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.

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.

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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.)

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

I woke up on Monday depressed, and remained that way. This is something that's happened before, though usually it spontaneously dissipates after about six hours without me having to do anything. Occasionally I have to watch Beavis and Butthead Do America to shake it.

Yesterday, it didn't dissipate after six hours. More like twelve (it started to lift around 8-8:30 PM last night). But I've scraped the bottom of the posts barrel¹ to bring you a post anyway, because I love you.

Though it's only a transmitted light post. I don't want to marry you or anything.

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

Spathoglottis NOID.

Zea mays.

Chlorophytum 'Charlotte.'

Aglaonema 'Maria.'

Cordyline fruticosa NOID.

Philodendron pinnatifidum 'Spicy Dog,' dying leaf. Unexpectedly, this is probably my favorite from this set.

Colocasia esculenta. Though this would be a close second place. Colocasia pictures are almost cheating, though, really.

Stromanthe sanguinea 'Triostar.' Turned out badly, which seems like it ought to be impossible with this plant. Not sure what to blame.

Caladium 'Cardinal.' Caladium pictures are cheats too. Also Codiaeum. Any of the "C" plants, really.

Episcia NOID.
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¹ Metaphor, obviously, but I picture it as being your standard staves-and-hoops barrel. Wooden (oak?), about 18 inches (46 cm) in diameter, and filled with white pieces of paper about the size of a receipt, which are the posts.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I was trying for a different picture than this, but Sheba doesn't like being in the cornfield and refuses to stay still long enough for a good photo.

The corn itself was more cooperative:

(I call it "Cathedral.")
In non-corn-related news, I have deactivated my Twitter account. This is because I have consistently found that spending large amounts of time on Twitter causes me to become easily irritated by everything, all the time, for reasons I do not understand or even have particularly plausible theories about. Which irritation I then usually take out on people on Twitter. I figured it was best to stop before I'd pissed everybody off.

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

Hey, remember last Saturday, when I was complaining about how cold and dry it'd been so far this winter? Well, on Saturday and Sunday, we were having an actual blizzard, officially, with the National Weather Service issuing Blizzard Warnings and making increasingly overwrought pronouncements about the inadvisability of trying to go anywhere: slick roads (there was rain for a few hours before the snow started), strong winds (20-30 mph / 32-48 kph sustained, with gusts to 50 mph / 80 kph), heavy snow coming down and then blowing around creating "near-whiteout conditions" and life-threatening wind chills (to -20F / -29C) and so forth.

But: not only did most of the actual snowfall happen at night when I wasn't awake to watch it, but we hardly got any snow at all, maybe two inches (5 cm) at most. (They had been predicting 3-4 in / 8-10 cm.) And, now it's that much colder, so I didn't get a warm-up or a snowfall, thanks a lot, Mr. Blizzard.

So I'm shunning winter until it decides to straighten up and be more reasonable. At least for today, it's summer on PATSP. We've got sunflowers, crotons, cannas, corn, all kinds of summery stuff.

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

Helianthus annuus. Not much of a photo, but the leaves aren't the photogenic part of the plant.

Platycerium sp., perhaps P. bifurcatum. Mine isn't doing so hot lately: possibly this is not a good indoor plant. Or maybe it's a great indoor plant and I'm just growing it badly.

Phytolacca americana. I was really impressed with pokeweed last summer this summer right now, in the summer, summer being the season it is presently. Weedy, sure, but also impressively ornamental -- I saw at least one eight-foot (2.7 m) specimen that was either deliberately grown or deliberately not cut-down, and it looked good. Hot-pink stems, multi-colored berries, birds like it: we could do worse, for weeds, is all I'm saying.

Ledebouria socialis. Yeah, this one's just kinda ugly.

Zea mays. There's something kind of Op Art about Zea mays photos: all those parallel lines that aren't parallel. I like it.

Synadenium grantii. Yes, you've seen this plant's leaves before, but so what? I like it.

Codiaeum variegatum NOID (most likely 'Petra'). This reminds me of photos of the Sun's surface: all yellow and orange with a few dark spots.

Ficus elastica 'Tineke,' or similar cv. I'm not sure what to say about this one either.

Ctenanthe lubbersiana. I passed up buying this plant at Lowe's this summer, repeatedly, because 1) it was very large and I didn't have room for it and 2) I wasn't sure I could keep it happy even if I found a way to make room for it. Lowe's is still the only place I've ever seen one, and I wonder occasionally whether I made the right call.

Canna 'Tropicanna.' Holy crap. It's a little over the top, I'll grant you, but this is my favorite. None of the others are even close.

Being Robin Ripley

A couple weeks ago, there was a multi-garden-blog kerfuffle that resulted from, as so many multi-garden-blog-kerfuffles do, a guest post at Garden Rant. The post in question was written by one Robin Ripley, blogger and published author, on the topic of "ugly" vegetable gardens. A number of bloggers then responded to the post with their own posts,¹ and it was all very exciting for two or three days, and then the whole thing kind of petered out.

Last summer's vegetable garden, before anything got planted in it. There are no after photos.
I don't have a vegetable garden at the moment, and probably won't this summer, either. I had one last year, and not only was it ugly, it also didn't produce anything but a few ears of barely-edible corn (I think I waited too long to pick it off the stalks), I didn't enjoy any part of the process and was left with no particular desire to do it again. We've gotten as far, this year, as buying a few seeds and having conversations about how one might plan a garden on our small and oddly-shaped lot, which conversations invariably end in me getting so overwhelmed by the details that I throw up my hands and declare that it's all too complicated-sounding, and, you know, what the hell, I don't even like being outside during the summer and can never remember to water anything outside, so why are we even talking about this in the first place. So I don't really have a dog in this fight; my vegetable garden will probably be both immaculate and imaginary.

However. Being sort of a sucker for drama,² I followed the links and read the posts and everything, and think both Ripley's defenders and detractors are aiming at the wrong things because people don't want to talk about the real reasons why her piece was obnoxious. Ripley herself claims to be "baffled" that people would take issue with her point that "that gardens take work, need maintenance and can be improved overall with some attention to design." So I thought that maybe there was still some value in dredging the whole thing back up again. To explain. Or possibly I just need to vent about it. Either way.

If you're sick of the whole argument, as I expect a lot of people are, you should probably skip this post and come back tomorrow.

'Super Beefsteak' tomato flower.
The reader may read the article in question for him/rself, if s/he doesn't trust my summary,³ but here's how it plays for me:

A. Americans are planting vegetable gardens in greater numbers than before, due to the recession.
B. However, some of these gardens will be ugly.
C. They're ugly partly because some gardeners don't know what they're doing, or they don't care what they're doing. They don't weed, mix in compost, plan out the design of their gardens in advance, buy good equipment, or try to make it look pretty.
D. These people are bad.
E. People who plant vegetable gardens and then don't take care of them make the rest of us vegetable gardeners look bad.
F. I'd rather these people didn't garden at all, than make me look bad.
G. Sometimes my garden looks bad too, but when that happens I fix it, because I pay attention to things [unlike these other, bad people, who do not⁴].
H. In conclusion, clean up your vegetable garden or you suck.

Ripley backpedaled (barely) once the negative responses started coming in. What she was trying to say, she says, is:⁵

A. I was just over-stating things a little; I got carried away, I exaggerated, I didn't mean all those horrible things you think I said. And also I didn't even say them.
B. I wasn't talking about your garden; I was talking about those other people's gardens, the ones abandoned because people took on more than they had time for.
C. If those other people (not you!) would pay attention to them and do a little planning ahead of time, their gardens could look really nice.
D. Probably they don't tend their gardens properly because they're so stupid and lazy that they think gardening is, or should be, as easy as pushing a button and getting instant vegetables.⁶
E. You probably shouldn't start a vegetable garden if you're not willing to work hard at it and keep up with it for the whole season.
F. People were angry with me for telling them they sucked, and will probably be mad at me again for telling them that gardening takes effort, because everybody is always so mean to me and I don't know why.

'Copenhagen Market' cabbage leaf, by transmitted light.
Now. Some of Ripley's defenders have tried to defend her using the argument well the title of the blog is Garden Rant, so she was supposed to rant about something, and she did, so what's everybody getting so bent out of shape about? This is a highly-efficient, time-saving approach, because it enables the speaker to excuse the post without having to read it first. But obviously there are a large number of super-offensive garden-related rants which nobody would excuse on the grounds that they're rants and the blog's name is Garden Rant and therefore it's okay. So I feel like this excuse is ridiculous on its face, as is the similar everybody's-entitled-to-their-opinions-and-isn't-it-great-that-we-can-all-have-different-opinions argument.⁷

I am told, and more or less believe, that Robin Ripley is a nice person, in person.⁸ And I doubt very much that she sat down to write the post with the intention of pissing off a large segment of the gardening blogosphere. Hence her surprise. But I'm baffled by her bafflement: what reaction could she possibly have expected to get?

Corn "tassel" (male inflorescence). From my own personal garden.
It's not only that her piece is likely to discourage any rookie vegetable gardeners who happen to come across it, as many people pointed out, and that's unfortunate; it's not even that she's ego-tripping on the subject to the point where she thinks that every unsightly vegetable garden is somehow a reflection on her vegetable garden, though she is.⁹ It's that she appears to be completely unable to even imagine that there might be people out there who want to grow a vegetable garden but don't have the money to buy better than a cheap Wal-Mart tomato cage, who don't have a husband they can draft for weeding duty at a moment's notice, who lack the experience and knowledge it takes to do these things correctly from the beginning, who don't have years' worth of gardening equipment stockpiled in their garden shed (maybe they don't have a garden shed at all, not even a little one) or the free time to weed as often as they know they should, much less the free time to be -- for fuck's sakes! -- making their own bread, cheese, wine, and pastries by hand, as the author bio at Garden Rant states.¹⁰

She is, in short, forgetting to appreciate that she has things really damn good, better than most of the people reading her post. She has more experience, help, equipment, time, land, and money than most people who want to grow a vegetable garden have, and then she's telling these other people that if they can't grow a garden that meets her exacting specifications, they shouldn't bother to try.¹¹

Flower and developing fruit of 'Golden California Wonder' bell pepper.
And then she's surprised when they respond that she should go fuck herself. If someone came up to you on the street and told you If you can't do any better at dressing yourself than these rags you're wearing, you should stop going out in public, what would you do? Smack them? Tell them to go fuck off? This is that. The offense readers of the Garden Rant post registered is offense of this sort. And they're not going to accept "What? Dressing yourself is something to take seriously, and it takes thought beforehand and effort. You can't just throw anything on and expect people to shower you with fashion awards. And maybe if they're not going to take it seriously, maybe they oughta stay inside," as an apology.

We do all have these moments where we forget that things are easier for us than they are for other people, and usually we can just be embarrassed about that in relative privacy and then go on, as opposed to having it publicly dissected across Twitter and a large chunk of the gardening blogosphere by a number of otherwise total strangers. So I do feel for Ripley a bit.

But it's hard to feel for her very much. I mean, I'd sympathize more if she had, anywhere in the original post or its defense, acknowledged that her particular situation makes it easier for her to plant and maintain a large, attractive vegetable garden than some other people's lives permit. Or even if she'd recognized that other people's ugly vegetable gardens are only her problem to the degree that she wants them to be. Instead, she complains about six-year-old soccer players getting trophies for showing up, because six-year-olds thinking they're good at soccer when they're only mediocre RUINS EVERYTHING.¹² Or something.

The basic point about scaling your garden to the size you can reasonably manage is, no doubt, a good one. It's too bad Ripley was more interested in berating the new gardeners who will get this wrong than she was in providing information that might help them get it right, all for the sake of . . . whatever she got out of it. Publicity, I suppose.

Corn stalks at sunset.
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¹ The ones I've run across so far, in the order I ran across them:

• Gardenbloggers.com,
• In the Garden Online,
• My Skinny Garden,
• Snarky Vegan,
• Read Between the Limes,
• Bloomingwriter,
• Happy Hobby Habit,
• The Kat's Garden,
• The Dig-It-Yourself Garden,
• About.com Container Gardening,
• My Northern Garden,
• Terra Mirabilis,
• The Home Garden,
• Gardening in My Rubber Boots.

² My original reaction to the article was to skim it and conclude that there was nothing relevant to me in it; my initial response to the controversy was bewilderment that anyone was taking it seriously. So many people were reacting so strongly, though, that I took another look.
³ Which is blunt, but I think accurate.
⁴ This part isn't stated that directly in Ripley's post, of course. But I don't know how else you're supposed to interpret sentences like "When [random unprettiness] happens, I move into action," and "Above all, we pay attention," in context of the rest of the post.
⁵ This abridged version is a little less accurate and less blunt, because, okay, I was amusing myself a little. But see if you can't find more or less these exact sentiments in the linked post anyway.
⁶ Because I expect people to object to this particular item more than the others, and to say things like but I never said anybody was lazy or stupid! I didn't even use those words in the post: Ripley says this in the follow-up post:

Our instant gratification society has led some of us to believe that any effort is a good effort and everything should be as easy as pushing a button. I believe we do a disservice to would-be gardeners by perpetuating the myth that they can grow luscious rows of bountiful vegetables without putting in some effort.

     Both these sentences are pretty transparent straw man arguments. W/r/t the second sentence, do you know any garden blogger who has ever suggested that vegetable gardening is effortless? Can you even imagine someone doing so without being roundly mocked by all the other garden bloggers? I mean, maybe the occasional marketer will gloss over the less pleasant aspects of growing a garden, but, you know. Fish gotta swim, marketers have to mislead.
     The first sentence bothers me quite a bit more, not just because it's a straw man, but also because there's something kind of icky about the psychology there. Any effort is not a good effort, Ripley would have it. Some effort is bad, is insufficient, is failure. This is an interesting perspective. I wonder about the interior life of a person who believes that there's no amusement or learning to be had even from a venture that fails to produce the expected results.
     As far as I'm concerned, any effort is a good effort if you get something out of it: maybe you had fun doing it, maybe you learned how to do it better next year, maybe you learned it's not for you. I'd argue they're still valuable even if you can't eat them. By the same token, tremendous effort resulting in an enormous harvest of food isn't a good effort if you hated every second of it or plan to do it all exactly the same way next year, as far as I'm concerned. Would Ripley agree? I have no idea.
⁷ It's true. Everybody is entitled to their opinions, and to say them if they wish. But sometimes expressing stupid or offensive opinions has negative consequences. Most people have learned this by adulthood, and express or hold back their ideas according to the kinds of consequences they're likely to have. I note here for the record that Ripley herself has not, to my knowledge, tried to defend herself this way, though some of her defenders elsewhere around the net have, which at least tells me that she's smarter than some of her supporters.
⁸ Though one suspects that now that I've posted this, she wouldn't necessarily be all that nice to me, were we to meet. That's fair, though. Also I wonder about the niceness of anyone who can talk about our "instant gratification society" non-ironically. The phrase was practically invented to dismiss, insult, or claim superiority to whole populations of people, typically either younger people or Americans, for the crime of . . . what? Wanting things to be less frustrating, painful, or time-consuming? Have humans ever not been after instant gratification?
⁹ The stench of it's all about meeeeeeeeeeee permeating both the original post and the response to its criticism is pretty damn off-putting. We all have moments of thinking that the universe revolves around us (though most of the time people recognize the truth, which is that it revolves around meeeeeeeeeee, Mr_Subjunctive) and I'm tempted to give Ripley a pass on that basis. However, neither the original post nor the defense of the post mention why any of us should care what Robin Ripley thinks of our garden's appearance. I mean, yes, perhaps people would have a better time vegetable gardening if they planned things out first, and maybe people should know ahead of time that it's going to take a lot of work. But Ripley's life is going to be pretty much the same whether the vegetable gardens of the world are visions of heaven on earth or monstrosities that need to be burnt to the ground and covered with concrete so nothing can ever be grown there again. The only points she makes in either post that might pertain to other people in a non-aesthetic way are, one, that abandoned gardens may harbor pests and diseases which could spread to other gardens, and two, some people can't grow vegetables in their front yard because some homeowners associations prohibit them, because abandoned gardens look ugly.
     These are both semi-legitimate, but I'm not sure the damage in either case is so severe that it justifies telling people not to try if they're not going to do it right. I mean, one is likely to deal with bugs and diseases regardless of who's gardening near you. Bugs and diseases are part of gardening. And homeowners associations are not static, unchanging facts of nature: they're people, and the opinions of people can be changed. Changing the rules of homeowners associations would be a lot easier if there were a lot more people in your neighborhood who also wanted to garden. If all the people who would stand with you against the homeowners association have been told that they may as well not try planting a garden if they're not going to get it right the first time, then no, you're probably never going to change the minds of your HA, but that's not exactly the fault of people who grow ugly gardens.
¹⁰ There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with making your own cheese. We should all be so lucky to have resources and time that permit us to do so. No doubt we'd be a lot happier, eat better, and so forth. The point where making your own cheese crosses a line is when one starts throwing phrases like "instant gratification society" at the people who don't have those resources or time, as though they could make their own cheese but are just too lazy to do so.
¹¹ There's an interesting moment in the original Garden Rant post where Ripley segues subtly from actual things anybody probably should do in a vegetable garden, for best results, like enriching the soil with compost before planting, weeding early and frequently, and designing gardens with paths that will enable them to tend the garden comfortably, into a list of things which are clearly only personal preferences and aren't even necessarily relevant to the aesthetics, like including edible flowers for color, adding artwork and sculpture, and planning for chairs in which to sit and contemplate the garden. I'm sure these things are nice things to have, if they're the sorts of things you like, but they're also a matter of taste and opportunity. Also: we do not all live on "small" (21 acres = "small") Maryland homesteads and consequently do not necessarily have space for some of that crap.
¹² Please. They're six. At six years old, half of them think they're going to grow up to be Big Bird, for fuck's sakes. If they truly can't play soccer, they're going to figure it out sooner or later.

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

Having a really bad day so far (I'm writing this on Wednesday night), and frankly Tuesday wasn't anything to get real excited about either. The election results from Maine are a lot of this, but it also turns out that at some time in the last two weeks, I've lost a plant (a couple Ficus maclellandii cuttings I managed to root, which were starting to really get going in a 6-inch pot). And by "lost a plant," I don't mean that it died: I mean I have no idea where it is. It's just disappeared. This has never happened before. (UPDATE: Ficus was located around 11 AM local time, hiding behind a large Asplundia. In retrospect, of course, I totally remember putting it there.)

As far as the Maine stuff goes, I don't know what I could say that wouldn't be completely obvious. It's hardly the definitive answer about Maine or anything else, it worries me w/r/t Iowa, and I am angry and disappointed on behalf of the gay and lesbian Maine residents who were looking forward to being able to marry their partners. I can only imagine how devastating.

Can pretty pictures cheer me up? Doubtful. But they're unlikely to make stuff worse, so we may as well try. Limited commentary, compared to previous batches, because I kinda ran out of time. But given my mood, you don't really want the commentary anyway.

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

Selenicereus chrysocardium.

Abutilon theophrasti (velvetleaf). Big Iowa cornfield weed: lots of money is spent on killing these. I like the plant, personally. My dad, memorably, informed me once that if you find yourself in a cornfield with an urgent need to go to the bathroom, velvetleaf works well as a toilet paper substitute. I have, thankfully, never needed to check this out, though I wouldn't be surprised, I guess. Considerably more detail is visible if opened in separate window.

Zea mays (corn).

Peperomia obtusifolia 'Gold Coast.'

Dracaena reflexa 'Song of India.'

Furcraea foetida 'Medio-Picta.'

Callisia fragrans. Not particularly difficult to grow, and the purple color it turns in full sun is pleasant enough. Weirdly impossible to find for sale.

Dieffenbachia 'Sterling.'

Aglaonema 'Brilliant.' A really delightful plant; one of my best-behaved, prettiest, and all-around wonderfullest varieties of one of the best-behaved, prettiest, and all-around wonderfullest plants.

Caladium 'Carolyn Whorton.'