Pretty picture: Canna NOID

It doesn't feel like it could possibly be Canna-blooming season again, and yet here we are.

Which means we must also be getting close to the Annual Sighting Of The Hummingbird as well. We planted Salvia elegans at the far edge of the property this year for the hummingbirds too, but we were expecting the field behind the house to be planted in soybeans this year (last year was corn; they've alternated in the past) and instead got corn again, which means that the pineapple sage is getting shaded out. Or at least I assume that's the reason why it's been staying so short. Goodness knows we've gotten enough rain. (Officially no longer in a drought as of a few weeks ago!)

This picture's from July 9, but they look about the same now, except that one of them has shattered and died. (It looked like something heavy fell squarely on the center of the plant.) I am choosing to believe that this was a case of Sheba running over it while chasing a tennis ball, instead of a mowing accident, which I can do because I didn't see it happen and can consequently explain it to myself in whatever way causes me the least upset. Though the mowing thing is more likely.

I have decided as of this year that it doesn't really make sense for me to try to overwinter the Salvia elegans indoors anymore, and I'm going to stop trying. It's not that it's hard exactly; the problem is more that the cuttings outgrow their containers so quickly that I wind up having to take three or four rounds of cuttings in the course of a winter. Which is nice, in that I start with one plant and wind up with twenty-five, but they also always get spider mites in early/mid spring, regardless of where I have them in the house, which means a few weeks of worry about that, plus all the time it takes to keep them watered, pruned, and propagating. I could just spend $4 at the garden center in February, propagate off that for a few weeks, and wind up in more or less the same situation by May, just without all the work. So that's what I'm going to try next year.

Oh. Reading back over this, I realize I just kind of jumped topics without explanation. I went from hummingbirds to pineapple sage because the hummingbirds also like pineapple sage. Though my pineapple sage plants are going to have to grow quite a lot before September if they expect to be hummingbird-worthy. The hummingbirds have standards.

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XLIX

Goodness. It's been so long since I did a transmitted light post that I don't even remember how I'm supposed to do them.

Actually no, that's not true. It's only been like five months. But it'd been nine months before that. I'm definitely a little rusty.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Schlumbergera truncata NOID, phylloclade. Though Schlumbergeras are not quite as abundant in the house as the Anthuriums, they've getting there. The most recent stats for the collection: 959 plants total, 198 Anthurium seedlings (21% of total), 116 Schlumbergera seedlings (12%). None of this changes the fact that they make lousy transmitted light subjects.

Philodendron [erubescens?] 'Golden Emerald.' I don't know what the deal is with this one; it never seems to photograph as bright and saturated as it actually is. It's really much prettier than this in person.

Brassolaeliocattleya Helen Brown. Probably by now it's not Brassolaeliocattleya anymore, but who has time to keep track of these things.

Iris ensata variegata. I have no memory of seeing a variegated Iris of any kind, anywhere. I mean, I know they exist; it's just that this photo is the only evidence I have that I've ever seen one. I didn't even take a photo of the whole plant, so there's no context for this picture. It's a weird feeling.

Salvia elegans. On Sunday, I semi-accidentally wound up looking at some of the pictures of the Salvia elegans we planted in the yard a couple years ago, when it was huge and in full bloom, and: I'm afraid we're just going to have to do that again. Even though I no longer seem to be capable of overwintering them. (Probably the basement is too warm now, what with all the lights.)

Callisia repens.

Tradescantia zebrina. I didn't actually intend for this to wind up next to the Callisia, but it's an interesting comparison, since they have a nearly identical growth habit.

Caladium NOID. Not one of my best Caladium pictures, but with Caladiums, even a bad picture is still okay.

Quercus sp., autumn.

Stromanthe sanguinea 'Triostar.'

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.

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.)

New (old) plant: Salvia elegans

We've been without a pineapple sage here since last fall, when my only surviving plant fell to a surprise frost before I could try to get cuttings to overwinter. There had been backup plants, of course, but those all pooped out because of drought or spider mites (or both), so when the one outside died, that was my whole stock.

Naturally I questioned whether or not I wanted to try to get another one. I mean, it had been a plant I liked, before all the unpleasantness, but nobody else seems as interested in it as I am, the mite thing was really annoying, and it grows a little too fast to keep up with effectively, so I wasn't going to.


But you know how it is. You run into one another again, exchange pleasantries, start feeling those feelings again, and before you know it you're going home together. (Also some money changed hands, which kinda ruins the metaphor, but whatever.)

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I stuck a bunch of Salvia elegans cuttings in a plug tray last Wednesday. Being pretty much out of room in the house, I stuck the tray in the best available spot I could find, on a very low shelf in the southwest corner of the plant room, then went on to dealing with the other thing I wanted to put in the plug tray, Canna seeds. (Which have been soaking in water for a couple days now, and aren't showing any roots yet; I suspect I may have overdone the filing-down-the-seed-coat step.)

Thursday morning, I went to take Sheba out, and saw this on the floor in front of the door:


I'm only out three cuttings, of about 22, so this is no big deal unless it happens again, and at least it wasn't something poisonous. But still. Frustrating.


She's also eaten a chocolate chip muffin this week, last Sunday, which was somewhat alarming until I found this site and did some math. No problems related to the muffin as far as I'm aware, but I was prepared for diarrhea and/or vomiting, at the very least. But no, she saves the vomiting for three days later.

Which makes me wonder when she's planning the diarrhea. It's really not the sort of thing you want taking you by surprise.

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XXXIV

Five green pictures, five orange pictures.

As I write this, I have no idea how yesterday's election went, but the odds are that I was pleasantly surprised by something and unpleasantly surprised by something else. Since bad news always hits me harder than good, this means I'm probably in a bad mood today. I mean, I saw a "vote no on retention of activist judges" sign¹ yesterday in someone's yard while walking Sheba, and it ruined a good chunk of my late morning / early afternoon. And that was just one guy. So today is probably not a good day for me. Be gentle.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Persea americana. We started a couple avocado trees from seed during the winter, less because I had a burning desire to grow avocados than because the husband likes to eat them. One is doing pretty well; I'm having trouble communicating with the other. I pinch it, it grows back one replacement growing tip. I pinch that tip, and it grows one replacement. The first plant understood that it was supposed to branch; I'm not sure why the second one is having such a hard time with the idea.

Unknown Cirsium sp. I was more certain about IDing this as a Cirsium then than I am now.

Salvia elegans, dead(ish) leaf. Arguably closer to pink than to orange, but whatever. When I first put the Salvia elegans outside last spring, some of the leaves turned weird colors from the cold. This is one of those. Not really pretty, exactly, but it's something I didn't know this plant could do.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Rustic Orange.' Not especially pretty, but I think the irregular red spots on the underside of the leaf were odd enough to call your attention to.

Populus deltoides. Fairly similar to yesterday's Liriodendron tulipifera photo.

Ambrosia trifida. Probably the prettiest ragweed-related photo you're going to see all month. Lucky you!

Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana.' Pretty much what you'd expect it to look like, I suppose. The main motivation for taking the picture was that this is a plant we cut back, and the newly-sprouting leaves, once they reached full-size again, looked very pretty.

Malus sp. My favorite from this batch. For some reason, I even kind of dig the blurry bits on the sides.

Zingiber malaysianum. The range of colors I get out of this plant continues to please me. I wish there were some way to do them all at once.

Heuchera 'Venus.' I prefer this to yesterday's Heuchera photo, though not by a lot. There are some very nice Heuchera varieties that are really plain by transmitted light; this isn't one of them.

-

¹ (Translation for non-Iowans: "How dare the Iowa Supreme Court try to tell me f*gg*ts are people!")

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XXXII

Okay. Well. The "good" stress is over now, I think/hope, so now we're just waiting to see what's going to happen from it. Meanwhile, I'm hoping to get some plants watered and some blog posts written, so I can make the time to have a small nervous breakdown later. (It's possible that I've had a nervous breakdown already, on Friday and Saturday, but you can never have too many, right?)

Meanwhile, Transmitted Light Week rumbles along with another batch of ten pictures.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Lycoris squamigera ("naked ladies"). Plain though the picture is, I kind of like this one. I like the plant, too, though the flowers I saw around town this year didn't look very good, compared to my memory of 2009. Perhaps they don't do as well in wet years?

Juglans sp.? I'm not sure on this one, because there are several trees around here with odd-pinnate leaves, and although I can tell that they aren't all the same, I've never been able to figure out how many there are or how to tell them apart. This was growing in someone's yard, so a walnut tree seems like a reasonable guess, and it's a very new leaf, so there isn't much to go on for an ID anyway. And it's not like it was that great of a photo to begin with, so why are we even talking about this?

Salvia elegans. Now that we've had a hard freeze, all the plants I stuck in the back yard have died, so I'm hoping that I can get a post together about the progression of the blooming. Some of this is just for my own curiosity about when it was actually at its peak, and some of it is that I took pictures every two or three days for weeks and I'll be damned if I'm not going to get something for all that effort.

Plectranthus amboinicus. If you tilt your head to the right, there's a Christmas tree in this picture. Or at least I see one.

Hosta NOID. In case you didn't believe me about these pictures being from the spring, I think this photos should convince you. When's the last time you saw a Hosta leaf that wasn't all ragged from wind and holey from slugs? Was it spring?

Syringa vulgaris. Probably my second-favorite photo from this batch. Also further evidence of spring photo-taking.

Nematanthus cv. These always look like they'd be perfect for transmitted light photos when the sun hits them right, but the leaves are so small that I can never get very good pictures out of them.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Henna.' Not a variety I'm terribly familiar with; we didn't carry it when I was working in the garden center. The photo doesn't do much for me.

Colocasia 'Coffee Cups.' This was an unusually difficult picture to get; the camera wouldn't focus on it properly. I like the color I wound up with, but I've seen (and taken) much better photos of Colocasias before.

Calathea makoyana. My favorite from the set, which I suppose is sort of predictable: plants in the maranta family (Marantaceae) are terribly photogenic in general. Less predictably, I've had the plant for six months now, and it's still alive. It's had spider mites once already, and the new leaves aren't very big, but with Calatheas, technically alive is accomplishment enough.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

It's usually difficult to get Sheba to sit for a picture; she walks away, or looks everywhere except where I want her to look, and it's often a frustrating process. Last Sunday, though, after a rousing game of fetch, I was taking pictures of the backyard Salvia elegans when she walked up and plopped herself down right next to it, in more or less the perfect spot, and then held still.

And, bonus -- it's a pretty damned good shot of the Salvia.

Random nonplant event: Hummingbird

So I've been trying to take photos of the Salvia elegans I planted in the back, the ones that didn't explode, regularly as they begin to bloom. The objective is not to get a time-lapse sequence of the bloom, though I probably could do that if I really tried, but to keep taking pictures as long as the blooms are continuing to get more abundant, because I worry that if I wait until they're at the absolute peak, that at some point before the plant peaks, we'll get a big windstorm that will tear the plants apart and then I'll have no pictures of anything.

So that's what I was doing outside with the camera.

And, since we're here, this is what they look like as of last Wednesday morning:


As you've likely deduced from the title, while I was out there taking pictures of the Salvia, a hummingbird showed up and began drinking nectar from the flowers. I got horrible photos from the event, but they're good enough to prove that a hummingbird was present, at least:

(It's in the center of the picture.)


From looking around a little bit on-line, the pictures, and memory, I think this was most likely a female ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris).

I didn't plant the pineapple sage specifically to get hummingbirds, and actually I'd pretty much forgotten that hummingbirds were even a possibility -- I see one maybe once a year. So this was a nice bonus. Next year, there will be more plants, and I'll figure out how to protect them from the wind a little better. I'm told hummingbirds remember the locations of food sources from year to year. Don't want to disappoint.