Blotties / Early Saturday Afternoon Nina

The finalists for the 2009 Blotanical Awards (or, as I prefer to think of them, the "Blotties") were announced during my hiatus, and I am pleased to be able to say that PATSP is up for four Blotties this year. (Last year, PATSP tied with Soliloquy for best Indoor Gardening Blog, a category which was discontinued this year because not enough people think of themselves as indoor gardeners to make the category competitive, which yes, does take a bit of the shine off of the win -- and it was only ever a tie anyway, which also bruises the old self-esteem slightly because I only just found out it was a tie -- but never mind.)

The categories are:

• Best Blog Name
• Best Container Gardening Blog
• Best Educational Garden Blog
• Best Iowa Blog

and one can vote here.

I would go on here and list the friends of PATSP who are up for awards of one kind or another, and encourage you to go vote for them as well, but A) some of them are in competition with PATSP and I'm not going to encourage you to go vote against me, even if they were more deserving, which they are not . . . or maybe they are, but they can advocate for themselves if they are so inclined, and what am I, Saint Subjunctive? and B) enough friends of PATSP are in competition with one another that endorsing people quickly gets awkward. (Best Asian Blog, Best Texas Blog, and Blog of the Year were all especially tough choices for me personally.)

Traditionally, and by "traditionally" I mean "I meant to do this last year and forgot for some reason," this is the time of year when I post a bunch of flower pictures in an attempt to bribe the reader into voting for me, but you will notice that I have, instead, tried to buy your affections by not going with the light-text-on-dark-background thing I was threatening before the hiatus, and have instead merely changed the light background to a different (and slightly darker) light background. Which will have to count as this year's bribery, because hey, we're in a recession, and do you think flower pictures grow on trees, etc. etc.

Except then I think, oh, well, maybe there were some people who didn't care about the light-text-on-dark-backgrounds thing. What about them? So here are some flower pictures, never mind what I said before:

Commelina coelestis communis, day flower or blue spiderwort. I assumed, as a child, that my grandmother had planted this on purpose, when I saw a small patch on the side of Grandma and Grandpa's house. It wasn't, of course, but it's an awfully decorative weed, as weeds go.

Stokesia 'Honeysong Purple.' This was quite a few weeks ago, at ex-work. I have no idea whether they would still be flowering now or not.

Nicotiana NOID. From a Home Depot, I think, in the Quad Cities somewhere. The overall verdict on Nicotiana for me at home has been kind of mixed: the one I had did nicely for a while and then kind of fell apart; I don't know whether that's normal. I think I like this color better than the red ones I had.

Coreopsis rosea 'American Dream.' From the Menards in Iowa City. I understand the appeal of Coreopsis intellectually, but I don't much like them. I think it's that being an indoor gardener who picks up his plants a lot, I've developed an aversion to plants that get tangled up in themselves (or other plants) and need a lot of work to separate.

Anthurium 'Florida.' This plant is actually my own: it decided to flower in the living room not too long after we moved. Decent-sized flower and everything.
And then for those of you who are indifferent to text color and unmoved by flower pictures, here is an early Saturday Nina picture:


Which I think should cover all the bases. Anybody who is still unconvinced to vote for me, e-mail me your street address and I will mail you a plant or a pair of scissors or a pony or something.

Question for the Hive Mind: Seed Storage

So I have lots of Portulaca grandiflora (moss rose) around, and I LOVE it. Seriously. I mean, I knew I liked it before, but very few of my outdoor plants are doing what they're supposed to be doing, and Portulaca is one of them. It doesn't hurt that the green metallic bees, which I also like, are fond of Portulaca.

So naturally, when I have a lot of something that's working out well, I want to jump to the next level, which is having too much of it. So I've been collecting seeds, and now I have this many:


I figure I probably can't do anything with them this year, right? Or can I? And if I have to store them, what's the best way to do that? I tried storing some Chlorophytum 'Fire Flash' seeds in an empty prescription bottle a while back (more than a year ago), and they turned moldy really quickly, so that doesn't seem like a great idea.

As long as I'm asking, I also have some Nicotiana seeds too. Less impressed with Nicotiana as a plant, but they're nice enough, and I'm willing to have more if they're willing to show up.

So, where do I keep them? I wouldn't be asking if I hadn't already had a bad experience with the mold on the Chlorophytums.

Pretty picture: Nicotiana NOID

(Picture is likely to be better full-size, in its own window.)


The outdoor containers I did earlier are all kind of, well, not really turning out like I had envisioned, especially the all-Osteospermum one (they're still flowering, but they've also flopped sideways -- apparently when I planted them, they were tall enough to be in their last week of upright growth already). I keep meaning to post pictures, but the first set of pictures didn't turn out great, I haven't had enough time to do a second set, and anyway I've been hoping that I could hold off doing a second set until some of them looked a little better.

Not a lot to say about the Nicotiana (which, like the Osteospermums, seems to want to lay down instead of stand up); I think the flowers on this one are a very cool shade of velvety red, which I like, and there are a lot of them. Not so nuts about having to pull them off when they're spent, but even so. We'll see how they hold up through the summer.