Assorted Stuff / Hiatus Announcement

SPECIAL NOTE: I try not to go two consecutive days without a post, but a bunch of stuff popped up on Monday that made it impossible for me to get one together for Tuesday. And then Tuesday was complicated as well (malware on a computer -- not mine, but one I use for Sims and Hulu -- plus unprecedented levels of family drama¹ and the usual barely-doable-within-the-time-available watering), and none of those problems have been resolved yet, so we may as well treat this as the beginning of another long hiatus, 'cause that's what it's going to turn into whether I like it or not. (You can't say you weren't warned.)

Orchid pictures will probably continue to go up about every four days, with minimal commentary, since they're already uploaded and scheduled.

Previously-arranged plant sales, blog comments, and e-mail correspondence should all continue to happen, albeit possibly a bit slower.

So here's the last regular post for a while. I was trying to make up for missing Monday and Tuesday by cramming lots of little fragments of posts together into one (Sort of like a blog-post McNugget.), until my Tuesday went to hell and I ran out of time.

1. Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips'
Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips' is the first plant I've bought in two months, and only the third plant I've purchased in the last six months. (The previous two purchases were the Salvia elegans, which I'm now thinking was a bad decision,² and the Ananas lucidus, which is doing quite well.)


Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips.'
I wouldn't have gotten this one either -- it was on the pricey side,³ and is a genus I haven't tried to grow before -- but I've been wanting a Mangave to try for a very long time, and this is the first thing I've seen for sale that was even close to a Mangave. So we're trying it. So far, so good, though it's lucked into one of the outdoor spots, so I really won't have any idea what it's like to grow indoors for another six months.


2. Amorphophallus konjac
I got an Amorphophallus konjac bulb from a reader at the end of last summer, as part of a trade. Stored it in the plant room on a low (cold) shelf, then potted it up this spring, around the end of April. And then there was a lot of waiting for it to do something.

It still has a ways to go, but I should be seeing an actual unfurled leaf fairly soon. Kind of excited.


The one bad thing about Amorphophallus is that plants with pronounced dormancies, that need to be stored dry during the winter, make me really nervous -- I'm always scared that I'll kill the plant accidentally and not find out until I go to start it again. I don't know why this is more scary to me than the plant-killing I do all the time, but it just is.


3. Grocery Store
Saw some unusual houseplant-related items in the produce section of the grocery store last week; Hylocereus fruits --


-- and Aloe vera leaves.


I knew Hylocereus ("dragon fruit") were sold, though I don't think I've ever seen any around here before. Didn't see a price on them. The opposite is true for the Aloe -- I've seen plenty of Aloes, but never expected to see the leaves for sale without the rest of the plant being attached.


4. What Fresh New Hell is This?
From the ex-job:


The plant looks fine -- some kind of NOID Rhipsalis, I'm guessing -- but what the hell is it growing in? Is that all coconut fiber? Can epiphytic cacti live in something like that?


5. Zea mays
One way to know that you live in Iowa next to a corn field is to check your lawn for . . . hmmm. I don't know if there's a term for these or not.⁴ I'm going to call them "cornweed," until I hear a better name.


There's also a few in the garden along the fence, though you can't see them clearly from this photo.
Squirrels drag unharvested corn cobs from last year's crop into the yard, then scatter the seeds around as they eat them. The corn these will produce isn't likely to be anything we'd want to eat (field corn is gross), so it's kind of pointless to leave it, but all the Iowanness in me rebels at the idea of pulling up a cornstalk, so they stay.


6. Gomphrena 'Audrey White'
In other news, Gomphrena now comes in white. Maybe it always did. I wasn't aware of it until this year, though. I don't know how I feel about it.




I guess that's it for now. See you when I see you.

-

¹ I and the husband are personally fine, and don't expect to be directly affected by any of what's going on. Just in case you were worried.
² I had a bunch of cuttings going in the basement, which were doing fine, and then I let them get too dry and lost 4 out of 5 of them. There may have been spider mites as well. This is exactly what happened to the previous batch of S. elegans, as I described back in April, so it's possible that it's just not a plant I can grow anymore.
³ ($14.99 plus tax for a 5-inch pot)
⁴ (There's "volunteer corn," which are the seeds that fell into the soil instead of getting harvested, which come up the following year and are generally removed, but I'm looking for something more specific to the situation of having corn spontaneously appearing in one's lawn.)

Pretty picture: Gomphrena 'Fireworks'

This was new to me. When I was at the ex-job, we had the same single variety of Gomphrena both years, 'Gnome Purple.' It wasn't objectionable -- it was well-behaved in the plug trays, people bought them, and they didn't need a lot of maintenance -- but I didn't really get the point.

Karen 715 showed up in the comments to tell me that no, I wouldn't get the point if I was only seeing them in plug trays: they get much bigger, and they dry well. I was willing to accept that, though I still didn't understand at a gut level.

'Fireworks,' though, they've stuck in four-inch pots instead of plugs, and the plants were already a couple feet tall when I saw them last Friday. I didn't get a picture of the table, but I got a close-up of the flower, and between the height, the color, and the apparent sturdiness, I feel like I understand Gomphrena now. You know, aesthetically.


I do kind of wish that they'd picked a different variety name. It's not inappropriate -- the flowers do in fact strongly resemble fireworks -- but it gets that Katy Perry song stuck in my head.

Work-related: Three plants I just don't get.

Amid the various pretty flowers and stuff at work, there are a few plants we sell where I just don't see the appeal. These are them:

Gomphrena 'Gnome Purple'
Gomphrena is the basis for a small running joke at work: Younger Co-Worker commented a few months ago that the name sounded sort of like a disease, and so whenever I'm feeling kind of run-down I try to mention to her that I'm having another flare-up of the ol' gomphrena again. There's a second joke behind the first joke, which is that I think the real-life disease she was referencing was most likely gonorrhea, which does add a little something to the humor even if I can't quite put my finger on it. (There's even a third joke to be made off of the previous two. Something about purple gnome gonorrhea: I can feel that there's a joke there but I can't figure out how to make the joke work properly.)

Anyway. I don't find this a terribly objectionable plant. It's behaved well in the greenhouse, and we even sold most of it, so it's okay. It still strikes me as being a weird thing to try to sell to people. The flowers aren't especially showy, and there are other things out there that will get you the same color. So I shrug.

Lobularia maritima 'New Carpet of Snow'
Alyssum is also just okay, as far as I'm concerned. The flowers smell nice, but the plants don't seem to stay looking very good for very long. We have a real problem with not being able to ignore the plants that want to be left alone; after enough overwatering, Lobularia start looking kinda weedy. Or not even weedy. Weeds, after all, often look quite vigorous and healthy. Our Lobularias start to look like weeds that have migraines. I do understand wanting to buy them when they look good, and so far at any given moment we've had some looking nice, for anybody who wanted them, but even when they look nice they're not especially showy, and it's not like it's hard to find substitutes with small white flowers (Bacopa or Euphorbia 'Diamond Frost,' e.g.). They're also so tiny -- which could be our fault, not the plant's -- that it's hard to imagine any practical gardening use for them. Which is probably a failure of imagination on my part.

Ageratum 'Azure Pearl'
Ageratum, though, wins the prize for winning the fewest prizes. Unless it does something really cool later on in the summer, I cannot imagine why anybody would want one of these. I mean, hell, I actually forget that they're there, a lot: the leaves are nothing special, the flowers are simultaneously small, somewhat unflowery-looking, and a washed-out color to boot. Also, we have at least three varieties ('Azure Pearl,' 'Hawaii Blue' or 'Blue Hawaii,' and a third one that I can't think of right now), but the flowers are, as far as I can tell, all the same kinda washed-out, very slightly purplish baby blue. Looking Ageratum up on-line didn't help answer any of my questions, either.

So I submit the question to you, the reader: what, if anything, do these three do? What makes them something that people would want to buy? Do you like them yourself? Etc.