The Very Slow and Occasionally Sticky Inferno

So here's what's been going on.

Watering the plants has always been time-consuming and tedious, but it got worse in April. I've been watering almost everything in the house on a 14-day rotation. A lot of the plants would prefer more frequent checks than that, but 14 days is what I'm able to do, so they either live with getting watered every 14 days, or they die, or I make a special exception for them and check them every seven days. Previously, the special exception category was limited to about 10-15 plants on a small table in the plant room, but in April, I decided that about 500 plants in the basement also needed to be getting checked every 7 days, because a lot of them were seedlings or newish cuttings or plants that are just really drought-sensitive, and they wouldn't survive if I tried to keep them on the 14-day schedule.

What this has meant is that instead of checking about 1000-1050 plants every 14 days, I was suddenly checking about 1500-1600 plants every 14 days. So I took the most tedious and time-consuming part of the hobby and made it like 50% worse, basically.

And because of the extra work, I thought to myself at some point in May or June or probably both: I bet I'm never going to be lying on my deathbed thinking, "Gee, I wish I'd spent more time watering plants." And as I started mailing out plants to people I was selling to or trading with, I started fantasizing about how I could scale back the collection in a way that didn't involve outright killing anything, because that always makes me feel bad.

Open this in its own tab and you can even see its disgusting little legs.
And then the scaling back started to happen, in the most literal way possible: I started finding scale insects on the plants. One plant at the end of March. A handful at the beginning of May. And then at the end of June, the floodgates opened and I was finding scale everywhere:

1 Alpinia zerumbet variegata (plant room; 31 March; discarded)
3 Alworthia 'Black Gem' (basement; 1 May; discarded)
1 Aloe NOID (basement; 8 May; discarded)
1 Albuca bracteata (basement; 28 May; treated)
1 Strelitzia reginae (plant room; early June?; treated)
1 Aloe polyphylla (basement; 26 June; discarded)
1 Philodendron squamiferum (living room; 27 June; treated)
1 Agave desmettiana, variegated (basement; 28 June; discarded)
1 Agave titanota (basement; 2 July; treated)
1 Agave americana (basement; 2 July; treated)
2 Agave 'Blue Glow' (basement; 2 July; treated)
2 Agave lophantha (basement; 2 July; treated)
3 Aloe vera (basement; 3 July; discarded)
3 Gasteraloe x beguinii (basement; 3 July; discarded)
1 Aloe x 'Silver Ridge' (basement; 3 July; discarded)
13 Alworthia 'Black Gem' (basement; 3 July; discarded)
5 Hoya polyneura (basement; 9 July; discarded)
1 Philodendron hederaceum micans (basement; 11 July; discarded)
1 Philodendron erubescens 'Red Emerald' (basement; 11 July; treated)
4 Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana (basement; 12 July; discarded)
1 Ficus benjamina 'Black Diamond' (basement; 12 July; treated)
1 Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x ? (basement; 16 July; discarded)
1 Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x ? (basement; 23 July; treated)

I think there were three separate infestations here, based on what plants were affected and when I noticed.

The first plant, the Alpinia, was I think was a single isolated infestation: I don't know where the scale could have come from, since I hadn't brought anything new into that area, but the plant was stressed, so it's possible it had a low-grade infestation for a long time, and then it got a lot worse really fast when it got stressed.

Scale on the Alpinia.
The second infestation barely counts: somebody sent me a cutting in June that had some scale on it, but I found them pretty much immediately, and it wasn't very advanced, so I think that's not going to be a big deal either.

And then the third. I think it came in on an Aloe polyphylla I received in December as a gift, because the outbreaks have all been taking place on plants that had been grown near the plant in question at one point or another. This is the infestation that swept the basement, might still be sweeping it, and what's caused all the troubles.

It's now been a couple weeks since any new scale was spotted, so possibly the worst is over. For a while there, though, I'd have to throw out more plants every time I watered, and that was depressing as hell.

But did I let myself sink into despondency and depression? Hell, no! I took action! For a few plants that I suspected had been exposed, but which I couldn't find any scale on, I decided to get out there ahead of the infestation and spray neem oil on them, to stop the infestation before it became visible. Which sounds like a good idea, right?

Yes. Well. You know how the directions on neem oil say not to use it on plants that are in direct sun, or that will be exposed to sun within a few hours of application, and all that? They should probably also add fluorescent lights to that warning, because within 24 hours, I'd completely defoliated two small Euphorbia trigona cuttings, and produced a few bleached spots and several ominous dark brown blisters on my baby Agave victoriae-reginaes. The former have bounced back, but the latter look to be permanently disfigured:

Agave victoriae-reginae, neem damage.
Which was even more discouraging, not that I learned my lesson. I then sprayed a plant room Euphorbia milii and Pedilanthus tithymaloides with neem because there was some kind of fungus that had been growing on their leaves. The Euphorbia responded by dropping about 95% of its foliage, immediately. The Pedilanthus was less of a drama queen about it, and only lost about 30% of its leaves, over the space of a month. Either way, though.

Euphorbia milii, after neem oil treatment for fungus. It was technically a success, I suppose, in that I'm no longer even remotely concerned about the fungus. Probably what happens next here is that I take cuttings and start new plants, but I haven't tried that yet.
Also, some of the Agaves I treated with neem and stuck outside also bleached (no blistering, though); they'll probably come back inside again in the fall, because the scale is probably not a problem anymore, but it'll be sad regardless, since they looked better when they had scale but no sunburn: I didn't really have the time or means to try to ease them into the outdoor light, and we don't have much for shady spots.

So then I started sinking into despondency.

All this was happening on top of the usual plant attrition, too. Not saying I encourage it or anything, but it's normal for me to lose a plant here, a plant there, for various reasons over time, and this was an exceptionally good summer for that.

I finally had it with Crassula ovata 'Gollum' and threw the lot out, because they persisted in developing a stupid fungus (maybe the same fungus, maybe a different one; I have no idea) even though I told them not to, and I didn't have a way to make them stop if they weren't going to listen.

The Salvia elegans all dried out (even getting checked weekly, they still dried out!) and died, save for one, which had a round of spider mites and is only barely alive now.

The Aeschynanthus radicans all gave up due to underwatering.

I threw out most of the Gynura aurantiacas I had when became clear that nobody was ever going to want to buy one. This is something I should probably have learned last year, but I'm slow.

The Fatshedera x lizei got spider mites and was thrown out. In fairness, I should note that I'd been expecting that to happen for almost two years, so it should probably get some kind of posthumous medal.

One of the Hatioras ("Easter cactus") imploded, the way they do.

And so on.

It was basically like the plant collection had caught fire. A very slow, and occasionally sticky, inferno. Everything was sort of slowly falling apart: scale, drought, scorching, defoliation, 50% more watering to do, spider mites, and fungus. It also wasn't getting any better. I had no way to know what plants might go bad next. There wasn't much I could do about it. And when I tried to do something about it, I mostly just made things worse.

The upshot of all this being that for about two or three weeks, I basically hated my plants. I didn't want to think about them, talk about them, or take pictures of them, and I sure as hell didn't want to water them, because the surest way to find something horrible hiding in your plant collection is to pick them up and look at them. Which you have to do, in order to water the way I water. (I still did take care of them, of course, because I recognized that I'd probably like them again eventually, and that there was no point punishing the healthy plants upstairs for the scale infestations of the plants downstairs. I just hated doing so more than usual.)

Echinacea 'PowWow Wild Berry,' at the ex-job, with what I believe to be aster yellows disease. PATSP has an official celebratory flower (Gazanias), so it seems only appropriate that PATSP should have an official flower of depression (It's pretty amazing that I've gotten by without an official depression flower for four and a half years, honestly.), and this was kind of the best I could come up with. My apologies to any Echinacea fans in the audience.
It's now been a couple weeks since I've found a new scale infestation. (New mealybugs as of last Wednesday, alas, but the scale seems to have slowed down.) In the last couple weeks, the plant collection has done two big things which I am choosing to interpret as apologies too. I won't tell you what those are yet, but there should be posts about them in the relatively near future. So we're getting back to the point where I'm able to appreciate plants again, somewhat, but I'd still rather not spend a lot of time thinking about them.

The blog, consequently, will be a bit up in the air for a while. I'm officially no longer on hiatus, but I'm probably not going to be posting very often, and I'll probably only be doing that when something exceptionally cool happens. And I'll keep going like that until . . . something changes and I start doing something else, I guess. Your guess is pretty much as good as mine right now.

Unfinished business: Pandanus amaryllifolius

You may remember that last week I was very excited about receiving a Pandanus amaryllifolius I'd ordered from Gardino Nursery. I placed the order on a Friday, had confirmation it had shipped the following Tuesday, and received it in the mail on Friday again. Which, one week between placing the order and receiving the plant isn't bad at all.

And for about the first ten minutes, I was pretty happy. It was packed well, and the plant was a decent size:

The plant. Pot diameter is 5".
So naturally I set about trying to smell it, because smelling the plant and figuring out why anybody would want to cook with it was the entire point of getting one in the first place. And . . . nothing. The plant itself doesn't appear to have an odor. So I pulled off a leaf and sniffed the broken end. Nothing. Then I furiously ground the leaf between my hands and sniffed. I'd describe the smell as being about equal parts cut grass and mushrooms, but not the good, earthy, fresh-smelling kind of mushroom smell. It was more the musty, quiet-rot kind of mushroom smell.

So this was already pretty disappointing already. (The husband suggests that maybe there's no pleasant aroma until the leaves are cooked, that heat is a critical ingredient in the process. Which is possible. I won't know for a while, for reasons I'll get to.) I took some pictures to document the plant anyway, because even if it looks pretty much the same as P. veitchii, I like P. veitchii, and amaryllifolius at least has much tinier marginal spines on the leaves (they're still there, but only barely, and they don't hurt, plus amaryllifolius doesn't appear to have any spines at all under the leaves along the midrib, which is helpful). And I try to get pictures of all new plants anyway, in case I want to write a post about them later, or need to prove that they've grown, or whatever. And picture-taking went fine for a little while.

And then I turned the plant to get a different angle and discovered -- mealybugs!

See 'em?

How about now? Makes me shudder just to look at the picture.
So. More picture-taking, followed by an e-mail to Gardino, showing them the mealybugs and asking for a refund or replacement.

["Jeopardy" music plays]

A couple hours later, I got an e-mail back from Gardino, saying that of course they'd send a replacement, and they were very sorry for any inconvenience, and so on, which was both A) an impressively quick response and B) more or less exactly what I wanted to hear. I was told that someone would contact me within a couple days regarding the replacement.

On Sunday night, someone contacted me about the replacement. Specifically, he apologized, again, and said he could send a clean replacement but wanted to know whether I wanted them to treat the plant first for bugs, just in case some were hiding or whatever. (Which is fair: mealybugs will hide.) I e-mailed back Sunday night to say that I did want the plant sprayed. (I wasn't planning on cooking with it anyway: my interest had always only been in smelling the plant.) And that was the last of the communication, as of Wednesday (yesterday) night. I don't doubt that they're sending a replacement plant, but I'm surprised they didn't say when they were sending it.

I'm undecided about whether or not it's worth hanging on to the first plant. I can't imagine I'll ever trust it not to have bugs, but at the same time, throwing it out seems like an overreaction. So far, I've given it a rubbing-alcohol rubdown, followed by being neemed to within an inch of its life for three or four days in a row, and then I put it outside on the north side of the plant room, this being the only spot I had available for plants that couldn't handle full sun where it wouldn't get mealybugs on anything else I cared about.

The Neoregelia to the left is the same plant that had scale a while back, and then flowered. It still has scale bumps on it, but I'm not sure if those are actual living bugs, or just dead scale that just haven't fallen off yet. I couldn't find any on the tops of the leaves, or the undersides -- all I see are around the base. But I've decided not to continue taking the risk. The Neoregelia will continue to live outside until it burns up, cleans up, or freezes.
So overall, Pandanus amaryllifolius has been a disappointment so far, though very little of that is Gardino's fault, and they've been very nice about fixing the part that was their fault. So I'd buy from them again, why not.

The question remains: I would like to know how one is supposed to get a pleasant, edible-type smell out of the plant, 'cause musty grass doesn't really do it for me. James Missier? Autumn Belle? Anybody?

Mealybugs and You

There are really a pretty limited number of pests that attack houseplants, when it comes down to it. Mealybugs, spider mites, scale, whiteflies, aphids, fungus gnats, and, if we're feeling really charitable and want to make them feel important, thrips. None of these are good for your plant, but some of them are considerably worse than others. And this guy:



is pretty much as bad as it gets.

There are a number of species of mealybug,¹ and all of them are evil. The most significant, as indoor pests go, are the citrus mealybug (Planococcus citri) and the long-tailed mealybug (Pseudococcus longispinus), though there are others, including root mealybugs (Rhizoecus spp.). Root mealybugs are the vilest creature ever dreamed up in the fires of hell, and are too distressing for me to even discuss in detail here. If your plant has root mealybugs, not only should you give up on saving it immediately (you can try to take cuttings, maybe, if it's that kind of plant), but you should put it and the soil in which it was planted into a trash bag, seal the trash bag well, bury the trash bag, carve a granite monument to warn future generations of the dangers buried in that spot, and then salt the earth above the burial site so that no living thing will ever grow there again.²

But what we're talking about is the more ordinary (still evil!) foliage mealybug. These are usually light gray or white (occasionally kind of barely lavender or pink), and if they're off by themselves, they're perfectly oval-shaped. More often, though, they appear sort of ridged, like in the picture below,³ and have a sort of fringe around the outside of the oval. They may also be partly hidden under a fluffy, cottony-looking layer of wax, which is almost always pure white. The long-tailed mealybugs will have, guess what, long tails as well. All mealybugs tend to congregate in more cramped areas: around a cactus areole⁴ like on the picture, or in a leaf axil. ⁵

Pay attention to that "water" droplet. It'll come up again later.

Here's a typical day in the life of a mealybug:

You wake up in the morning and, if you are located on a plant, you begin to suck the sap out of it. If you are not located on a plant, you try to move until you are located on a plant. Depending on the sort of day you're having, you might also lay 300-600 eggs, mate 9-13 times, or take part in a three-way. Then you go to sleep and/or die. The end.⁶

The sap-sucking may or may not be a big deal to the plant: it depends on how severe the infestation, and how healthy the plant is otherwise. Some plants are also better sources of nutrition, apparently, too: mealybugs are an especially big problem for Hoya species (especially the 'Hindu Rope' variety of H. carnosa) and cacti, and at work we've also had to deal with them on Saxifraga stolonifera, Streptocarpus cvv., and Echeveria. No plant is immune, however, and there's no such thing as a tolerable level of mealybugs, either: they're always capable of stunting or distorting new growth, causing reduced flowering and dropped buds, weakening a plant to other attacks, and creating a mold problem.

Mold?

Yes, mold. Here's the deal: plant sap has carbohydrates (=sugar) in it, mostly, and plant sap is the only thing mealybugs eat. However, all animals, mealybugs included, need protein as well, which is present in much smaller amounts. This is why life as a mealybug is so boring: you pretty much have to eat all day long in order to get enough protein to function, and all "functioning" gets you is the ability to stay in one place and eat all day long. But wait, there's a problem – if you eat all day long, you're going to get pretty full, right? Unless you do something? So mealybugs excrete whatever they don't need, on a pretty much constant basis. Since the sap is mainly water and carbohydrate (sugar), the waste is also mostly water and sugar. This is, I'm almost positive, the source of the "water droplet" in the picture. What likes sugar water besides teenagers and hummingbirds? Well, plenty of things, but mold is way up there too.



In a backhanded way, the mold is kind of a good thing for a houseplant grower, because it may get your attention when the bugs themselves do not. The bugs can look like dust, or lint, or a little chunk of perlite. The mold, though, is black and sooty, and there's no way you're going to mistake that for anything innocent.

By this point you might be saying, Okay, Mr. S., Jesus, I get it, they're bad. When do you get to the part about how to make them go away?

Patience, patience. Calm down. It'll be over soon.

So anyway. The common name of "mealybug" is apparently a reference to the waxy coating, which gives the insects a sort of "rolled in flour" look. Make the flour = meal connection, and there you have it. I mention this mostly because it's new to me (I've always wondered about the name), but it also happens to lead into our next topic, which is, why they're so goddamned difficult.

The coating doesn't just look waxy: it actually is wax. Wax, unfortunately, is very good at repelling water. What this means is, most insecticidal sprays aren't going to work, because most sprays have to contact the pest's body in order to do any damage. Two ways to deal with an obstacle like this: around, or through.

To go around, one can use a systemic insecticide. These are insecticides which are introduced into the soil and taken up by the roots. They don't harm the plant, but they do change it from snack to poison. Since the mealybugs have to eat more or less around the clock, once the poison is in the plant's system, the bugs begin to die. It sounds elegant in theory, though I suspect that there's a catch somewhere. Still, we did have a pretty dramatic decrease in our whitefly problem within a few weeks of treating the worst-off plants with Marathon (imidacloprid).⁷ So systemics have impressed me before, and I just bought some to use on my cacti, so we'll see if they're as impressive at home.

To go through, we have lower-tech solutions: you can dissolve away (or at least soften up) the wax with rubbing alcohol, and then hit the plant with a regular spray pesticide after that. You can also go through by taking some Q-Tips and squishing the miserable little bastards by brute force: it's emotionally satisfying, but not especially effective, because you won't be able to see all of them. Rubbing alcohol might be useful just in loosening the grip of the bugs on the plant: a rubbing alcohol misting, followed by a forceful but not insanely strong shower of water, might get rid of enough bugs to be useful, but I wouldn't rely on that by itself. (I've tried. Doesn't work.)

A strategy that worked in the past on the smaller Cereus peruvianus, but which has not worked so far on the larger ones, has been to add mealybug-squishing to my daily routine for a few weeks. Every day, or at least every few days, I'd get out the rubbing alcohol and Q-Tips and go over the entire surface of every affected cactus, squishing every actual critter I saw and giving a good firm rubdown of everything else. After a month or so of this, the problem seemed to be more or less over (two weeks isn't enough, on the other hand: I tried that too, and there were still enough residual eggs and crawlers that they mounted a comeback. I may have an asymptomatic mealybug carrier somewhere in the group of plants, in which case you can expect a post titled Typhoid Mary sometime soon. Assuming that I can figure out which one it is.), though recent inspections of the small Cereus peruvianus have turned up new activity anyway. (I really did seem to manage to eradicate them from four out of the six affected small cacti, with nothing more than Q-Tips and rubbing alcohol, which is proof that the concept is sound. Wouldn't necesarily recommend it, because it's a time-consuming way to go, but it's at least more than theoretically possible.)

With the big cacti, or with any leafier plants that have more nooks and crannies, you need a different strategy. I've now spent a few nights going over the big cacti, areole by areole, with a fistful of Q-Tips and a quarter of a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and that's great stuff, but I think I'm not going to win this one without some systemics besides. And probably another few rounds with the rubbing alcohol. I started with the Bonide preparation of imidacloprid last Thursday; we'll see if I can shake the damn things that way.

Don't be ashamed to give up on a plant if you need to. It's better to throw a plant out at the first sign of trouble than it is to do a half-assed job of eradication and find them spreading to all your other plants. With my Cereus, especially the five-foot ones, I feel like I kind of don't have a choice but to fight, since I've had them so long and there's considerable sentimental attachment there. But battling pests can easily become a chore that will suck all the enjoyment out of the hobby, and with mealybugs, most other indoor gardeners will understand if you just don't want to go to the trouble.

Something to consider: if the plant is a recent acquisition, you might consider telling the store (nicely!) where you bought it that they sold you a bad plant. They're not necessarily going to offer you a new one, or hand you a complimentary bottle of pesticide, but it's only neighborly to let them know, in case they're not aware of the problem. And it's also a way to gauge what kind of business they are, and decide if it's really a place where you want to be spending your money. I'm not actually sure which way my own employer would jump, in this situation, though I could see the boss being okay with taking the plant back until the mealybugs were under control: we haven't done that before, to my knowledge, but it seems like the kind of thing we would do.

Two other final notes: never never never never never knowingly buy a plant with mealybugs, thinking that you'll be able to get rid of them easily. I have done this myself (with a small Hoya), and it did work out okay, but at that time I hadn't actually dealt with trying to get mealybugs off of anything, and looking back at that purchase now, I shudder to think of the risk I was taking. Just don't do it. Even if it's the most awesome plant ever. Even if it's only one mealybug. Just say no, and walk away.

Readers looking for another perspective on mealybugs may find Water Roots' discussion of them interesting. The perspective isn't so different that we don't both agree that they're evil, but she has a much more specific eradication procedure.

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Photo credits: all me, alas.

¹ (which is actually a type of scale insect, just with a waxy instead of hard covering. Or at least that's what the scientists say, if you want to believe them.)
² Kidding, but – not. Root mealybugs are the sorts of things indoor gardeners have nightmares about. They're just as bad as regular mealybugs, with the added obstacles of being more mobile and essentially invisible, because they live in the soil most of the time. It really is probably more in your interest to take a few cuttings and then destroy the plant and soil: the only exception to this would be for a very valuable plant that has a relatively light infestation, in which case as much isolation, systemic insecticides, and much bleaching of tools and workspace are all but mandatory. And even then, you should seriously, seriously consider whether and for how long you want to be battling mealys. The good news is, they're not all that common: I have yet to have a root mealybug infestation on any of my plants.
³ In case anybody's wondering: yes, this is a mealybug infestation on my beloved 5-foot Cereus peruvianus, both of them, at the same time, which is why I'm doing this post now and how I'm able to get pictures. It's really very depressing.
⁴ Areole: the small bumps from which clusters of cactus spines emerge. They get a special name because they are, for all practical purposes, very short "branches," from which the thorns (which are very pointy "leaves") emerge. Only plants in the Cactaceae family have areoles, and everything with areoles is in the Cactaceae. At least, that's my understanding of the term, and Wikipedia backs me up on that.
⁵ Axil: point where a leaf's petiole attaches to its stem.
⁶ (What – you were expecting a couple hours to work on your novel? You're a mealybug.)
⁷ Imidacloprid is also sold as "Merit," and it's one of three active ingredients in Bayer 3-in-1 spray, and the active ingredient in some flea control products for cats and dogs as well. It's thought to be pretty safe, and protection against pests lasts for about a month after application, though there is a granular preparation from Bonide that's supposed to last twice that.