Unfinished business: Clivia seedlings

The picture is six months out of date, and I've up-potted these since it was taken. The basic information -- that the self-pollinated Clivia 'Aztec Gold' seedlings are still alive -- remains true, though.

The seeds were sown in August 2013, and there was an update on them in April 2014.

My other Clivias -- the parent 'Aztec Gold' and a plain-orange offset from WCW in October 2007 -- are still around. The latter is fighting a scale infestation at the moment, which is upsetting,¹ but 'Aztec Gold' has continued to offset well since it started in January 2014, and the offsets are now large enough to consider potting up separately. Though I'm probably not going to, because it turns out that I like the fuller look one gets with multiple plants in the same pot.

The seedlings will probably not bloom light yellow like their parent did; I assume it's a hybrid. Not really concerned with it either way: I've had Clivias since 2007, and have only seen one bloom in that time. I mean, I'd eventually like to know what the blooms look like, but I'm not necessarily expecting to find out.


P. S.: In the course of trying to locate patent information for Clivia 'Aztec Gold,' I ran across a blog that consisted solely of two blog posts of mine, which had been copied almost completely -- photos, title, captions, and text -- though for some reason not the tags. The internet is infuriating, and full of terrible people.

I've submitted a takedown request to Google,² and I imagine it will be granted, but so much stuff of mine has been duplicated in one place or another (as I discover when I search for information about one of my plants) that it would take me a lifetime just to fill out the requests for getting it all taken down. This is not a good system for preventing content theft, and I am angry.

I'll let you know what happens. (It has probably already happened, by the time you read this: I'm writing on 20 August.)

UPDATE (22 Aug.): Google had taken the posts down by August 22nd. The blog still exists, which is mildly irritating to me, but at least it no longer has any posts.

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¹ This is the first time I've had a pest problem with Clivia, I think. I knew they could get scale and mealybugs, but since it hadn't happened before, I sort of thought that maybe my personal pet scale wasn't compatible with Clivias. So it's been disappointing to learn otherwise.
I removed a couple leaves and dosed it with imidacloprid. Ordinarily, throwing it out would have made more sense, but it's not like Clivias are widely available around here, and besides, this particular one has some sentimental value. So we'll see how far the imidacloprid gets me.
² Which is one reason why I'm not linking to the posts in question -- the links would soon be dead, assuming Google does the right thing and deletes the blog. And I have every reason to think they will. The other reason is that if Google doesn't delete the blog, then I'm loath to give the thief any credibility with search engines by linking to them.

Anthurium no. 0586 "Vera Special"

First, a couple bits of unfinished business:

I e-mailed my local Iowa State Extension Office on July 29, asking about tests for dasheen mosaic virus (DsMV), as discussed in the comments to this post. They replied immediately, and recommended I ask the ISU Plant and Insect Diagnostic Clinic about it. So I sent the same e-mail to the ISUPIDC.

On August 20, I heard back from the ISUPIDC. The answer was: no, they do not test for DsMV, but they did know of a company that might, Agdia, Inc.

Agdia does in fact do DsMV testing, which is great, but they won't tell you on the website how much the testing costs. I assumed that that meant that it was an if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it situation, but e-mailed Agdia to ask anyway, and got an autoreply "I will be out of the office until ______" message, because everything has to be fucking impossible today.¹

In the end, it's not going to happen: testing one sample is $67 at Agdia ($9 per additional.), which is more than I want to spend to answer this particular question. But if I change my mind later, I have somewhere to go. So thanks, ISUPIDC. I guess.

The other unfinished business is related to the ongoing thripstastrophe.² Ivynettle suggested in the comments on this post that I try getting parasitic mites to eat the thrips, that she had done so this year and had been pleased with the results.³

That didn't go very smoothly either, and is also expensive ($63.70, shipping included, for 50,000 mites.⁴), but it at least has the advantage of being something I haven't tried before. Imidacloprid doesn't seem to affect the thrips at all; white oil is cheap and somewhat effective, but also extremely messy, time-consuming, and the Anthuriums respond by dropping all their blooms, so I don't want to try that again unless I'm truly out of other options. Hand-picking is ludicrous, spraying with a non-imidacloprid insecticide (e.g. pyrethrin) is prohibitively expensive, giving up and living with the thrips is depressing,⁵ zero-tolerance for thrips infestation would end with all the seedlings in the garbage except one, and it would probably be a pink/pink. So this is something I can try. Even if it fails, as it almost surely will, doing something feels better than doing nothing.

With all that out of the way, then, let's talk about seedling 0586. The name assigned to her, "Vera Special," wound up being sort of a joke, because Vera is almost identical to 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha," and awfully similar to 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis."

Which one is Vera?

It was this one! (L-R in the first photo: 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis," 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha," 0586 "Vera Special."
It happens to be a look I'm really fond of, and even if it weren't, I see orange so rarely that I'd be inclined to keep and cherish it even if it were terrible. But it's not terrible! Hooray! The spathe is a decent size, and so far doesn't seem to want to flip backward. Add in the color, and I think that easily puts Vera into the top 25% of all seedlings.

The leaves are also basically identical to Marsha's, which makes sense because Marsha and Vera were both divided from 0115 "Erlene Adopter," and are either clones or siblings.⁶ Marsha, Adam, and Vera have another thing in common, which is that they have all done this at some point:

A weird 0586 leaf, by reflected (L) and transmitted (R) light.
Not all the leaves, or even most. Just a few per plant. In all three cases, it appeared basically overnight, I hadn't done anything any differently that I could remember, the leaves otherwise appear perfectly healthy, and it doesn't seem to be spreading or intensifying. I don't have any very satisfying theories about what's going on: it sort of resembles certain rare kinds of virus damage, and sort of resembles some kinds of fertilizer deficiency and mineral toxicity, but if it's fertilizer-related, then it's weird that of all the Anthuriums here, it's only affecting three very closely-related plants. I mean, they all get basically the same fertilizer, and I water heavily enough that anything toxic should all have been washed out of the soil long before the leaves changed colors. The coloration doesn't look much like most viruses I've seen, either. So I don't know what's going on.

The unaffected leaves are unremarkable. Nice when new, dull and kind of plain when older. Resistant to thrips damage, though, which is always nice.

Like her relatives, Vera suckers thickly, another strongly positive trait. It remains to be seen whether Vera will be like her relatives in being impossible to pollinate. I don't know how many blooms have appeared and withered without any pollination on 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis," but, like, several. And I haven't had any luck with 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha" either. I suppose sexual reproduction doesn't seem as urgent when you can make so many suckers.

So overall? Vera's not perfect, but she's a keeper. No question about it.

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¹ (I'm writing this on Friday August 21. It really was a pretty rough day, internetially speaking. Absolutely nothing worked the first time I tried it.)
² Not to be confused with the scalepocalypse, or the miteaclysm.
I'm pretty sure I haven't mentioned the miteaclysm before, so:
The Anthuriums in the living room, i.e., the parent varieties of most of my Anthurium seedlings, have developed some kind of mite problem, though the mites in question don't appear to be spider mites. Or at least they're not particularly inclined to spin webs. I suppose they could still be really lazy spider mites.

(on the NOID red)
I'm not super worried about the mites, which I figure will probably go away once the days get shorter and colder. (This has happened in previous years.) The predatory mites are also alleged to go after spider mites, so hypothetically, the predatory mites could kill two birds with one stone although come on how are you ever going to kill two birds with one stone unless the birds are like lying on the ground with one of them resting its head directly on top of the second bird's head and they're both holding perfectly still? And even then, if the birds saw you walk up with a stone they're not going to keep sitting like that, they're going to fly away, right? I question the whole premise of the idiom, is what I'm saying. (And don't even get me started on "the more the merrier." I mean, some of the "more" might be assholes! How's that going to make anybody happy? And how are you supposed to transport eggs if you don't put them all in one basket? Two baskets? That's not efficient at all! Do you even know how much baskets cost these days?)
Anyway. The point is, it's possible that the predatory mites could solve all kinds of problems for me, though at this point my best-case imaginary scenario is that they slow down the thrips, a little. Expecting more than that seems like a recipe for disappointment.
³ As did another reader, by e-mail, some time ago, though if I remember right they didn't claim to have tried predatory mites personally; they were just suggesting it as an option.
⁴ I cannot imagine how much it must suck to be the employee who has to count out 50,000 individual mites to put in the bottles. No wonder they're expensive: that must take weeks. And what tiny tweezers they must have to use!
⁵ At least in the short run. In theory, I could maybe breed thrips-resistant seedlings, given enough time, but the thrips reproduce so much faster than the Anthuriums that I suspect the thrips could come up with new attacks more effectively than the Anthuriums could come up with new defenses.
⁶ Erlene herself has never bloomed, but offsets thickly and has similar foliage, like Vera and Marsha, so it wouldn't surprise me if all three plants were genetically identical. A fourth plant divided off of Erlene, 0581 "Adam All," has similar foliage and produced an orange bud once, but Adam sucked at follow-through and hasn't tried again. Wouldn't be surprised if he were a clone also, though.
Erlene/Vera/Marsha/Adam are from sibling group AG (seed parent 'Orange Hot;' sow date 12/7/11). 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" is from sibling group AH ("Orange Hot" and 12/17/11), which is close enough in sow date that it's entirely possible that Eliza is a half- or full sibling of the others, but she's probably not a clone of any of them.

Anthurium no. 0112 "Dottie A. Rebel"

Dottie presents me with an interesting question, and maybe also answer, about genetics.

The first thing I noticed when the bloom opened up was that Dottie's ID number is very close to other seedlings that have bloomed -- 0108 "Deena Sequins," 0110 "Delta Badhand," and 0116 "Eileen Dover." Which suggested that maybe they were all from the same cross.

And when I looked, I found that three of the four (Deena, Delta, and Dottie) had the same seed parent (NOID purple) and sow date (21 December 2011), so they are definitely from the same cross. Eileen, though, is from a different seed parent ('Orange Hot'), with close to the same sow date (7 December 2011). So possibly there was a reciprocal cross done between the NOID purple and 'Orange Hot' during the summer of 2011, which resulted in these four more or less identical-looking seedlings.

Two other seedlings resemble 0108, 0110, 0112, and 0116. 0046 "Aurora Boreanaz" fits the theory fine, or at least doesn't contradict it: Aurora's seed parent is also the NOID purple. 0132 "Eve Stropper" is trickier. Eve's seed parent is 'Gemini.' None of the seedlings can have the NOID purple, 'Gemini,' and 'Orange Hot' as its parents simultaneously, so obviously more than one cross is capable of producing a bloom like this.

So what's the most distinctive thing about these six? It's not the color -- I've seen plenty of red spathes, after all -- it's that the spadices match the spathes. So I looked at all the blooms so far where the spathe and spadix match, and what the seed parent was in those cases. There were three from 'Gemini,'

five from the NOID purple,

one from the NOID red,

five from 'Orange Hot,'

and seventeen from 'White Gemini.'

The parent plants 'Gemini' and the NOID red have contrasting spadices. So they're probably not where this characteristic comes from. I suspect that although the spadix and spathe match on 'White Gemini,' it probably has the genes for a contrasting spadix, since it was supposedly discovered as a mutant of 'Gemini.'¹ It's certainly imaginable that 'Gemini,' the NOID red, or 'White Gemini' might have recessive matching-spadix genes or something, since they're all hybrids, but if we're just making a guess anyway, it seems simpler to assume that the matching-spadix genes are coming from plants with matching spadices.

There's another hint in that as far as I've seen, 'Gemini' and 'White Gemini' have never produced pollen for me. Which means that unless they're being super-sneaky about it, they're probably not the ones introducing the matching-spadix genes.

The NOID red can probably be ruled out on the grounds that it has some pretty distinctive characteristics (large, wide, flat dark green leaves which are sometimes red or brown while developing, green spadices, sometimes a peculiar angle to the way they hold their leaves), which it tends to impart to its offspring, and none of the plants from the red/red group have any of those characteristics.

Three other parent varieties with matching spadices could have been part of the genetic mix when 0112 was being conceived -- a NOID pink which sometimes produces pollen but has been mostly unsuccessful at producing seeds and seedlings,² and 'Red Hot,' which looks a lot like the 0046/0108/0110/0112/0116/0132 group, but has only ever produced one seedling, which didn't even survive. And which I can't remember ever producing any pollen. In fact, it's been at least a couple years since 'Red Hot' even bloomed, and it's never been a strong bloomer for me. So 'Red Hot' is probably not where these seedlings came from, however much they may resemble it. The third possibility is 'Pandola,' which does a weird thing where the spadix is initially pink or orange-pink at the base and yellow towards the end. (The two-color thing isn't distinctive, but the specific colors involved are.) 'Pandola' definitely produces both pollen and seeds both, but the two-tone spadices are distinctive.³ And the red-red group doesn't have those.

Consequently, I conclude that 0046, 0108, 0110, 0112, and 0116 are all probably 'Orange Hot' x NOID purple, and 0132 is probably 'Gemini' x 'Orange Hot,' though 'Gemini' x NOID purple can't be ruled out.

That's what I'm guessing from looking at Dottie. Am I right? Am I wrong? Probably some of both. Perhaps plant paternity testing will be cheap enough someday that I can find out for sure. In the meantime, I can entertain myself by guessing.

As far as deciding whether Dottie specifically is a keeper or not, well, I have no particular problem with the bloom.

I often don't like matching spadices, but I find red/red and orange/orange a lot less objectionable than pink/pink.

The leaves are perfectly typical, mostly unblemished Anthurium foliage,

and the plant as a whole is notable mostly for how long and unmanageable it is, though I guess it's also worth mentioning that it's done some spontaneous branching, which not all Anthuriums will bother with. The branching is completely obscured in this photo, but trust me it's there:

So on balance, I guess I'm fine with Dottie and would expect to keep her around for a while -- at least long enough to see whether she'll reproduce -- except that she has also had the bad luck to be living on one of the three shelves in the basement with scale-infested Anthuriums. I can't remember for certain, but I don't think I've seen scale on Dottie specifically yet,⁴ so there's hope, but I also periodically think maybe I should just sweep the whole shelf clean and start over. So we'll see what happens.

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¹ 'Gemini' and 'White Gemini' both have spadices that are often initially white and then change to light yellow. The seedlings with contrasting spadices mostly either start out white and change to yellow or start yellow and change to white. (Also 'White Gemini' frequently has a little bit of pink in the spathe as it ages.) So even though 'White Gemini's spadix does initially match, I don't think it should count as a matching spadix for genetic purposes, because it otherwise behaves like a contrasting spadix, and it's a mutation of a plant with a contrasting spadix.
² For various reasons. 1) I generally don't try, because why would I want more pink? 2) although I have four plants from the NOID pink, they don't bloom very often, so I rarely have any opportunities to try. 3) seedlings from the NOID pink have a worse than average survival rate (63% for NOID pink; the overall average is 68%).
³ This is all very tough to prove, or even illustrate well, because of differences in the way the plants photograph at different times, and the ways that blooms change over time, but I think it's very likely that, say, 0083 "Carmen Adairya" is 'Gemini' x 'Pandola,' because that is totally 'Pandola's spadix:

⁴ The problem with this is that seeing scale and not seeing scale both mean the same thing: that there could be scale. So it sounds like good news, but is not. There is never any good news.
The scale situation has consumed an enormous amount of my emotional energy over the last three years, which is all the more remarkable considering that as far as I remember, scale have never directly killed any of my plants, and rarely even accumulate to the point of making the plants unsightly or sticky. What kills the plants is me deciding to throw them out because they have scale; what makes them sticky is me spraying soybean oil all over them in the course of trying to kill the scale. Scale are sort of my own little horticultural autoimmune disease.
*blink* I'm not sure what to do with this realization, now that I've had it. I mean, surely the answer is not to embrace the scale.

Anthurium no. 0580: "Marsha Marsha Marsha"

So let's just get it out of the way: the scale are back. I've seen scale on nine Anthurium seedlings in the last couple weeks.¹ So far, the infestation is localized to a particular corner of the basement, but it's not as if the scale stay still, so that means probably no Anthurium-selling this year. Which is perhaps just as well, since I hadn't made any real progress on deciding which seedlings to sell. (If you feel like you really, really want an Anthurium and don't care whether it comes with scale or not, uh, I guess e-mail me or something.)

The cause in this particular case is that I have had a Gasteraloe x beguinii for many years, and it got infested by scale, but I thought maybe I could clean off and restart four offsets and have scale-free plants again. The restart attempt happened in November, and by March, it was clear that I had not, in fact, managed to get the scale off three of the four offsets. So out those went. One offset appeared clean, though, so I let it stay. A week ago, while I was shoving its flat back into place on the shelf, I happened to snag a leaf from the single remaining Gasteraloe on something, and it broke off and fell into the flat of Anthuriums below. I didn't know that's what had happened at the time, but even if I had known, I might not have worried about it, since I hadn't seen scale on that plant for a while. But, there were enough scale on the leaf that fell down that they managed to colonize several Anthuriums in a short period of time. And so now there's a new outbreak to deal with.

The moral of the story: some plants cannot be de-scaled, and attempting to de-scale them anyway only compounds the problem.²

Which brings us to Anthurium 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha." I liked her well enough when I saw her bloom that I up-potted her to a 6-inch pot, but the only available space for the new pot was the general area that's experiencing the outbreak, and the outbreak's extent wasn't known at the time, so now she, too, has scale. We had best not get too attached to Marsha.

But. The bloom is pretty nice, more or less interchangeable with that of 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis." Marsha's only the second orange / orange bloom I've seen,³ and appears to be long-lived, a normal size, and decently shaped. So she's got that going for her.

The foliage is okay. Marsha and her clone (or sibling) 0581 "Adam All" did something odd simultaneously in March, where a few of the larger, newer leaves on both plants developed odd lighter-colored squiggles throughout them, almost overnight. Subsequent leaves haven't had that problem, but the discoloration appears to be permanent on the affected leaves. Ordinarily, I'd assume that that sort of color change indicated a nutrient deficiency (or maybe overdose?), but since it's only happening to two closely-related plants out of several hundred, and those two aren't getting anything the other 700 don't, I'm sort of at a loss to explain. It's at least sort of pretty.

0581 "Adam All."

0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha."

0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha." I suspect this is the same leaf as the above photo, photographed six days earlier.
The overall plant is pretty nice-looking, too, as the seedlings go. Still pretty compact, no thrips damage.

But when I went down to the basement to check on the discolored leaves, I still found several tiny little scale insects to rub off the leaves, and I'm sure I didn't get them all. You never get them all. So Marsha is probably, ultimately, doomed. I don't want her to be, I intend to try to get rid of the scale even if it involves throwing out a bunch of other seedlings (and it probably will), but in the end I think I will probably fail, and Marsha will end up in the garbage. I don't feel particularly depressed by this: it's closer to a sort of weary numbness. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than being depressed.

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¹ 0173 "Judith Priest," 0209 "Muffy Stopheles," 0219 "Rhoda Horse," 0223 "Patty Cake," 0235 "Rowan DeBoate," 0267 "Natalie Attired," 0330 "Faye Quinette," 0577 "Pandora Boxx," and 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha." Judith, Rhoda, and Pandora had bad enough cases that I decided to throw them out rather than try to clean up the plants; it's probable that I should have done that with the other six, but it was hard enough getting rid of the three. Rhoda had never bloomed before, and had a bud, and I still threw her in the trash.
² Which plants? I have found that there's no point in even trying to salvage Agave, Aloe, Alworthia, Asparagus, Ficus, Furcraea, Gasteraloe, Gasterworthia, Hoya, Manfreda, Neoregelia, and Pereskia, because no matter what you do or how thoroughly you do it, they'll always come back, and in the process of trying, you'll often get yourself stabbed with spines, soaked with neem oil, or otherwise frustrated.
It's also pointless to try to rid Alpinia, Ardisia, Cyrtomium, Nematanthus, Podocarpus, Schefflera, and Zingiber of scale, but the experience is somewhat less horrible.
Occasionally, it actually is possible to eliminate scale from Albuca, Anthurium, Begonia, Coffea, Epipremnum, Hatiora, Haworthia, Hippeastrum, Murraya, Philodendron, Phlebodium, Strelitzia, Syngonium, and Yucca, though in many of those cases the solution is to cut the plant back to the ground and/or remove all foliage, and let it start over again, which is a drastic enough solution that it's not always going to be worth it.
Also it should be kept in mind that this only applies to the particular species of scale I'm dealing with, and in my particular home environment: I won't guarantee anything when it comes to other kinds of scale and other living conditions.
³ Maybe the third, if 0118 "Elijah Sturdabowtit" counts as orange / orange. Elijah is definitely orange / orange when the spathe first opens, but he changes to pink / pink so quickly that it's tough to put him in either category.

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Golden Monarch

Not the best picture but at least reasonably color-accurate, I think.

Masdevallia Golden Monarch= Masdevallia Golden Angel x Masdevallia Monarch (Ref.)

In Anthurium/scale/thrips news:

I just couldn't bring myself to oil Anthuriums this week, either. So that's what, like three consecutive weeks of oiling, followed by two weeks of not-oiling?

The present situation:

1) I saw thrips again on Thursday (4 Sep.). Also saw 2 scale insects on one of the Agave victoriae-reginaes in the basement, on 3 September. It is unclear whether the insects in question were alive at the time, but even seeing dead ones isn't a happy occasion: I want to not see them at all.
2) A lot of the plants are sticky, too, from dried oil and dishwashing liquid. It'll wash off eventually, I assume, but it makes dealing with them slightly less pleasant until that happens.
3) I also suspect that some of the bud-dropping I've been seeing lately with the Anthuriums can be blamed on the oil.
4) And we did wind up losing #238 "Rudy Day," #247 "Selma Carr," and #243 "Sal Monella," most obviously from watering issues, but it's possible that the oil didn't help. #095 "Clarice Fulhartz" is still around, at least, and may live long enough to produce a bloom, though she doesn't seem to have produced any roots yet.
5) Even though it hasn't actually eliminated the thrips or scale, makes the plants unpleasantly sticky, may be killing buds or plants, and has an unpleasant smell, I think I'm still going to resume oiling this week. It did, if nothing else, make the thrips a lot harder to find, and it's possible that if I'd just kept it up for a couple more weeks, I might have actually gotten rid of them. I mean, it may not be likely. But it's possible, and I'm otherwise out of options. So.

I had plans last week to do a third Anthurium update post, about the species involved in breeding Anthurium varieties and/or what makes for "good" Anthurium foliage, but sort of ran out of time. Posting's likely to drop off again as I resume oiling the plants. (Sorry.)

Anthurium News: The Good News

There are still some bright spots to be found in the Anthurium-breeding project, despite the recent rash of dropped buds and minimal first-time budding. To wit:


1) I haven't seen any thrips in about a week. I gave the basement plants the week off from oiling last week because 1) I was tired, and 2) the smell wasn't getting any better. If things went according to plan, I resumed oiling this Monday, but I figured a week off might do all of us some good.

I also haven't seen any scale since I began oiling the plants in the basement. This is also good news, but less so, because it's always been tough to see scale. I'm pleased that I'm not finding it, but it hasn't necessarily gone anywhere.


2) The grandseedlings are coming along adequately. I potted up more seedlings from #276 "Zach Religious" on 24 August, making 22 second-generation plants now, all of them Zach's. I probably won't get 100% long-term survival, but that's fine. Zach has thanked me by producing a new bloom that photographed nicely and is a good bit larger than the previous one:

Seeds have now been started from #271 "Wanda Reulthemal," #273 "Wes Coast," #239 "Russ Teanale," #005 "Chad Michaels," and #059 "Bijoux Tuit." The only interesting things about this so far are that a couple of Wanda's have germinated and should be ready to stick in soil soon, and Chad is spectacularly fertile (more than 70 seeds from one inflorescence, though that doesn't mean that that many will germinate).

Photo actually only shows 60 seeds; another 10 were ready to sow a few days after this, and the spadix still had a few unripe berries.
Many, many more seedlings are developing berries,¹ though some of them are unbelievably slow about it.


3) I'm pretty sure I managed to pollinate 'Midori.' I don't yet know how many of the individual tiny flowers got pollinated, but I can see about eight bumps in the middle of the spadix that are bigger than the others and seem to be growing. Even if it worked, I won't have any ripe berries for quite a while, but I had been worried that it was going to be exceptionally difficult to pollinate, like 'Florida' (still no luck with 'Florida,' by the way) and maybe it's not.

'Midori' was happy enough here that it tried to produce a second bloom a few weeks ago, but the developing bloom got stuck in the cataphylls and snapped its own stalk off. Which is a thing that happens occasionally. I'm hoping 'Midori' will try again before the winter.

I also have at least two blooms on the NOID purple pollinated (picture of one below), one from the NOID pink, and six blooms on 'Pandola.' In all cases, the most likely pollen parent is the NOID red, which is super-reliable about producing pollen and not much else. Though the NOID red has also been pollinated, probably by 'Pandola' or itself.

And yes, I know, pollinated Anthurium spadices are not the prettiest things to look at. Scroll back up to Zach's picture if you feel the need.


4) Does it count as good news if it hasn't happened yet? Because I have a theory which, if true, is encouraging.

I've been sort of mildly bummed out all summer, that there weren't more first-time buds showing up. I guess I got kind of spoiled during the winter and spring -- from late December 2013 to late May 2014, I was seeing, on average, a first-time bloomer every three and a half days. From June to August, that's dropped to one every three weeks.

My theory on this is as follows:

1) the Anthurium seedlings just won't bloom unless they're in 4" pots. I don't know why it matters or how they know, but no seedling has ever attempted to bloom in a 3" pot. On average, once transplanted, it takes them ten months to produce their first bud.²
2) I tend to up-pot in large batches, whenever enough room becomes available. There were 90 plants moved up in January, February, and May 2013, who I think of as the "Class of 2013."
3) It's maybe the case now that all the seedlings from the Class of '13 which are inclined to bloom easily in basement conditions have done so already, and the reason first-time blooms slowed down this summer was because the class of '13 was too old to do first blooms, and the class of '14 (i.e., the 126 plants I repotted in October 2013, January 2014, and April-July 2014) was too young to start blooming yet.

The theory winds up making two predictions. The first prediction is that I should be seeing a couple first-time buds from the Class of '14 more or less now, which has happened with #279 "Tristan Shout."³ The second prediction is that I'll start seeing more and more of those happening as we get into the winter, and by February 2015, first-time buds will be appearing once or twice a week again, as the seedlings from the Class of '14 reach blooming size. That obviously can't be confirmed yet, but it's a prediction. And it's making me feel slightly better for the moment.

It's also possible that the air conditioning is suppressing blooming in the basement, though it doesn't seem to be bothering the Anthuriums upstairs. If that's the explanation, though, the result is the same -- when the heater switches on in the winter, suddenly there are lots of new blooms again.

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¹ As of Friday 29 August, there were berries developing on: #002 "Alexis Mateo" • #005 "Chad Michaels" • #031 "Sylvester" • #059 "Bijoux Tuit" • #063 "Audrey Quest" • #066 "Barbara Seville" • #076 "Bob Humbug" • #083 "Carmen Adairya" • #097 "Colin Ambulance" • #108 "Deena Sequins" • #110 "Delta Badhand" • #125 "Anya Wei" • #126 "Erin Dirtylondry" • #200 "Mario Speedwagon" • #223 "Patty Cake" • #231 "Rhea Listick" • #232 "Rhoda Badcek" • #234 "Ross Koz" • #239 "Russ Teanale" • #244 "Sarah Problem" • #245 "Sawyer Ad" • #271 "Wanda Reulthemal" • #273 "Wes Coast" • #280 "Jujubee"
Not all of those will necessarily reach maturity and be sown, and not all the seeds that are sown will necessarily germinate and grow, but that's a pretty big group, especially considering that I've only been doing this for three years.
Also: holy shit, I've been doing this for three years already.
² Though that's with a range from 1 to 17 months; it's not like you can make them bloom when you want by repotting them at the right moment. Time since repotting is a better predictor of when they'll bloom than the time since germination is, but only barely.
³ Wait, what about #171 "Genevieve la Difference, who also just started forming a bud for the first time according to your previous post?" I hear no one at all asking. Well.
Genevieve is a really late bloomer from the Class of '13; she should have started her first bud five months ago. I think that means she had to repeat a grade. Or maybe she missed so much school after that skiing accident during Spring Break that she had to take an incomplete, so then she made up the work during the summer and graduated late. I dunno. The graduating-classes metaphor is perhaps getting a little overextended.
In any case, Tristan is the only one from the class of '14 to do a first-time bloom when my theory predicts first-time blooms from that group should begin.
Five other members of the class of '14 have tried, precociously, to bloom by now:
• #218 "Noah Fence" (repotted October, bloomed May, completed July)
• #231 "Rhea Listick" (repotted October, bloomed February, aborted April, retried May, completed June)
• #265 "Madame LaQueer" (repotted October, bloomed June, aborted July)
• #280 "Jujubee" (repotted October, bloomed March, completed April)
• #281 "Laganja Estranja" (repotted October, bloomed April, aborted June)

Materials and Techniques: White Oil

As you have probably guessed, I've started spraying the "white oil" on the plants in the basement (as of August 4). This leaves me basically no time to do anything else, so I'm not doing anything else.

Points of interest about the oil-spraying process so far:

1) It is very messy. Oil and soap and water gets everywhere. I'm still doing it inside, because . . .

2) It's also very time-consuming. Watering a round of plants (bring plants to the tub, put plants in the tub, water, drain, take plants out of tub, return the plants to their original location) normally takes me about 15 minutes. Having to bring every plant to the tub means more trips, and then spraying all surfaces of every plant makes each round of watering take longer, so watering is now happening at less than half the usual speed. Taking the process outside would only serve to make a time-consuming and messy process more so: having oil, soap, and water dripping on the plant room floor is the lesser evil.

3) Emulsification is totally real, you guys. When I started the whole process, I had the oil and the dishwashing liquid in a milk jug, and I shook the jug around to mix the two together, and they mixed, but the mixture wasn't stable, so by the time I was ready to dilute and spray a new batch, the stuff in the jug had mostly separated into two layers again. When it was freshly shaken up, it poured pretty much the same as the oil -- noticeably thicker than water, but not by very much. At some point, though, I shook it up and it thickened into something very different, roughly the consistency of mayonnaise (which is also an emulsion made of about 70-80% vegetable oil, water, and an emulsifier¹), yogurt, or thick shampoo. Pourable, still, but much slower, and it sticks to the measuring spoon terribly. That's gotten a little thinner over time, but it's still very different from the oil I started out with.

White oil concentrate (left) and in the spray bottle I actually use (right).
4) I'm also using roughly three or four times more of the oil/detergent mixture than the recipes I found on-line recommended (I'm using 3 Tbsp in a little less than a quart of water; they recommend 1 Tbsp in a full quart), because after a few test sprayings on a Gasteraloe, I wasn't convinced that there was enough oil in the spray to be accomplishing anything. It is possible that this will turn out to be a disastrous decision, but the plants haven't reacted badly so far, aside from the Breynia disticha, which may have been having other problems.

5) And I'm still seeing new thrips and scale, though I wasn't necessarily expecting them all to vanish like magic at the first application. Not sure I expecting them all to vanish ever, as far as that goes.² But I am having a more difficult time locating thrips, if not scale, so maybe progress is being made.

6) Because of the slowness and messiness, posting is likely to be light for the next couple weeks, as much of my free time will be spent drunkenly sliding around on the plant room floor in a pool of soybean oil and soap,³ and/or cleaning up from same. There'll still be orchid posts every five or six days, unless I forget.

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¹ The emulsifier in mayonnaise is egg, not dishwashing liquid. Or at least it's not dishwashing liquid in your better brands of mayonnaise.
² There's a post to be written, sometime, about the claims I found in a number of sites that were pushing the white oil, that because the oil wasn't a chemical, and because it works by suffocating the insects, there was no way they could evolve resistance to it. Sadly, that is not the case: 1) any atom, whether alone or in combination with other atoms, is a chemical of some kind or another. Vegetable oil is not an exception; it just happens to be one of the chemicals that we can eat large quantities of safely. 2) No, thrips are not likely to evolve beyond the need to breathe oxygen, but they can still evolve resistance to white oil. If I ever get around to writing that post, I'll describe some ways that that could happen. But don't hold your breath, no pun intended.
³ (Not that I'll actually be drunk. Though that may not be the worst idea I've ever had.)

Anthurium News

The scale is back. (On #280 "Jujubee" in the photo,¹ though I've seen them on #076 "Bob Humbug" as well.)

The thrips never left. (#243 "Sal Monella" in the photo, but I could pick any plant that's blooming and have at least a 50-50 chance of finding thrips on it.)

I despair. Having tried imidacloprid granules, zero-tolerance for infested plants, irregular and incomplete rubbing alcohol sprays, and hand-squishing, we're moving on to "white oil."² The optimist in me notes that at least white oil has the potential to get rid of both scale and thrips at once.³

Should white oil fail to do the job, I . . . I don't know. I don't know what to do.

 

[somber pause]

 

There's also some bad news about two of the Anthuriums I said in the last post might have blooms: both #265 "Madame LaQueer" and #040 "Ivy Winters" have aborted their blooms. Ivy has already started work on a new bud, which is surprising.⁴

But the news is not entirely bad. #203 "Anna Mae Hemensouz" has finally opened its bud, and --

I mean, yes, it's very much like #005 "Chad Michaels," but I like Chad a lot, so that's fine with me. As it did with Chad, my camera understates how dark the spathe is. The plant as a whole is actually pretty nice, though I don't have any photos that show that very well.

#218 "Noah Fence" makes his debut today too:

I was not expecting the purple spadix, so I guess that's something to be pleased about. This probably also means that Noah is 'White Gemini' x NOID purple. That NOID purple sure got around.

You've already seen it, but in the last post, #179 "Katie Boundary" hadn't fully opened when I took the photo. So this is more what she really looks like:

'Peppermint Gemini'⁵ has produced a new bloom, after a very long wait:

This has me sort of excited, because speckling in spathes is, according to the book, an incompletely dominant trait, so if I can get it crossed successfully with something else, I should be able to get some speckled seedlings eventually.⁶ Really, I'd be pretty happy if I could just get some seedlings from seed parents other than 'Gemini' and 'White Gemini.' As divided up by seed parent:

'Pandola' and the NOID red are probably much better represented on the pollen-parent side of things, but several of my stock plants appear to have made no contribution at all to the seedling-genetics situation.⁷ Which I suppose makes it all the more impressive that I've gotten the sort of color range out of the seedlings that I have.

You may also notice from that pie chart that the second generation is officially upon us now. Eight of the seedlings have #276 "Zach Religious" as a seed parent. They aren't yet old enough to be doing anything interesting, and won't be for some time, but they exist, and seem content not to die, which is all I ask for at the moment.

Left column, top to bottom: #636 "Lourdes Prayer," #637 "Abby Damned,"
#638 "Rosetta Stoned," #639 "Vicky Tacky."
Right column, top to bottom: #640 "Penny Tration," #641 "Ciara Mist,"
#642 "Bianca Donk," #643 "Fauxnique."⁸
Seeds from #271 "Wanda Reulthemal" and #234 "Ross Koz" have also been sown, though none of those are big enough to pot up yet, and it's beginning to look like there may be something wrong with the one seed of Ross's so I'm not getting my hopes up. (He has others. It'll be fine.) Another four plants⁹ are very close to having mature berries, so there will probably be some seedlings from those potted up too, by maybe December.

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¹ There are three scale insects visible in the photo. Can you find all three?
² Vegetable oil, dishwashing liquid, and water, mixed together. The recipe I intend to follow calls for a 4:1 mix of oil and dishwashing liquid, mixed up, and then diluted to 4 Tbsp of that mix in a gallon of water. Which doesn't seem like it could possibly be enough oil to accomplish anything, but that's the recipe I found, so that's what I intend to try.
³ (The pessimist in me just keeps calling the optimist an idiot until he cries.)
⁴ According to the Anthurium-breeding book, blooms emerge from the leaf axils. If a bud aborts, then, you usually have to wait for the plant to produce a new leaf, a process which takes about a month, before you can see the next one. For the most part, this matches my observations, but Ivy and a few other seedlings seem to have found a loophole, possibly by switching to the axil for an older leaf, being faster to construct leaves than I anticipated, or producing a leaf while I was distracted by something else.
⁵ Technically, I don't know for sure that this is 'Peppermint Gemini,' as it wasn't tagged when I bought it, but it did say it was produced by Twyford, and it's the only speckled white/red/pink variety of theirs that I know about, so it seems safe to assume, at least provisionally.
⁶ There are already 13 seedlings with 'Peppermint Gemini' as the seed parent, three from 21 September 2013, and ten from 19 February 2014. So it's going to be a while before I find out whether speckling acts like the book says it does. And even if it does act like the book says, the book also says that when crossing a speckled plant with a non-speckled plant, even if the offspring are speckled, the speckles are usually coarser and less evenly-distributed than in the parent. There has to be some environmental component there, though, because the first bloom I saw on this plant had color a lot more broken up than this; see this post.
⁷ Specifically, there's been no confirmed contribution from 'Florida,' 'Midori,' 'Red Hot,' 'Joli,' or the NOID red-purple which may be 'Krypton.' ('Krypton' itself has gotten involved, though.) The last three of those have either killed off the developing berries before they matured, or haven't rebloomed for me yet. I've tried to pollinate 'Midori' and 'Florida,' and the spadices of both have changed, but there's no definite sign that either one intends to produce berries.
⁸ The only names I might take credit for are "Lourdes Prayer" and "Vicky Tacky," which I'm pretty sure I came up with. ("Lourdes Prayer" is not that great, but I'm pleased with Vicky.) All the others came from somewhere on-line. I linked the names I know to belong to actual drag queens; the others may or may not refer to anyone real. It's not like there's an official registry somewhere. Though the site that "Ciara Mist" links to seems to be trying pretty hard to be an official drag registration site.
⁹ (#005 "Chad Michaels," #059 "Bijoux Tuit," #239 "Russ Teanale," and #247 "Selma Carr")

Random plant event: NOID NOID

The scale infestation continues. It is in fact looking like what people say is true: once you have scale, you always have scale. It's never very many insects, they're never on very many plants, I can occasionally even remove an infestation from an area entirely by repeated spraying with rubbing alcohol.¹ But it always seems to move somewhere else, and always seems to return to the plants I removed it from. Between the scale and the sunburn and rot caused by putting plants outside before they were ready, I'm on the verge of throwing out all my Agaves, Furcraeas, Manfredas, and Mangaves and being rid of those genera forever, the same way I abandoned Hedera and Codiaeum to the spider mites years ago. I mean, look what happened to my Agave lophantha 'Quadricolor' after two days outside:

September 2013:

April 2014:

I did salvage an unrotted offset from it, and I had a previous offset (taken over a year ago, when I'd thought the scale might lead me to throw the plant out), but that's small consolation for losing a specimen as large and pretty as it was. Especially since the offsets will likely die or get thrown out before reaching that size themselves.

But we're not here to mourn the Agave; we're here to marvel at the recuperative powers of my NOID fern.²

I discovered scale on several of the fronds around the beginning of March, maybe the end of February. I started cutting off any fronds that had obvious scale, and any fronds that were close enough to have had honeydew dripped on them. As I progressed, I realized that 1) this would result in me cutting off most of the fronds, and 2) any fronds that I left would probably have enough undetectable scale on them to launch a new round of infestation, so I'd have hacked my fern to bits but accomplished nothing. So, I cut all the fronds off down to the rhizomes. Maybe the plant would come back, maybe it wouldn't, but at least the scale would be gone.³

I'm not certain about the date, but my best guess is that I cut the fronds off on 28 February. By 18 March, new ones were coming up all over:

And by yesterday morning (26 April), it was back to what it had looked like before, pretty much:

That's an incredibly fast comeback.

I don't know yet whether this had the intended effect of getting rid of all the scale. I haven't seen any yet, but then I've also been too busy and too scared to look for it. I'm impressed with the plant's recovery either way, though.

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¹ If you want to recommend that I try pesticides, especially imidacloprid: been there. Done that. More than once. It costs too much for something that works as slowly and incompletely as it does.
² It was a hitch-hiker in a Rhipsalis I bought years ago. Took it out, nursed it along, and it is now much, much larger than the Rhipsalis ever dreamed of getting. Because the fern wasn't supposed to be in the pot, though, there was no ID for it. My best guess is that it's a Phlebodium of some kind, possibly P. aureum. When I expressed this opinion in a previous post, someone popped up to tell me that it was cleeeeearly a Hawaiian wart fern (Microsorum scolopendria or Phymatosorus grossus) and not a Phlebodium at all. Based on the lack of scent (M. scolopendria fronds are supposed to smell like vanilla.) and the less-orderly arrangement of its spores, I'm pretty certain it's not that particular Microsorum (or Phymatosorus). Though I don't rule out that it could be a Microsorum (or Phymatosorus).
³ In theory. I was assuming that the scale wouldn't be able to survive on the hairy rhizomes long enough for the plant to grow new fronds. This may or may not be a good assumption.

Random plant event: Euphorbia leuconeura

The Euphorbia leuconeura story continues. When we last checked in, there were flowers starting to appear on one of the two plants. It's taken longer than I was expecting, but there are now finally some seedlings popping up:

Six so far in this pot (one has emerged since the photo was taken); I've also spotted one seedling in a neighboring plant's pot.

Not sure what, exactly, to do with these; obviously my initial impulse is to give them their own pots and begin mass-producing them, because that's always my first impulse, but A) that's going to take space, and I was already planning to start cranking out Coffea seedlings starting in December, so I really don't have the room, and B) it's kind of a stupid idea for me to be making more plants to take care of, what with the ongoing scale infestation.¹ So I guess they're going to stay where they are for the foreseeable future. Hopefully root crowding won't be too big of a problem; I suppose I'll know based on how quickly the pots dry out.

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¹ I am now in the process of adding imidacloprid to all the plants in the house. (Last year I just did the basement, which was apparently not good enough.)
I'm doing it as I water, which means that I won't actually be done until around the end of November, and imidacloprid takes a month or two to reach full effectiveness, so I won't really know how well it worked until around late January.
And my chances aren't great, mathematically speaking. I don't know how likely it is to both fully eliminate scale from plants that are currently infested and prevent new infestations from starting on clean plants, but if it's 99.9% effective, which is optimistic, and all 936 plants are either infested or exposed, my chances of actually getting rid of the problem once and for all this winter are only (0.999)^936, or about 39%.
I can do things to help boost those odds: remove branches or leaves that have visible scale on them, throw out some more plants, wipe plants down with rubbing alcohol. And it's likely that not every plant is either infested or exposed right now. It could be that I only have to eliminate or prevent scale on like 75 plants, in which case a mere 99% success rate would give me roughly 50-50 odds of victory.
So there's some room for optimism. Just not, you know, very much.

Your Love is Like / a Rollercoaster, Baby, Baby

Weird times. The plant collection is at once thriving in previously unprecedented ways and going completely to hell, which I guess is something that can happen once a collection reaches a certain size. Sort of like how Texas can be a disaster area due to flood and drought simultaneously.

On the one hand, I've been finding scale infestations all over the house, including on some very special plants,¹ which has at times left me despairing of ever getting things under control. (For good reason -- this has been going on for almost two years already, and only seems to be getting worse. It's showing up in new rooms, it's showing up on plants I thought I'd cured, and it's particularly bad on the plants that were outside for the summer.²) I'm not seeing scale on that many plants, really (probably only about 50, in a collection of 955), but of course it's the scale you're not seeing that's the real problem.

Also the Euphorbia fungus has returned as well. It probably never left.

On the other hand, the Stapelia giganteas are blooming like crazy, which is delightful, in that special way that the smell of dog shit can be delightful if it's being smelled for the right reasons.³

Anthurium "Bijoux Tuit" is working on a second bloom, making it the second of my Anthurium seedlings to bloom twice. Three more Anthurium seedlings are producing first blooms,⁴ for a total of thirteen. I'm not completely used to the idea of the Anthuriums blooming, even though it's been a few weeks now, so this is neat every time I'm reminded of it. About 40% of the Clivia seeds I started are producing leaves.⁵ I just took a whole bunch of berries off the Coffea and started seeds drying.⁶

Seeds on lower right.
I had one Schlumbergera seedling, #55, produce a flower bud about 14 months after it was first sown.⁷ The Spathiphyllum seedlings are looking like actual plants now, and have been for some time.

They're even suckering!

So the teal deer here is that the most incredible, wonderful, and exciting things are happening with the plant collection, and I am honestly thinking about throwing it all in the trash, shuttering the blog, and taking up a less emotionally draining hobby, like competitive jam-jar rolling.

For the time being, I've just been throwing out plants⁸ and looking for sources for bulk imidacloprid.⁹ Should I find scale on the Anthuriums again, however, absolutely anything might happen.

LATE EDIT: While watering on Tuesday night, I found out Schlumbergera number 25 has decided to try and bloom as well:

Hopefully that bud will do better than #55's did.

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¹ The original Murraya paniculata, all four of the gray-variegated Yucca guatemalensis, and the Furcraea foetida 'Medio-Picta,' to name a few.
² Lesson learned: don't put scale-infested plants outside in the summer. I blame ants.
³ So far, I have six blooms open at once in the plant room, plus at least one on the smellier Stapelia variegata, and I'm not finding the combined odor objectionable or even noticing it much. Which might mean that I've just gotten used to it, but the husband hasn't said commented on any unusual smells, and he spends less time in the house. So I'm thinking maybe it's just really not that bad unless you're up close. They're not a flower you want to stick behind your ear or anything.
⁴ #118, "Elijah Sturdabowtit;" #46, "Aurora Boreanaz;" and #235, "Rowan DeBoate." Rowan is particularly of interest, as her spathe is sort of a pale peach/cream color, which I haven't seen before on my plants.
⁵ No, it does not seem to have mattered much whether I rinsed them with hydrogen peroxide before planting, though I can't say for certain that it doesn't matter at all. The un-peroxided group of five seeds currently stands at: 0 rotted, 3 inactive, and 2 germinated and producing foliage. The peroxided group of eight seeds has 2 rotted, 1 inactive, 2 germinated but not doing much of anything, and 3 germinated and producing foliage. If we're only counting the seedlings that are visibly growing and healthy-seeming, that's a success rate of 40% on the first group and 38% on the second.
⁶ I took one berry off on 7 October, which gave me two seeds. Then on 27 October, I removed a whole cupful, and got 138 seeds. Though at least three got washed down the drain while I was trying to clean them off, and I'm planning to give a few others away, so I'm probably going to wind up starting about 130 seeds from this batch on 22 December. And that's not even half the berries that are on the plant.
Unrelated point of interest: in large quantities, Coffea berry skins smell sort of oniony, it turns out.
⁷ No pictures, because the bud dropped. It had either already given up on further development when I took it out of the flat it was in, or I knocked it off the plant in the process of untangling it from the other seedlings, 'cause by the time I went to get the camera to take a picture, it was no longer attached to the plant. Considering that it had no business even thinking about blooming in the first place (it's in the basement, under artificial lights, so it doesn't get the long, cool nights it should require for setting buds, and it was also a couple years too young to be blooming besides, according to all the reputable websites), I figure this is a pretty good sign. The moral? Between this and the Anthurium situation, I'm thinking that it's best to ignore when people tell you that plants have to be X years old before they'll bloom, because plants can't read and will bloom when they feel like it.
⁸ I had 1017 plants at the beginning of September, 1001 at the beginning of October, and it looks like we're going to be somewhere around 950 at the beginning of November. Since most of the plants that were easy to get rid of got thrown out ages ago, every plant I discard now is like a knife to the heart, pretty much.
⁹ For comparison, I've been paying $8.50 for one pound of 0.22% imidacloprid; the stuff at the link is $3.08/lb for 0.5% imidacloprid, before shipping. Do I actually need that much in order to dose the entire collection all at once? No, probably not that much. My best ballpark guess is about 25 lb. of what I've been getting, or 11 lb. of the bulk stuff.
Some of you will, at this point, be thinking about telling me I should try something else, something other than imidacloprid, like neem oil or rubbing alcohol or whatever. The reason why I'm not considering these as options is because sprinkling imidacloprid granules on soil is fast, covers the whole plant, and only has to be done once. Spraying neem or rubbing alcohol, or anything else, takes much longer to apply, covers only the areas I can reach with the spray (not so bad for large-leaved plants like Strelitzia, but spraying every surface on a Polyscias fruticosa? Fuggedaboutit.), and has to be re-done at least every week or two to keep up with the freshly-hatched larvae. As the size of the collection decreases, rubbing alcohol or whatever might be more of an option, but at the moment, there's really no way I could keep up. It's not like I haven't tried before.