a little longer, to let it get a bit bigger and grow roots into the rest of the pot before buying one. (They came in as plugs around the end of January, I think? And then were immediately repotted into three-inch pots. So there's soil in there that doesn't have roots growing through it yet.) But they'd already sold most of the six or seven they'd gotten, and I didn't want to miss the chance to get one. So I bought it earlier than I would have liked. So far, so good, though. And I've had very good luck with Euphorbia tirucalli historically, so this will probably be fine.


Gasteraloe x 'Green Gold.'
Mostly for the novelty value of having an intergeneric plant that's not an orchid. Though it has a certain somethingness I like.

Well, that's probably the Aloeness, now that I think about it.


Aloe NOID?
The variegation made this too much to pass up, but the color (similar to Alworthia 'Black Gem,') was also interesting. Alas, the plant was plain green within a few days, but I could probably change it back if I really wanted to: the basement lights are bright enough to darken 'Black Gem.' I haven't looked for an ID yet.