File under "better late than never:"

It's been some time since PATSP's "Rumble Among the Jungle," in which PATSP readers voted in a single-elimination tournament to determine the Best Houseplant of All Time. The winner, Schlumbergera cvv., was declared a year and a half ago, in November 2011. (The results of all matches are collected here, if anyone cares.)

At the time, I made the comment:

The husband suggested photoshopping a belt, tiara, or trophy -- or all three! -- into the picture, in honor of the win, but I'm afraid I'm not skilled enough to do that, so you'll have to imagine.

Thanks to a reader,¹ we finally have that picture, and I've got to say it completely lives up to what I'd imagined (though is it just me, or does the belt make it look fat?):

So congratulations again to the Schlumbergeras.

I've occasionally thought about doing a second RATJ, but 1) Polldaddy seemed to forget that I had an account there shortly after the RATJ ended, which is irritating, and I haven't bothered to create a new account; 2) my memory of the first one is that it took a lot more time to run than you'd think; and 3) I'm not wholly convinced that Schlumbergera wouldn't just win again.² So maybe it'll happen sometime. Everybody did seem to have a good time, and we've got a different group of voters now than we did back then, so it could still be surprising.

In any case, thanks for the Photoshop work: if nothing else, I think it's convinced me that tiara-and-a-belt is a good look, and now I want to see that combination on some prizefighters and beauty queens.

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¹ (I didn't know if you'd want to be credited for it by name or not, so I've erred on the side of privacy. But feel free to take credit in a comment, if you want to.)
² (Though that could maybe be dealt with by making a rule that plants who'd won previously wouldn't be eligible to compete again.)

LOLPhilodendron

Haven't done any LOLplants for a while, but a reader e-mailed me this last week and I found it amusing, so here you go.

For those who don't know, this is an example of guttation. Guttation tends to freak out people who haven't seen it before, but by itself, it's harmless. The PATSP post about guttation can be read here.

Scale Poetry

(after William Carlos Williams)

This is Just to Say

We have spread to
the orchids
that are in
your basement

and which
you were probably
hoping
would bloom
someday

Fuck you
they were delicious
so sweet
so juicy

-

This is not factually accurate. There are no orchids in the basement, and as far as I know there are no scale on the orchids elsewhere, knock wood. I needed it to be the orchids so the "hoping would bloom" part would make sense. The photo is real, and was one of my plants, but it's a year and a half old.

Poetic license aside, this is precisely the sort of note I imagine scale insects would leave, were they capable.

LOLAbutilon

LOLCactaceae / Hiatus Announcement

Back row, L-R: Schlumbergera x buckleyi, Pachycereus marginatus, Echinocactus grusonii, Pilosocereus pachycladus, Astrophytum ornatum, Myrtillocactus geometrizans, Stenocereus pruinosus.
Middle row: Epiphyllum oxypetallum, Stenocereus thurberi, Isolatocereus dumortieri.
Front row: Cereus peruvianus, Rhipsalis teres var. heteroclada (?), Schlumbergera x 'Caribbean Dancer,' Browningia hertlingiana (?), Leuchtenbergia principis.

Not present: Selenicereus chrysocardium, Selenicereus anthonyanus, Hatiora salicornioides, Mammillaria spinosissima, Parodia microsperma, Hylocereus sp., Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa, Rhipsalis ewaldiana

I was hoping to make this, like, a regular thing, after doing the first one back in 2008 (when it was the Aroid Family with bows, rather than the Cactus Family with Santa hats), but for reasons I no longer recall, it didn't work out last year, so the tradition kind of stopped before it got started.

But a few weeks ago, I was thinking of Santa hats for some reason, and it occurred to me that I could make my own tiny, plant-sized ones from construction paper and cotton balls. One thing led to another, and a couple hours later, I was taking the above picture. I have no idea what I'll do next year. (Maybe I could knit a bunch of little Christmas sweaters?)

This also begins the winter hiatus. As in 2008, I wish my readers a (in some cases retroactive) happy Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Gurnenthar's Ascendance, Festivus, Boxing Day Eve, Cephalopodmas, Monkey, mundane but not-unpleasant day of no particular significance, or combination of the above, in accordance with your religious beliefs and preferences or lack thereof.

PATSP will return on 26 December.

LOLCactus

If you don't get it immediately: Selenicereus is pronounced Seh-LEEN-ih-SER-ee-us. "Dion" is pronounced "DEE-on."

If it still doesn't make sense, do a Google search for "near, far, wherever you are."

If it still doesn't make sense after that, well, it wasn't a very good joke anyway, so don't worry about it.

LOLCactus

I've had these two Cereus peruvianus plants since 2004. These are the ones I had to treat for mealybugs for over a year -- I used rubbing alcohol and went over the whole stem surface with Q-Tips, I sprayed with neem, I repotted, I took them outside for a summer, I added imidacloprid granules to the soil, and finally something worked.

They grew about a foot during the course of the summer (2008) they were outside, too, but then they came back in, they went through the winter, then we moved them to the house, and they've been in the southwest corner of the plant room since the plant room was habitable by plants.

Why the southwest corner? Well, the main reason is that I don't really have any good southern exposure in the house, and that was the brightest spot I could find for them, but it also happened to work out really well, because they were just the right height to fit that corner perfectly. Yes, I knew they'd grow out of the spot at some point, but it worked well enough originally.

So then I waited for a year, and not only did they never outgrow the spot, but they never grew at all. Which was strange, because, after all, these are the same plants that went from 17 to 51 inches (0.4 to 1.3 m) in the first year I had them, and just the summer before we moved here, they'd added another foot. So they're perfectly capable of growing very fast, but they weren't doing it. Why not? Not a mystery I was especially interested in solving. They weren't outgrowing their spot, they weren't dying, they were in a spot that was awkward to get to so it would have been tough to check into the matter, therefore if it ain't broke don't fix it.

So then last Friday, for unknown reasons, I happened to check under the pots, and saw roots coming out. Which eventually led to me repotting these plants, which is why they were outside in the photo (no room to repot something that tall in the house). They turned out to be the most rootbound cacti I've ever seen (I apologize for the lack of a picture), alas, which explains the lack of growth.¹

Anyway. So now they're in new soil, in the southeast corner of the plant room. It's not a particularly good spot (it's a little cold and dark for their purposes, though we might be able to fix that, at least partly), but it's the spot in the house with the highest ceiling: 9'5" (2.9 m). The taller of the two cacti is 7'5" (2.3 m) right now, so something else will need to be done before the year is up, but better this than have them continue to live rootbound.

It turns out, in case you're interested, not to be that tough to repot a 7 1/2-foot-tall Cereus peruvianus. The spines are relatively small, and the ribs are positioned such that one can hold on to the plant without getting stuck. I did have to enlist the husband's help to hold the plants upright while I repotted,² but aside from that it was a piece of cake.

-

¹ Something I hadn't thought of until recently: having this many plants means I should probably be repotting more than I am. If you're supposed to repot once a year, then in any given watering cycle (14 days), I should have to repot 33 plants, on average. I repot a lot, but I know I'm not doing two or three plants a day. So no doubt there are other plants in the house in dire straits as well. I haven't yet started writing down when I repot, because it hadn't seemed necessary, but I'm realizing that I probably ought to start.
² They don't look upright in the photo, but that's because they're both curved slightly. This is probably the result of me not getting them properly vertical when I repotted them in 2008, plus a long period in the corner of the plant room, during which time I didn't turn them that often because they were hard to reach, and not growing anyway, so why bother. At least with the husband's assistance, I can get the weight balanced, even if the stems don't wind up perfectly vertical.

Random plant event LOLPlant: Sansevieria trifasciata

Sometimes you can wait a while to repot a plant, and sometimes it's sort of an emergency. And then every once in a while, it's kind of both at once.



UPDATE: Andrew's much-improved LOLplant version:


(Link to Sansevieria trifasciata profile)

LOLCactus

This post would have been a much better idea if I had, one, thought of it two years ago --


-- and two, if I had any kind of graphics-manipulation skills whatsoever. (It's actually getting to be sort of a problem, lately.) But you understand what I was aiming for, at least.

LOLSpathiphyllum

The dame said she had a case for me. I put down my glass, looked her over, and said, "It looks like a case of spider mites, lady, and you can keep it."

LOLSaxifraga

(THEY SEE MY STOLON -- THEY HATIN')
Those of you who get this will, I hope, find it very funny.

 

 

(What a "stolon" is.) (Song being parodied.)

Found on FAIL Blog:

I haven't really done anything in the new house yet, landscaping-wise, because it seems likely that there's a steep learning curve to it, and between the plants and the blog I don't have time to teach myself landscaping. But. . . .


Perhaps there's less to it than I thought.

LOLSpath

Haven't done one of these in a while. I am quite honestly surprised that the idea had legs enough for three posts, never mind eleven of them.

The above is a picture of the fifteen four-inch Spathiphyllums I bought at Lowe's last Thursday. Why so many? Indeed, why any at all, given that I'm not that fond of them? They were only $0.50 apiece (marked down from $0.99 (marked down from $1.99 (marked down from $3.97))), and I didn't see anything wrong with them, other than the dead flowers needed to be pulled off. Which apparently Lowe's finds it more time-effective to hand-write little yellow stickers with new prices on them than to just clean up the plants occasionally. (It must be such a weird place for anyone who's actually fond of plants to work. Comments can be anonymous here at PATSP, so come on, oppressed big box garden center workers: tell me some stories.)

Anyway. I figure I know how to keep them going well enough, I can keep them for a little while and then resell them through the consignment store in Iowa City that accepts plants (my cut of which would likely be $1.50). Good for me, and better for the plants than lingering for days and then getting tossed in a dumpster. Or whatever it is Lowe's does with the plants they kill. If I'd wanted, I could have gotten another, like, 25 of them, but 15 already seemed excessive. (I mainly got that many so I could take the flat they were in as well: I am seriously coveting plastic flats lately.)

It's not especially lucrative, but you have to go with the opportunities you see. In theory.

When I mentioned this at Twitter on Thursday, sometime PATSP commenter Lance suggested that "Flip This Plant" would make a good new show for Bravo (especially since "Flip This House" appears to be in a bit of trouble, conceptually: hard to flip houses when nobody's buying them, much less resell them for more money than you bought them for). I'm afraid it would be kind of slow. Maybe it's more HGTV's speed. I'm open to being the object of a bidding war. Bravo, HGTV: my e-mail address is in the sidebar. Have at.

LOLAraceae / Hiatus announcement

Text may be more legible if picture is opened in a new window. Also it's easier to see that the Anthurium in the back has its eyes closed.
I wish my readers a festive and enjoyable holiday of their choosing (including but not limited to: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Gurnenthar's Ascendance,¹ Festivus, Boxing Day Eve, Cephalopodmas, Monkey) unless they prefer not to enjoy or observe holidays, in which case I wish them a mundane but not-unpleasant day of no particular significance whatsoever. I'm in the latter (non-observing) camp, and will most likely be working for an hour or two in the morning (the plants still need water, even if people are celebrating something).

This is going to be the last post for a few days, as I'm going on my winter hiatus. As with previous hiatuses, I'm not actually going anywhere, probably, but I do occasionally need to take a few days off of blogging.

New, regular posts will resume on December 26. In the meantime, enjoy your elves (not a typo).

-

¹ If you get this joke without looking it up, give yourself 5000 points.

LOLAnthurium

I'm not sure there's anything I can say that would add to this.

LOLConifer

I don't even know what kind of tree this is, unfortunately. I mean, I could: I know people. I just haven't bothered.

So the story here is that the husband and I were out driving around in March or so, and saw this tree on the side of the road. It's "wearing" a Christmas decoration of some kind of tinsel garland, but of course my brain initially read the image as a sparkly boa. I got the Christmas thing a split second later, but trees wearing Christmas ornaments is just a less interesting thought than trees in feather boas. And so voila: gay conifers.

I took a picture back then, but didn't like the way it turned out. Wouldn't have thought about it again until the next time I was really pressed for a blog entry, except that we wound up accidentally on the same stretch of road recently, so I tried again with the picture. This picture is an improvement, but I was still sufficiently insecure about whether or not people would be able to see where the joke came from that I've bored you with all this explanation anyway.

LOLCactus / The Great Dampening

It's been a very wet year. I had kind of expected that after the Snowiest Winter Ever (actually, I think the winter only came in second-wettest, but that's still a lot of snow¹), and the Five-Hundred-Year Flood, we were probably due for a Worst Drought in Recorded History to finish out the summer. This didn't happen; instead, we've continued to be wet, though not in a record-setting way. Just lots of thunderstorms, lots of wind and rain, lots of mornings where I arrive at work to find all the perennials, shrubs and trees laying on the ground and have to stand them back up.

Why does this pertain to our deflated cactus? Well, because: the roof of the greenhouse has a pair of vents running the length of the greenhouse along the ridge, which can be opened. And during days in the summer, they always are. All the way. At night, these are generally lowered part-way, so that if it should rain, the water will roll off the vent flaps, land on the roof, and roll off harmlessly into the alley. And that would totally work, if rain fell straight down, at a moderate pace.

Perhaps you see where I'm going with this.

But instead there are wind and torrential downpours of rain. So even when the plants are inside, we sometimes wind up overwatering. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the only cactus we've lost.

There have also been a few issues with mildew, particularly on the Gerbera daisies, for the same reason. And a lot of the outdoor plants have plain old root rot, though some of our rot issues could have been avoided had certain people refrained from telling me over and over that I needed to be staying on top of the watering, and ohmigod the plants can dry out like [snaps] that if it gets hot and windy out, and oh noes! I think I see wilting! so be sure and water water water.²

Gerbera with mildew. We have about twenty that look like this, and about twenty that look a lot better than this but still have some mildew here and there.
And then the slugs will speak for generations to come about The Great Dampening of 2008, which is a whole other issue. I want to like the slugs; I sorta think they're cute, how they're all formless and blobby and slimy and stuff. But I've found them on everything. In the greenhouse, out of the greenhouse, everywhere. And they're less adorable in large numbers, I gotta say.

Gather around, children, and let me tell you about how wonderful things used to be, back in aught-eight. The world was full of delicious damp leaves, and we had respect for our elders. . . .
-

¹ and it was awesome!
² (Not that I'm bitter.)

LOLFicus

I transplanted the Ficus religiosa seedlings a couple weeks ago, because they seemed potentially kind of crowded, and also because the flood was approaching and I didn't want to leave them all at work to die: I figured I could take a couple home to keep and hedge our collective bets. But then I wound up taking them all home anyway, when I was told the water was going to be four feet high in the greenhouses.

It was all too soon. Immature roots being disturbed, plus a change in environment, and now we're down from ten seedlings to four. And, frankly, I don't like the looks of the four, either.

Growing plants from seed, it would seem, is stupid. Mostly they don't sprout, and when they do sprout they don't grow. Presumably if they both sprout and grow, they end up looking like crap and you're still better off to buy them fully-grown from a grower.

I'm not saying I've given up on the seeds I have, and the Echinopsis seedlings, the four that came up, are still technically among the living. But the Great Annual Seed Project, or GASP, isn't going to be annual. I'm not doing this again. Not with my own money, anyway.

LOLChlorophytum

Urgh. The last few days have been murderous, heat-wise, and I'm really not sure at all what I'm going to do about this. I had to leave early on Saturday because I just couldn't take it anymore; a couple days before that, one of the greenhouses was at about 90% humidity, with a temperature of 106ºF (41ºC), which when I put those numbers into the National Weather Service's heat index calculator, the number it spit out was a heat index of 216ºF (102ºC). Granted, after a certain point, the actual number of the heat index stops being meaningful, but still. I have a proposal to run by the boss, but so far, she and I haven't been in the building at the same time for like three days now, so I haven't had the opportunity.

Anyway. So I came home on Saturday and napped, and then I slept Saturday night, and then I napped again Sunday morning, for a total of a little over 13 hours, and then I felt more or less okay again, but goddamn. And, as WCW helpfully reminded me, this is only the beginning of the summer, not even officially summer yet, even: there's a good three months of this ahead.

LOLRadermachera

Okay, maybe I do want to expand beyond the LOLSpathiphyllums.

I choose to click on "no," by the way. China dolls (Radermachera sinica), like Homalomena 'Emerald Gem', are great if you're talking to marketers, but I don't know a lot of people who have had good experiences with them. (I do know a few. I'm just not one of them.) And anyway, this one dropped about 3/4 of its foliage when I got it home, and was probably never going to look very good. (This was possibly my fault for buying from Wal-Mart, but at least that way it was a $2.50 mistake instead of a $30 mistake. These things do add up.)