Clivia seeds available

A reader has sent me a batch of Clivia seeds, more than I can realistically grow out.¹ She also provided instructions for their germination that got me 91% germination, and 88% post-transplant survival.² If you're in the U.S. and have always wanted to try growing Clivias from seed, this is your chance to try it out.

How many seeds you get will depend on how many other people want them (and how many you want to get). If a lot of people are interested, I may have to ask you to cover the cost of postage, but if it's just 1 or 2 readers wanting them, I don't mind mailing them out for free.

Contact me by e-mail (mrsubjunactive@outalook.com, minus the two a's) if interested to get the addresses / quantities / money straightened out. I don't know how long they'll remain viable, and I was hoping to mail them out on Monday or Tuesday (1 or 2 May), so sooner is better than later.

Also if you have cats, you may want to pass. Clivia are toxic to cats. It sounds like fatalities are rare, but I wouldn't be comfortable taking the risk, personally. Clivia are also toxic to dogs, though I didn't find out how toxic until, like, today, and since Sheba's never shown any interest in the Clivias I assume she's not going to suddenly develop any. Decide for yourself how much of a gamble you want to take, but I figured I should say something.

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¹ Because I got a big batch of seeds in February already. I'm good for Clivias for the foreseeable future.
² About half of the first batch, as of 22 April (sown 7 February, so they're about 10 weeks old in the photo):

You were probably expecting to see the germination instructions down here. Sorry. I'll try to get a blog post up about this soonish.

Anthurium no. 0589 "Hetty King"

Just in case you were under the impression that drag kings were a new thing, Hetty King (born Winifred Emms) was performing as a male impersonator before World War I. She even got decently famous at it, along with several other male impersonators from around that time (two of the bigger names being Vesta Tilley and Ella Shields). I mean, male impersonation then didn't mean quite the same thing that drag kings do now, obviously, but it's clearly in the same neighborhood, and I don't get the impression that it was considered particularly shocking and immoral. At least no more shocking and immoral than the music halls they would have been performing in, anyway.

Shamefully, I didn't do as much research into King as I probably should have if I'm going to talk about her.¹ But there's a nice long article/interview with King here, and YouTube has some relevant videos as well.

Hetty King's seedling namesake is, alas, much less interesting. She's yet another in a long line of LPAs,²

and although the foliage is pretty nice,

the only notable thing about her, really, is that she produced a second bud really quickly. Lots of pent-up blooming energy, perhaps: she was 39 months old before making a first bloom.³ The overall plant is fine,

but the spathe flipped backward after opening, and I have plenty of pink/pink Anthuriums already. Hetty's not so terrible that I need to go out of my way to discard her, but she's not so good that I'm going to feel bad when I eventually do.

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¹ What with watering, trying to blog every day, Anthurium-taping, e-mail, trying to sell plants on Craigslist, trying to make sure Sheba takes her Benadryl every morning, getting pictures of the plants and sorting through them, and physical therapy exercises, I've been perpetually exhausted.
Notes and explanations:
• trying to sell plants on Craigslist hasn't actually resulted in any sales yet. It almost never does. Craigslist is the worst. Sadly, it's also the only. So I keep trying.
• Sheba's been chewing holes in her fur, especially the fur on her feet. We think this is probably an allergy (it's happened in other years; also my allergies have been acting up intermittently during the same period), and giving her Benadryl twice a day, and spraying her feet with a lidocaine-based spray, seem to keep it under control better than anything else we've tried, but she doesn't actually like the Benadryl or the spray, so it's a little bit of a hassle to administer them, and they aren't able to stop her from doing it altogether, just enough to keep her from chewing actual wounds into her skin.
• I have been having trouble with my right shoulder, off and on, since the spring, which got bad enough that I saw a doctor about it a month ago. Got a referral to a physical therapist, who I like and who I believe knows what she's talking about, but she gave me exercises and stretches to do twice a day, which was tough to fit into my schedule but I (mostly) kept up with.
Then at the follow-up appointment, it turned out that I had been doing the exercises mostly wrong, partly because I was finding it so difficult to fit them into my day that I was trying to rush through them, taking shortcuts, etc. My shoulder got somewhat better anyway, but an elbow started hurting instead, so the only thing I accomplished was moving the pain from one joint to another.
And then the physical therapist, at the follow-up, assigned me a set of new exercises that take just as long to do as the old exercises did, plus I'm supposed to continue the old exercises. The one time I attempted to do all six things, I was trying to work out before watering plants, so I was in a hurry, and even though the correct way to do the exercises had been clarified for me at the follow-up, I was doing doing them all wrong anyway, and could tell I was doing them all wrong, but got frustrated with myself for not being able to do them right, and the whole situation was miserable. So, as I write this (26 October), I've more or less decided that I prefer the shoulder pain to the exercises, and I've stopped doing them entirely, which is obviously not a mature or productive reaction to the situation and will certainly not make anything better. But so my point is that time I might have spent researching early-20th-century male impersonators has been going toward hurting myself with poorly-performed exercises instead. For which I am doubly sorry.
² (= Little Pink Anthuriums)
³ The average length of time from sow date to first bud continues to increase, as some of the earliest seedlings get around to making buds, but it's still around the two-year mark. The mean is 28.5 months, and the median is 27.2 months. 39 months is really late, though the record at the moment for the latest bud belongs to 0045 "Lineysha Sparx," who finally produced a bud, after 47 months, and then dropped it.

Saturday morning Sheba picture

It's been a while since anything particularly noteworthy happened with Sheba. Lots of shedding, I suppose, but otherwise everything's fine. And it's not like the shedding ever actually stops; it's just been more intense lately.

Saturday morning Sheba picture

It's Sheba!

Nothing new with her lately. She eats, she poops, she sleeps. Same as it ever was.

Dog Hair as a Rooting Medium

Background:

Dog (Canis familiaris) hair is cheap, abundant, renewable, and produced in such vast quantities that one feels mortally certain that it must be good for something besides canine thermoregulation. Furthermore, most existing rooting media are dependent on the destruction of natural ecosystems (peat moss), require a large amount of energy for production (perlite), or pose a health hazard to the producers and users (vermiculite),¹ so finding a more renewable medium would be a boon to both plant-loving dog owners and the environment.

As canine hair has some qualities in common (holds water, fibrous texture) with other substances used in rooting media and soilless potting mixes, it was evaluated for its potential as a rooting medium.


Experiment:

The floor of a home containing a dog ("Sheba," Fig. 1) was swept, and the sweepings collected into a pile. (Fig. 2) The sweepings were then separated into hair and non-hair, with the latter discarded. (Fig. 3) The material which resulted was fibrous and mostly dark gray in color, with inclusions of lighter matter.²

Fig. 1 ("Sheba")

Fig. 2 (material collected by sweeping)

Fig. 3 (collected material post-purification)
The hair was then added to a plastic pot, 7 cm in diameter. Non-hair material was left out of the pot when it was feasible to separate it. Once the hair had been placed in the pot, it was rinsed with water several times to remove water-soluble contaminants. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4 (rinsed hair in pot)
Next, the cutting to be rooted was prepared. We selected Plectranthus verticillatus (Fig. 5) as a test subject, because P. verticillatus is known to root readily under a large range of conditions. A cutting approximately 7 cm in length was taken from a plant (Fig. 6), and the lowest pair of leaves was removed.

Fig. 5 (the stock Plectranthus verticillatus plant from which cutting was obtained)

Fig. 6 (Plectranthus verticillatus cutting before removal of lowest pair of leaves)
After making a hole in the dog hair at the center of the pot, the end of the cutting was placed into the hole, and the hair packed around the stem to ensure contact between the rooting medium and the cutting. The pot was then placed in a brightly-lit but sunless location. Moisture level was monitored, and water added when it would have been added for a cutting rooted in soil.


Results:

During the first full watering, a considerable amount of dark brown material washed out of the rooting medium. Chemical characterization was not performed, and the identity of the substance is unknown. Similar but lighter yellow material was washed out of the medium following some but not all subsequent waterings.(Fig. 7) Rooting medium had no discernible odor.

Fig. 7 (drainage water containing uncharacterized yellow contaminant)
The experimental pot retained water much longer than a comparably-sized pot of standard potting mix. However, the distribution of the water was quite different. The upper half remained relatively dry, even immediately following the addition of water, while the lower half stayed very wet. This made it difficult to determine when to water the cutting.

The oldest pair of leaves wilted significantly after three or four days. No new leaf growth was observed; a few small (< 2 mm) roots had formed by four weeks (Fig. 8). This is significantly less root growth than would have been expected from potting soil or water after an equivalent length of time.

Fig. 8 (roots formed after four weeks in rooting medium)
After five weeks, the cutting remained alive but wilted, and had produced no new growth. (Fig. 9)

Fig. 9 (cutting after five weeks in rooting medium)

Conclusions:

Though root development suggests that canine hair may be capable of rooting plant cuttings under some circumstances, development was slow compared to standard media, probably due to the different water-absorbing abilities of canine hair, and it is likely not an acceptable substitute for potting soil.

This experiment also demonstrates that Plectranthus verticillatus, contrary to popular perception, is not in fact capable of rooting in any material, merely in most of them.

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¹ Large-scale production of canine hair also results in the indirect destruction of natural ecosystems and consumes considerable energy, in addition to generating significant amounts of ecologically problematic waste. Objective observation of human behavior to date with respect to animal companions leads us to conclude that humans simply do not give a shit about the ecological impact of their pets, and would continue to attempt to keep domesticated dogs, cats, hamsters, etc. even if forced to live in a poisoned, radioactive, waterless hellscape as a result, because they are adorable and precious, whoosa good dog, whoosa good dog yes you are. If humans are to keep animals as pets in any case, we may as well figure out how to do so in as minimally disruptive a manner as possible.
² The inclusions were primarily composed of household dust, lint, fragments of potting medium from indoor plants, and the fallen leaves of said plants.

Saturday morning Sheba picture

Sheba's still here. So's the snow. I'm pretty happy about both.

I feel badly for those readers who are tired of snow and wish it would stop already. Also envious. I have yet to reach snow satiety, and I think 2008 was a record snow year for Iowa, so it may well be that the concept of too much snow just doesn't exist for me. Or that if it does exist, I would have to move somewhere else in order to experience it.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Huddle 'Joan'

The continuing story of Why Is Mr. Subjunctive So Damned Itchy All The Time:

Medical professionals have been consulted. Unfortunately, by the time I saw a doctor, the itching hadn't happened for a few days,¹ so there was nothing to show anybody, not that they would have seen anything in the first place, because it never looked like anything, but there was even more nothing to see than usual. And so the visit was inconclusive as to the cause of the itching. We did pretty well eliminate scabies, mold, and imidacloprid as possibilities, though, which just getting scabies struck from the list was worth the trip all by itself. And this is all basically what I expected, that the first doctor's visit wasn't going to settle anything. I was really just hoping to pare down the number of possibilities.

There was also an incidental diagnosis of a very mild case of athlete's foot, though I don't know how that could have happened and am not sure I'm entirely on-board with that diagnosis² but whatever sure I can get some Lotrimin why the hell not.

The leading theories are presently fleas, stress, and dry air/skin. The first will, in theory, resolve itself sooner or later.³ I don't know that there's much of anything I can do about stress, and trying to think of something to do about it would only make it worse, so probably the best thing for me to do about that is to forget that it's even a theory. And the dry air/skin thing is questionable, but the only one she had a concrete suggestion for, so I'm supposed to use different soap and then a new cream afterward and call her in a week to tell her whether that's helped. That seems kind of pointless, though, while I'm not experiencing any itching, because what am I going to report? "I changed soap like you said and went from having no symptoms to . . . also having no symptoms?"

Anyway. Not really feeling any better about the plant collection, and the contractors are actually worse now, 'cause they're done with the outside stuff, mostly, so now they've moved in. So regular blogging is still on hold, for however long it turns out to be. But I've just asked you to think, for a second time, about my skin, and scabies, and added a new horror: athlete's foot. So here is an orchid show picture to make us even again:

Paphiopedilum Huddle 'Joan' = Paphiopedilum Hellas x Paphiopedilum F. C. Puddle

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¹ Tiny bit of itching on Saturday, but nothing like it had been. No itching at all on Friday, Sunday, or up to 2 PM on Monday.
² (it only vaguely resembles any of the images that come up in Google, plus this would be the first time anyone's ever used the word "athlete" in any kind of relation to me so it feels pretty wrong medically and linguistically. I mean, I realize she's the doctor and she would know, but still.)
³ Point of interest: I saw my first actual flea since this whole thing began, last Friday, on my arm. It's plausible that it may have come in from outside with Sheba (who had been outside immediately before, and who was in my office at the time because there were contractors present and she has to stay in the office with me while that's going on). It wouldn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense for a dog-preferring flea to jump on to a dog, then off the dog onto a person, but they call them fleas, not geniuses, so maybe.
Sheba remains at normal levels of scratching and biting; some patches of fur have filled in a lot faster than others, but there's general progress across the board, and she's done with all her medication as of Monday. Also she said to tell you hi.

Pretty pictures: Vanda cristata

I seem to have accidentally fallen into a blogging-hiatus hole. Among other problems to be detailed below, I'm really coming to despise the plant collection:¹ they appear to be playing a game of chicken, to see which of them can have the most and largest problems without getting thrown in the trash. (Currently neck and neck for the lead: Agave desmettiana and Agave americana.)

Meanwhile, we've progressed from The Week of Sheba's Unexplained Itching to The Week of a Grandparent's Funeral to The Week of Contractors. A plan that was started roughly two years ago has finally started being executed, so we're getting some work done on the house, but our influence over which repairs, when they happen, and how they're performed is very minimal.² So there are early-morning noises, and strange people coming in and out, and at one point the plant room door was replaced.³ The whole thing's been disruptive and unpleasant. It surely says something that the high point of the last three weeks was a funeral.

As for Sheba, she's back to normal amounts of scratching and biting since she started the flea treatment, which is great. Unfortunately, the improvement was accompanied by an ear infection⁴ and fantastic, amazing dandruff,⁵ so we don't seem to be winning on that front either.

The reader may recall that I've been itching quite a bit myself lately, and that it got dramatically worse at about the same time that Sheba's latest outbreak began, so it'd be logical to think that when she's doing better, I'm also doing better. But no. My problem was apparently never the fleas.⁶ The itching is pretty terrible on its own, but it also wakes me up at night sometimes, or keeps me from getting to sleep, which amplifies all the previously-mentioned minor annoyances. And of course I have no idea what is causing it or how to make it go away; so far, all I can really do is take Benadryl, which may or may not do anything for the itching, but at least knocks me out to the point where I don't have to be consciously aware of the itching anymore.

As I write this on Monday morning, this week has not yet made its particular flavor apparent. Depression? Loss of internet service and/or electricity? Bureaucratic runarounds? Car trouble? Whooping cough? Sinkholes? Plague of frogs? Robot uprising? Time will tell. Posting is expected to stay confined to once-a-week orchid posts for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, here are some bad photographs of a not-particularly-photogenic orchid.

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¹ Not hyperbole. I know I've said things like this before and then come back around to liking plants again, but it feels like we're surely coming to the climax of . . . something. Two years is a long time to keep a hobby that's costing more in aggravation than it's giving you in pleasure, and it's getting harder to believe that stuff might get better.
² In mitigation: we're not paying for any of it, so it feels churlish to complain. (Not that that stops me, because since when have I minded being thought of as churlish?)
³ Not so terrible in and of itself, but they started when it was 39F / 4C outside, and involved a lot of people just standing around while there was a giant hole in the wall of the plant room, cold breeze blowing freely in and out, so I was understandably worried. (I spent the majority of that day in my office with the door closed trying to pretend that it wasn't happening.) It doesn't appear to have harmed any of the plants yet, but this wasn't that long ago, so they could just be slow to react.
⁴ Not diagnosed by the vet, but the smell is awfully familiar, and obviously emanating from her ear, so.
⁵ If I were a dandruff connoisseur -- and you know that one has to exist, somewhere -- this would be the best week of my life. Right up there with the first time I ever saw The Breakfast Club, probably.

^ This .gif is also a pretty good representation of how I feel when my itching gets really bad.
⁶ (which might explain why I never saw any)

Pretty pictures: Papaver orientale

Sort of a good news / bad news situation from the vet, though in this particular case the good and bad news are the same thing:

We had more or less ruled out fleas previously, on the grounds that I've lived with fleas before, long ago, in Texas, and I remembered that vividly enough that I figured it would be perfectly obvious. But we hadn't seen any fleas jumping around or on us. We hadn't seen any fleas on Sheba.¹ I've been itchy a lot, but the flea bites I remember from Texas were big angry red things that lasted for days, and I haven't seen anything remotely like that, so I assumed that whatever the problem was, it couldn't have been fleas.² We still don't know what's going on with me, but it kind of goes without saying that fleas seem much more plausible now.

This is bad insofar as it's not the most desirable problem to have, and now there's a lot of work to be done as far as vacuuming and washing, but on the other hand, it was easily diagnosed and should be relatively easy to solve. Sheba doesn't have some exotic form of dog leukemia, she's not allergic to mold in the walls that would cost us thousands of dollars to fix, and she's not been driven to emo self-harm because we're not walking her enough.³ Just fleas. Could have been worse. And should it happen again, we'll recognize it much earlier, and won't have to let it reach this point a second time.

Anyway. Since I sort of promised plants with the title, and since I've just made you think about fleas for a few minutes, here are some pictures of Papaver orientale:

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¹ Still haven't, actually - I went through her fur with a flea comb after we got back from the vet, and I couldn't find any fleas or eggs. I don't know if I was looking in the wrong place, if there were never that many to begin with, or if they're just really difficult to find, but I believe the vet because A) he had a flea to show us, and B) he's a vet so you gotta figure he'd know. Though I suppose he could have a whole big glass jar full of fleas sitting in a back room somewhere, that dips into when he feels like selling some medication. (Yes, but am I paranoid enough?)
² In retrospect, it seems sort of obvious that Texas would have different kinds of fleas than Iowa, given the differences in climate and possible reservoir species. A flea that lives off lizards and armadillos in a region that rarely freezes would probably have different properties than a deer/squirrel/rabbit flea that has to survive winters of -10F / -23C.
³ (Though we are still going to try to walk her more.)

Saturday morning Sheba picture

Sheba's itching problem has gotten bad enough that in spots, she's bitten off all her fur and then kept going, leaving sores. You can't see them in the picture because I've deliberately chosen an angle that hides them (you might still be able to see a little bit on her back right leg), but they're there. We've tried everything we can think of here (anesthetic sprays, baths, oatmeal baths, benadryl, changing her bedding, changing her food), and none of it seems to make any difference (the benadryl might help slightly, but it's such a small amount that any perceived improvement might be wishful thinking). And still no obvious indications about what's causing it in the first place. I feel like a bad dog dad. So she's got a vet appointment on Tuesday, which is too damn far away but also the best we can do.

My primary worry is that this is going to turn out to be a mold allergy, because if we have mold, I suspect that the plants will be indirectly responsible. Not that I'm so thrilled with the plants lately anyway. It might be nice to have a reason to get rid of some of them, but I wouldn't be okay with getting rid of all of them.

Not sure what the best-case scenario would be. Maybe a laundry detergent sensitivity? I guess the best explanation would be that she was biting holes in herself because she's just that hungry. I'd feel way worse, but it'd be even easier to fix than the laundry detergent thing. I doubt that's our problem, though.

Random plant events: Hatiora and Schlumbergera

Oh hi. Apologies for the three-day gap in posting.

Imidacloprid II: The Imidaclopridatening¹ has finally ended, so all that's left to do is sit around with my fingers crossed until I find out whether or not it's worked. I'm finding scale less often now, which might be a good sign. It also might just be a sign that all the really badly-infested plants were thrown away, and the ones left are only slightly infested. Time will tell.

In other news, Sheba and I are both extremely itchy lately. Losing-sleep kind of itchy. Biting-bald-spots-into-the-whole-inside-of-your-leg itchy.² I have no idea why: there are no bumps or rashes or anything, we haven't changed laundry detergents, etc. The main environmental change is probably the addition of all the imidacloprid, but that really should be staying confined to the pots, and in any case I'm not pouring it down my legs, which is where I'm having the worst problems.

Besides imidacloprid, the other theories include: mold, weather, the house heating system, karma and/or divine retribution, allergies, excessive washing, inadequate washing, witches, and bunnies.³ This has always been going on to some degree or another -- I first blogged about Sheba getting hot spots a year and a half ago, and I first noticed that I was feeling itchy frequently last July. But it's so much worse right now, for both of us, that I'm thinking surely this can't be a coincidence.

Of course, thinking about it also sometimes sets it off, so I should move on to another topic quickly. Maybe plants?

The plants are still doing things, and I'm still taking pictures, though it's been hard to get very good pictures lately -- too cold and/or rainy to go outside for good light, too dark to get good pictures inside. So I apologize for the quality, but:

My NOID orange (but sometimes not-orange) "Easter cactus" has bloomed again. This isn't supposed to happen when it's not Easter, as far as I know, but perhaps it's been confused by the temperature in the plant room -- we were late setting up the heater, so it's been cold in there. Some plants like this more than others. Historically speaking, the flowers are red when they first open, then gradually turn more orange. Not sure what happened this year that we're starting out with orange at the beginning. Maybe that's temperature-related?

In any case, the buds were initially kind of a light pink, then magenta --

-- and opened up orange, with no red stage this year at all. I guess Hatiora likes to keep a person guessing. Or at least this Hatiora likes to keep this person guessing. Perhaps the appropriate "person" for Hatiora's eventual plant profile should be M. Night Shyamalan.⁴

The plant is approximately the same size now as it was in February. Maybe a little bigger. It's not that it hasn't grown quite a bit in that stretch of time; it just drops pieces whenever I'm not watering perfectly, and sometimes when I am watering perfectly, so the net growth is basically zero. There remains a strong argument for Patsy Cline as the profile "person."

Meanwhile, and more predictably, the Schlumbergeras are in full swing at the moment as well. 'Caribbean Dancer' (above) is the main bloomer, but that's to be expected, since it's the largest and oldest of my plants. I also have a salmon/peach variety, which is just barely visible in this photo (slightly to the right of center, under a couple layers of 'Caribbean Dancer' blooms), which is having its biggest year to date, a magenta one (not pictured) that's got some buds but no actual flowers yet, and a white one (also not pictured) with plenty of buds that are only just now beginning to open. The previously-reported bud on seedling number 25 aborted shortly after I took that picture, I guess because I wasn't feeling bad enough about the plant collection. If I can figure out a way to move the seedlings into the plant room by February or so, I might start seeing buds on the seedlings that actually open. And boy will that be a crazy day.

Just to end on a bit of a tease, other random plant events coming up this week:⁵ Phragmipedium, Anthurium, Leuchtenbergia, Billbergia, Strelitzia, and some unidentified trees in downtown Iowa City.

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¹ (1. dumping imidacloprid into the pot of every plant in the house. 2. Well it's a word now. Deal with it.)
² (more Sheba than me on the bald spots. Though if I could reach . . . . In any case, I'm pretty sure we're both having trouble getting to sleep, and then waking up early, because of itching.)
³ Some of those are jokes. Which ones are jokes is left as an exercise for the reader.
⁴ Pro tip: you do not want to get me started about M. Night Shyamalan.
⁵ (where "this week" = a vaguely-defined period of time which includes not only this week but also the following week, a solid chunk of December, and never, and where "random plant events" means random plant events, stupid plant tricks, and possibly graffiti)

Grab bag

Not much to report lately; I'm heavily preoccupied with trying to dump imidacloprid into all the plants. It isn't particularly difficult to do: it just makes watering take longer, so there's less time for anything else. And of course I'm still finding scale as I go, though less of it than I expected.

Here are five things I've found interesting enough to stop and photograph, but not interesting enough to write a whole blog post about, in the last couple weeks:

1. Coffea arabica

Of the eight pots of Coffea seedlings I started back in February, I still have six. (The other two got sold at a consignment store in Iowa City.) I up-potted them to 6-inch/15 cm pots a couple weeks ago, because they were drying out before their turn in the watering cycle came around. I've been surprised at how quickly they've grown: I once believed that the plants we got in at the ex-job, about this tall, in 4-inch pots, were probably about a year old, but it seems more likely now that they were only six months. If even that.


2. Corn

The cornfield behind the house got harvested yesterday.¹ Sheba sometimes worries when the machinery shows up to do things to the field (understandable: it's a large, blurry object making growling noises in the back of the house where she plays: I'd be alarmed too), but she either didn't notice it this time or she's getting used to it.

This is slightly sad for me; I like when the field is planted in corn better than I like when it's planted in soybeans. Since we've lived here, they've alternated plantings, so next year will probably be a soy year.


3. Neoregelia 'Gazpacho'

As expected, the Neoregelia 'Gazpacho' has continued to bloom. Less expected is the fuzzy white fungus that appears to be growing on the spent flowers. I can't recall seeing this before, and my ongoing battle with fungus on the Euphorbias has me worrying more about this than I otherwise would, even though I doubt it's the same fungus.

Aside from that, though, the Neoregelia is behaving normally. It already has two good-sized offsets on it.


4. Ananas 'Mongo'

Speaking of offsets.

This is a lot faster than I was expecting. The fruit is still on the plant and everything, though the reduced light indoors has made it lose a lot of its color. Pretty sure all the true flowers have opened and closed already.


5. Spathiphyllum NOID

Finally, one of my older Spathiphyllums (I got it in January 2007) has self-pollinated a number of times, and has produced a couple hundred seeds, but the seeds have so far mostly fallen to fungus, instead of germinating. I had been hopeful that this spadix, which appeared to have been pollinated successfully, and which seemed to be developing normally, might provide another chance, but instead it started to get these white cauliflower-like bumps, and then I accidentally broke it off its stem while I was trying to get it ready for photos, so I never got to see the cauliflowers develop into whatever they were going to develop into. This may be a good thing, depending on why the atypical growth was happening, but I was a little bummed all the same.

There is one exciting thing to report on the whole Spathiphyllum-breeding project, though: my biggest peace lily (likely 'Mauna Loa' or 'Sensation'²), which I've had since January 2003, is blooming right now, after a long bloomless period. The spathe hasn't opened yet, and I don't know for sure if it will be interfertile with my other plants when it does, but I've wanted to propagate it for years now. In almost 11 years, it has never offset, so the only way I'm going to propagate it appears to be by seed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

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¹ (Also our first snow, though I didn't get a picture of that.)
² I'm guessing those cultivar names on the grounds that they're the main varieties of Spathiphyllum that I'm aware of which get really big. 'Mauna Loa' is one of the oldest and most popular of the big varieties, and 'Sensation' is the largest variety the growers' guide could come up with that's at all common -- supposedly 'Sensation' can reach 5 feet (1.5 m). Mine's not anywhere near 5 feet tall, but it's been indoors for 11 years, so some stunting would be understandable. Even under my non-ideal conditions, the leaves are all a solid 13-19 inches (33-48 cm) long, and it's vastly bigger than my other spaths.
Allegedly there are even peace lilies out there somewhere that can reach 9 feet (2.7 m) tall, though the largest I've personally seen was this guy:

Who was maybe 5 or 6 feet (1.5-1.8 m), and sold to us as 'Sensation.' Even if not the world's largest Spathiphyllum, I wouldn't want to run into it in a darkened alley or anything. Not considering some of the things I've said about spaths in the past.

Saturday morning Sheba picture

I had planned on taking a new Sheba picture to post today, but then it rained all morning yesterday, making that difficult. So instead you get a photo from August 2010, not terribly long after we first got her (in March 2010).

Sheba's been fine as far as I can tell, though her latest thing is dandruff. Terrible, terrible dandruff, from like her rib cage on back to her tail. (Though I doubt it would show up in photos -- it really was the rain that was the problem, I swear.) This has never happened before. She doesn't seem particularly bothered by it, and dandruff is (barely) preferable to bald spots, so we're not freaking out or anything, but still.

Saturday morning Sheba picture

I should maybe start giving Sheba treats after taking her picture. It's hard to get her attention.

Saturday morning buffalo picture

I know, I know, you were expecting Sheba. This is sort of (barely) Sheba-relevant, though.

I really enjoy riding around on side roads and gravel roads. I like the lack of traffic, and having the option to jump out of the car and take a bunch of pictures of a weed on the side of the road when the spirit moves me, but also it's just more interesting. There are more things to look at, you're a lot closer to them than you are on the highway, and you have more time to check them out because you're not going by them as quickly.

We haven't done much of this lately, because when we bought the house, we lost our main excuse for doing it. Also there are only so many roads in the area, and we'd already been on most of them, so there weren't many left over, and part of the fun is getting to see new things.

But a few weeks ago,¹ the husband and I got another chance to do some back-road wandering. We'd both cleared our schedules for the day, because we had a thing to do about an hour south of home and didn't know how long it was going to take. Also the weather was nice,² so after we were done, we took the opportunity to try to locate some new roads on the trip back.

And we did! Found about 30 miles of brand-new (to us) gravel, which was pretty exciting on its own, but then at one point, we wound up on . . . well, not quite a ridge, but it was a lot higher than any of the surrounding area. Maybe an unusually large hill? In any case, it was neat, and I was taking some photos of the view . . .

This photo benefits a great deal from being viewed full-size.
Also: remember this the next time someone describes Iowa as flat and boring. Admittedly some of it is, but it's a lot more varied than people know.
. . . when the husband rolled the car forward a little and suddenly there was a BUFFALO.

Several buffalo, actually, but only one of them was in a good position for photos.

This wasn't the first buffalo we've seen in Iowa or anything; we'd also run into some somewhere north of Cedar Rapids, about five years ago. But they're uncommon. At one point during the 80s, I remember being told that buffalo were the meat of the future, that they were so much lower in cholesterol than beef, and tasted great, and so on and so forth. Twenty-five years later, it's pretty clear that reality isn't going to catch up with the hype (ditto for ostriches, which were promoted the same way, at around the same time, and which we've only encountered once in our travels, also north of Cedar Rapids), but apparently some people are still raising them anyway.

So this was neat. Plus we could just sit there and watch it for a while.

Sheba took a while to notice the buffalo (she is sometimes a little slow to pick up), but once she did, she freaked the hell out. Growling and barking and whatnot, which initially seemed silly, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that no, that's reasonable: they're huge, we have no reason to think that Sheba's ever seen one before, and they do have some menace to them. I mean, it wasn't being aggressive or anything, but just the horns, the face and, well, the size.

The buffalo did not appear to feel threatened in any way by Sheba, but it did, as you see above, look up from what it was doing so see what all the commotion was. The husband and I felt bad about disturbing it, so we left shortly after Sheba started going bonkers. Still pretty cool, though. I realized while writing this post that I kind of . . . forget, sometimes, that buffalo didn't actually go extinct.

-

¹ (Same trip as this and this.)
² I am pleased with this summer's weather so far; I don't know if we've been consistently cooler than the historical average this year, but we've been consistently cooler than the last few years, at least.
Last summer at about this time, you'll remember, I was pretty miserable. This year . . . well, the official high temperatures for Iowa City on 23 and 24 July were 79F/26C and 77F/25C, and the forecast as I write this is for a solid week of temperatures at or below 82F/28C. Our forecast high for today, Saturday, is 70F/21C. In Iowa. In late July and early August. Even taking into account that the NWS always predicts a few degrees cooler than reality winds up being, to even be thinking about temperatures below 95F/35C at this time of year is incredible.
EDITED TO ADD: The NWS is now predicting a low temperature of **49F/9C** for us tonight. 49. In July. What.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

This picture is from last Sunday (30 June). We were coming back from a trip to Fairfield, and stopped just north of Brighton, in a public area for people to launch their boats into the Skunk River. There's a former bar (now apparently a house) along the road to the launch site, and a dog who lives there saw Sheba go by in the car and followed so she could introduce herself.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

For a while yesterday, Google/Blogger wasn't letting me upload this photo (I tried three or four times), so you almost didn't get to see this. But I tried again after a few hours, because I care, so you do.

You're welcome.

Not really any Sheba news to speak of; she's been getting some hot spots over the last month or so, probably because it's been a terrible year for biting insects (I didn't even know what a buffalo gnat was until this year, and I've lived in Iowa about 75% of my life.) and she had existing allergies to something already, which have been coming and going for a long time. I don't think the spots at her elbows are hot spots: I think that's just how her hair grows.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Technically Sheba's on the neighbor's lawn in this picture, not ours; our lot has a corner taken out of it for unknown historical reasons.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Spent a lot of yesterday moving plants outside, and then (after looking at the weather forecast) back inside again. The location is sort of new: the husband poured a slab of concrete on the north side of the garage last fall, which means I've got a decent-sized, mostly-shaded, level surface to fill up with plants this summer.

Unfortunately, they're not accustomed to outdoor light yet, so even if it had been warm enough to leave them out, I couldn't have done it. The side of the garage still gets some direct sun in the afternoon. Sunburn isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's worth going to a little extra trouble to avoid. So for a while, I'm going to be moving plants out every morning and then in again every night.

As for the pets, Sheba had a pretty nice Friday; both the husband and I were outside a lot, so she got to sniff every square inch of the back yard. Several times. Apparently it's fascinating.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Old picture (from last June), but I figure it will probably serve your Nina-photo needs. (If not, submit a refund request by e-mail. Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. Refund is not transferable. Restrictions may apply.)

I'm less than thrilled with the color and overall photo quality, which is probably why I didn't post it last June, but it's my understanding that all I have to do is tell you that I used an Instagram filter on it, and then you have to like it regardless.

Not really any Sheba news. There's been a lot of traveling in the last couple weeks, which is rough on her (she sometimes gets carsick), but she didn't actually get sick, so that was nice.

I've gotten a couple new plants in the process, neither of which is particularly interesting (Sansevieria trifasciata 'Jade Dwarf' and Ficus benjamina 'Starlite' are my guesses, though neither one was tagged with a cultivar name), but at least they were cheap ($5 and $3-something, respectively).

Sansevieria trifasciata NOID, possibly 'Jade Dwarf.'
A lot more money went toward large (12-14" / 30-36 cm) clay pots: many up-pottings have been on hold for several months because I needed a couple really big pots, so I could free up a few sorta big pots, which would free up some medium-sized pots, and so on.

Ficus benjamina NOID, probably 'Starlite.'
Also questionable judgment but at least not terribly expensive: I've been working on a couple new plant profiles at once, for the "book" or whatever it's going to turn out to be, and I had forgotten about the problem where when I'm writing a profile, I tend to convince myself to get more of whatever it is I'm writing about. Worse, the search results for certain plants will bring up seed-selling sites, and you know how I am about seeds. So on Thursday, I discovered that I'd ordered 100 mail-order Leuchtenbergia principis seeds in some kind of seed-purchasing blackout.

(I already have two Leuchtenbergia principis plants. I mean, I like them very much, but that was unnecessary. Fortunately, it should only set me back by $8.50, so I imagine I'll survive.)

I am now soliciting suggestions for what a person could do with 80 or 90 seedling Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings. (The prize for the best answer: an undetermined number of Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings.)