Unfinished business: Vinca, Murraya, shoplifter

Just three odds and ends today, referring to previous posts, plus decorative but unrelated photos of Reiger Begonias.

1) The Vinca minor sport:

A few days back, I realized that WCW hadn't seen the Vinca sport yet, so I went and found it and showed it to her, expecting her to be as excited as I was, and she was all like, "Oh. That's 'Wojo's Gem.'"

It's who?

It turns out that there is already a plant on the market like ours, so this is not the way we're going to make our millions. Oh well. I was even told that it was a fairly vigorous grower, considering how little green tissue it contains, though I was told that by a salesman so I'm not sure if this is true. In any case, we still have the Dracaena, which is doing okay so far.


2) The rescue Murraya paniculata trees:

Too little, too late. Or possibly too much too late. Whatever it was, we were too late, and there wasn't anything saveable. Which may be just as well; the one Murraya paniculata we've got already is kind of a pain to water and move around, and these two were both bigger than that.


3) The shoplifter:

He came back in. I had to go outside to check his vehicle to make sure it was the same guy, and it was, and so then I kind of, um, ran up to him and let him know how this whole cutting thing worked, though I was pretty thrown by him showing up again, and there were a lot of words trying to come out of my mouth all at once so I'm not sure how coherent I was actually being.

I'd report his general attitude on the situation, except it was hard to read: he said something to begin with to the effect of, well, you know I'm doing this tissue-culture thing, and I (not wanting to get another full lecture about this and have the conversation derailed already) was like, yes, yes, I know why you were taking them but that's not really the point. He also gave me kind of an eye-roll (not a literal eye-roll, it was kind of the audio equivalent, whatever that is) about So what you're saying is that if I want the leaves, I should buy the plant, which was irritating because 1) I dislike it when people beat me to my conclusions, and 2) I dislike it more when they beat me to the wrong conclusions. The actual answer, of course, is that if you want the leaves, you can take just the leaves; you just have to acknowledge that you're taking something, and work out a price at the front counter. Or, better still, ask people about a price before you go taking anything.

The whole conversation was kind of baffling, as was the previous one, because this is all stuff that we take so for granted. It's incredibly weird and awkward to be in the position of trying to explain, you know, capitalism to someone in his late 30s / early 40s. ("You see, there's this place called the U.S. Mint, which is where they make the money, and then they send it to the banks, and people exchange the money for goods and services with one another. . . .")

And then finally, it was even more frustrating, because for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, the front counter person, who wasn't around for the original theft but who had, nonetheless, been filled in on that when this guy came in, declined to charge him retroactively for the cuttings, even after he brought the idea up to her. I wasn't there for any of that, though, and didn't find out until yesterday. In the long scheme of things, it's not that big of a deal, and he did buy another plant so we're probably pretty well covered, but it's still annoying to go through this whole emotional thing and then have it not pan out at the end because the cashier didn't feel comfortable charging the guy for something just because he didn't have it (the thing she was charging him for) on him right at that moment.

But at least it's been more or less resolved.

Random plant event: Vinca minor sport

Another new little mutant (the first mutant is still doing fine, though it's not growing very fast, which has me a little concerned. Not that it should be growing fast -- it's a Dracaena -- but until it's big enough that we can propagate it, there's only the one plant, and we don't have a backup should something go wrong, and not having a backup makes me very nervous indeed), this time on a Vinca minor.



The picture isn't the greatest; it's hard to get a good close photo with my camera. Or maybe it's easy and I just haven't figured out how yet. But this is good enough that you can see the basic coloration scheme, and also what the parent looked like (the parent is on the left). I don't have high hopes for this as a patentable plant, just because there's so little green area on the leaves that I'm guessing it's not going to be very vigorous, but it'd be a pretty striking filler plant if it could be kept from reverting. So we'll see how it goes.

Work-related: the Vincaphant and the "C Game"

A lot of the outdoor spring stuff we get in arrives in trays of what are called "plugs." (I'm told this is because they're roughly the same size and shape as a spark plug.) They're just seedlings that have been germinated in a tiny plastic cell (depending on the plant, this can be as small as half-inch / 1 cm squares), and by the time we get them, they're often getting pretty close to rootbound already.

Tray of Vinca minor seedlings -- or is it?

A lot of what needs to be done in the late winter, then, is to transfer these plugs to whatever container we want to sell them in; for some plants, this means "six-packs," which are roughly hand-sized plastic trays containing six cells, each of which contains a plant. (There are also four-packs, and for some plants we plant plugs directly into a three- or four-inch pot, or even a gallon pot, something which I don't advise you to do at home with just any old seedling.) The transplanting is a long and tedious process, which I sort of wish I could do more of, because instead of long and tedious but simple and comprehensible, I wind up running all over the place putting out (metaphorical) fires and being interrupted by somebody or another every time I turn around. (I tried to deal with this by just not turning around, but that didn't work either: I still got interrupted, and I kept getting further and further away from stuff besides.)

It's done now, but a large part of the last week or so has been Vinca minor, "Lesser Periwinkle," which I have issues with right off the bat because there's also a Vinca major, and a "Madagascar Periwinkle" (Catharanthus roseus). If the plant we are doing is in fact Vinca minor, then I'm irritated because it seems obvious to me that the names should be the other way around, and major should be minor and vice-versa. But from looking around on-line, I think actually the plant I've been calling Vinca, because everybody else calls it Vinca, is actually Catharanthus, which all makes me want to take my ball and go home, because it's hard enough to learn all these names without people deliberately trying to confuse the issue by calling things by the wrong name.

Anyway. So but the point is, potting up plugs basically works like this, for six-packs: you take a six-pack, fill it with dirt, water the dirt, make six holes in the six cells of (now-wet) dirt, stick six plugs in the six holes, and then move on to the next. In practice, this is done more assembly-line, with lots of watering, then lots of hole-poking, and so forth, but that's the basic process.

And this gets really, really boring in short order. Since we don't have the teevee or the intertubez to occupy us, we have to make our own fun, which can be difficult to do. What one of my fellow pluggers and I did was, we started to "draw" pictures in the trays by pulling plugs out selectively, sort of like a Lite-Brite in reverse. Co-worker did a credible bird head (aiming for a puppy, but what're you going to do), which I didn't get a picture of, but I came up with a marginal elephant, which I did get a picture of, and which I referred to at the time as the "Vincaphant," though now I'm thinking it should probably actually be the "elepharanthus" instead, since the more I look at the pictures the more convinced I am that what we're planting is not Vinca at all.

The Vincaphant / elepharanthus.

The other good way I've found to stay entertained while doing mindless work is called the "C Game," and is something that we used to do during long tedious periods at a previous job. The "game" is just, you take turns naming words that begin with a pre-specified letter (which at the other job used to be the letter C, most of the time, because those games seemed to be the most entertaining and long-lived, but which I played with M for the one attempt so far at this job, and it went okay. From previous experience, I know that J and K are not good letters; R, S and T are all pretty workable.). This is every bit as easy and mindless as it sounds (an advantage, because you don't want something that's going to slow down the tedious work you're doing), but it's also unexpectedly fun sometimes. Also you'd be surprised how quickly you run out of words.

The C Game has no scoring: you can't use a word that has already been used by someone else, and plurals are discouraged. You only "lose" if you give up and drop out of the game of your own volition. There's an "oooo" bonus (where everybody says "oooo" admiringly) if you come up with groups of words in a row that are 1) meaningful as a group and 2) start with the same letter, e.g. "belly button" for the letter B, "Marilyn Monroe" for M, or "chocolate chip cookie" for C, but nobody keeps track of who's gotten more "oooo" points; it's just something that can happen. I don't anticipate a lot of C-Game time, because for obvious reasons it only works when a bunch of people are all stuck together for long periods: normally we're bringing stuff in and taking stuff out kind of all the time, so there are constant interruptions. But try it yourself if you like.