Top 18 PATSP Posts of 2012

2012 wasn't my, the blog's, or the plant collection's best year. I spent basically the entire year saying that I had too many plants,¹ and trying to reduce the collection to a more manageable size, and somehow managed to gain plants anyway (919 at the beginning of 2012, 1029 at the end). And then the scalepocalypse. And then I started having problems with fungus, a problem which is ongoing.² And then the scale came back.³

Also saying these are the top 18 posts is sort of misleading in two different ways: five of them are basically all the same post, so it's closer to the top 14 posts. Also "top" doesn't really mean anything except that I liked how they turned out and think you should see them if you happened to miss them the first time. They're not necessarily the most-viewed or most-commented or anything like that. Anyway.


18. Pretty picture: Cattleya aclandiae (16 April 2012)


I just liked how the photo turned out, basically.


17. Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica (4 September 2012)

Well, it was a big deal. You don't even know.


16. Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Peruflora's Cirila Alca (22 November 2012)


Also just a nice photo.


15. Random plant event: Spathiphyllum (5 December 2012)

In which I propagate a plant I don't even really like, at a time when I'm actually trying to reduce the number of plants I have, because I've realized propagation is possible. I still feel all conflicted about this.


14. Pretty picture: Rhyncholaelia digbyana (30 November 2012)


In which I attempt to liven up a dull blog post with an incomplete screenplay.


13. Random plant event: Aglaonema 'Maria,' with special guest star (8 March 2012)


The debut of the peat-bog-in-the-basement idea.


12. Cribplants, yo. (28 November 2012)

In which my thugged-out ass realizes that Snoop Dogg is a mothafuckin genius.


11. Elsewhere on the Web: Did We Win Already? (29 January 2012)

The sellers of the blue dyed orchids said, about a year ago, that they were going to admit on the tags that their plants wouldn't re-bloom blue. I wonder if that actually happened. Somebody should check.


10. Random plant event: Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold' (22 August 2012)

The rumors are true: Clivias actually can be induced to bloom. I was beginning to doubt.


9. The Very Slow and Occasionally Sticky Inferno (14 August 2012)

The scale outbreak depressed me. And led to all sorts of incidental badness. Which was also depressing. And is continuing to be depressing. And will likely be depressing in the future as well.


8. Pretty pictures: Masdevallia Sunset Jaguar 'Night Breed' (24 April 2012)


I really love this flower, though I'm unable to read the name without thinking about the "night cheese" joke on 30 Rock.⁴


7. Random plant event: Epiphyllum NOID (26 August 2012)

In which an Epiphyllum blooms in Iowa, and a family is brought together. (No, really.) Also there are many pictures.


2 to 6. Missing From Retail series
(Part 1, 25 November) (Part 2, 2 December) (Part 3, 8 December) (Part 4, 14 December) (Part 5, 20 December)

Sort of a weird choice, I guess, but it was nice to expand the horizons of the blog for a bit and talk about a new group of plants. Plus I learned some things about plants I was otherwise unfamiliar with.


1. The Brick Joke (16 January 2012)

And no, Pierson's Flower Shop and Greenhouses, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, never did contact me in response to the post, so I assume I'm still banned from the store. We never have occasion to go to Cedar Rapids anymore anyway (I'm sorry, Frontier! I miss you!), so this hasn't had much practical effect on my life. However, my initial feelings of well they kind of have a point and I understand why they might not want me there have had a year to . . . curdle.

And so now we have 2013. May I have less fungus and scale, fewer plants overall, and the same number of kidneys, next New Year's Day.⁵

-

¹ (Absolutely true, though!)
² The fungus story so far:
First I tried neem oil. That makes leafy Euphorbia and Pedilanthus types defoliate, and doesn't seem to have much lasting effect on the non-leafy stuff.
Then I tried spraying with basic copper sulfate in water, which seemed like the least nasty thing available for fungus control at the ex-job. Not only did that not help much, it clogged the sprayers almost immediately.
Then I asked for help from Cactus Jungle. They said hydrogen peroxide, so I've been doing that, but this doesn't seem to be helping either, especially since I can only do it every 14 days or so. And it makes the Pedilanthus defoliate.
The next thing to try is baking soda. That's not going to work either, but it's another thing I can spray inside the house that won't kill us all, so I'm going to try it anyway.
When baking soda has conclusively failed -- and it will -- only then am I going to allow myself to use an actual hardcore, mid-20th-century-type fungicide. I bought a bottle of chlorothalonil at the ex-job some time ago, then looked it up when I got home and kind of wished I'd bought something else, 'cause I don't want to use it in the house and it's too cold to use it outside.
If the chlorothalonil doesn't fix things -- and it's a polychlorinated benzene ring with two nitrile groups, so it ought to be able to kill everything -- I'm going to go back to the ex-job and buy some captan.
And if captan doesn't work either, I am going to burn the goddamned house down. THE MILDEW WILL NOT WIN.
³ (Truthfully, I'm depressed about all this. Probably going to take a hiatus for a while following today's post. I'd rather not think about plants any more than absolutely necessary right now. Plus, I have a bunch of plants in the basement that I need to dose with imidacloprid granules, and that's going to take some time.)
⁴ It's a throwaway gag where Liz Lemon is home by herself eating cheese. Getting the rights to use the song, even though it wasn't the whole song (or the right lyrics!), apparently cost the 30 Rock producers $40,000. That's some commitment to a joke, that is.
⁵ (For the record, I would also be okay with an increased number of kidneys, at least within reason.)

Cribplants, yo.

I've just become acquainted with gizoogle.net, a site which Snoop-Doggifies Google results and/or websites. What is Snoop-Doggification? Er. It's probably easiest to just show you.

Unfortunately, a lot of the formatting gets lost in the process, so the resulting blog doesn't look much like PATSP, but I was especially tickled to see what it did to the list of houseplant books from the first Missing From Retail list:

• Crockett, Jizzy Underwood. Crockettz Indoor Garden. Little, Brown n' Co., Boston MA / Toronto ON, 1978.
• Kramer, Jack. Da Illustrated Guide ta Flowerin Cribplants. Peerage Books, London, 1985.
• Powell, Charlez C. n' Dizzle M. Vining. Orthoz Complete Guide ta Successful Cribplants. Chevron Chemical Co., San Francisco CA, 1984.
• Stuckey, Maggie. Da Cribplant Encyclopedia. Doubledizzle Direct, Inc., Garden Citizzle NY, 1993.
• Griffith, Lynn P., Jr. Tropical Foliage Plants: A Growerz Guide. Ball Publishing, Batavia IL, 1998.

I would absolutely buy a book about cribplants.

I would also totally buy a plant named Bizzlebergia nutans, especially if I saw it described like this:

Bizzlebergia nutans (biatchz tears) be a pimped out plant, as far as I be concerned -- it grows fast, propagates easily, is hard as fuck ta kill, n' produces short-lived but straight-up horny-ass flowers up in tha late fall n' winter.

Also Gizoogle is quite a bit more honest than I am when it comes to the Musa photo from this post. My original:

I don't know what specific botanical characteristics distinguish Musa from Ensete.

The gizoogled version:

I don't give a fuck what tha fuck specific botanical characteristics distinguish Musa from Ensete.¹

Mixed feelings about this overall. On the one hand, I was extremely entertained for a couple hours on Monday night, but then I felt bad, because the Snoop-Doggified² versions were so much better than my original writing. But I got better. How did I get over this? By running other people's blogs through Gizoogle, and seeing how much improved everybody else was too.

As you might imagine, new layers of meaning would be added to any post where Carol talks about her hoe collection at May Dreams Gardens, but I prefer the garden fairy posts. (The most recent one emerges from Gizoogle signed by "Violet Chronicpea Maydreams," who is the "chizzle scribe fo' tha garden fairies n' tha garden fairy whoz ass likes ta put rocks along tha edgez of tha raised bedz up in tha Vegetable Garden Cathedral.") And I find the garden bloggers' bloom day inspirational quote much improved as well:

Our thugged-out asses can have flowers nearly every last muthafuckin month of tha year.
~ Elizabeth Lawrence

Moving on, here's Garden Rant, on the topic of which Presidents have had the best record on environmental protection issues:

A few muthafuckin years back I posted bout the ten chronicest prezs up in U.S, history, accordin ta dis crib. Back then, tha dopest recent environmental record was owned by Bizzle Clinton. It still is. Clinton created 17 freshly smoked up nationistic monumentz (4.6 mazillion acrez of preservation³), extended protections fo' wetlandz n' old-growth forests, n' banned off-shore drillin yo.

(Oh, word, Adrian?)
And I love Kylee's (Our Little Acre) account of finding a monarch caterpillar in her garden in November, mostly because I am amused by the milkweed --> milkchronic substitution:

But da most thugged-out astonishin muthafuckin thang I found was a monarch caterpillar fo' realz. A tiny one. It was so small, itz a wonder I even noticed dat shit. Da milkchronic it was on was mostly yellow n' dyin yo, but did sheezy some fresh freshly smoked up growth all up in tha top. Right back up in yo muthafuckin ass. Still, tha cold temperatures n' latenizz of tha season have caused most of tha milkchronic ta lose they leaves n' they're left as bare stems standin sentinel up in tha garden.

By now I'm pretty sure you get it, and since it was kinda stupid in the first place, I'll stop providing examples. Investigate further on your own, if you're interested.

DISCLAIMER:
OBVIOUSLY, none of the people who were "quoted" for this post said anything like what Gizoogle claims they said, however amusing I find the idea that they might start. I didn't ask permission first, because I'm not clear where the line actually is here -- I'm not reproducing text from other blogs, and the whole point of the humor is the obviousness that the people "quoted" would never, ever say any of these things, so it's hard for me to imagine a scenario in which the original authors would suffer any kind of material or emotional loss. But, if you are Carol, Susan, or Kylee, and you're offended by this anyway, for whatever reason, just leave me a comment or send an e-mail and I'll take it down and replace your bit with something from Fairegarden. (And if Frances is offended, I'll keep moving on until I find three bloggers who aren't. There is no shortage of bloggers.) And I'm sorry I didn't ask first; I expected you either wouldn't care or would be amused.
FURTHERMORE, no offense was intended toward PATSP readers. (Though y'all, at least, have been warned about the language, so I'm not going to take it very seriously if you claim to have been offended.)
ADDITIONALLY, Mr. Subjunctive does not, ordinarily, condone the use of the word "bitches" or any of its derivatives in reference to female humans,⁴ but there's a world of difference between "make me a sandwich, you dumb bitch" and "What up, my biyatch?", and I think this is clearly much, much closer to the latter. Though I can apologize for that too, if it'd make anybody feel better.
Peace out.

-

¹ This is not true in the very strictest sense. I care, but only to the degree that it makes it easier for me to tell which I'm looking at. If the distinctions are all in how the flowers are arranged or the shape of the cell walls or something that's not obvious to the eye, then no, I really can't care.
² I am aware that he is trying to change his name to "Snoop Lion." Dat don't even make no mothafuckin sense though, so I ain't even hearin it.
³ (It's the "4.6 mazillion acrez of preservation" part that does it for me.)
⁴ (and he's even a little uncomfortable using it for female dogs, as far as that goes)