Announcements

One: the article I mentioned writing last year for the Old Farmer's Almanac Garden Guide is out; print copies have been available on their website for a few months. I've also heard of print copies being available in actual stores, though I have yet to witness this in the wild.

Two: you've probably figured this out already, but I think I'm done writing the blog. Or at least I'm going to stop feeling bad about not writing posts, which probably amounts to the same thing in the long run. (It leaves the door open in case I later decide that there's something I just have to share with the world.)

There are multiple reasons for this, but the two biggest are 1) plant-writing burnout and 2) discovering that I am substantially happier when I spend less time on the internet.¹ Despite 1), I am still going to have and grow way too many plants; despite 2), I am still going to approve comments² and respond to e-mails and update photos and names in the seedling galleries (because sometimes I have found the galleries convenient for my own purposes). Blog-adjacent stuff will all probably happen much more slowly than it used to, though, and some of you know that I'm already wildly inconsistent when it comes to e-mail. If I manage to name the Schlumbergera seedlings from the 2018-19 season, I will probably post to let you know what those are, though I don't promise to explain the names.

It's also possible that a few older posts may be edited or deleted from time to time, as I'm increasingly uncomfortable with having so much personal stuff on here. (I know nothing ever goes away completely on the internet, but it seems like there'd be no down side to making some things more difficult to find.) Changes to the archives, if any, will likely be so minimal that you won't notice them,³ and to be honest, combing through it all and editing stuff feels like it would be a lot of work, so I'm not sure this is likely.

I wish I had other houseplant blogs to point you to, but I don't. I don't encounter very many to begin with; I can only remember seeing three actively-updated ones in the last two or three years. Of those, one is primarily interested in showing you Instagram-worthy photos of plants, without much actual information. The other two offered information, but it was the same information you could get by doing a search on-line: they weren't bringing personal experience or "here's what the books don't tell you:" or trivia about the plants. I mean, goodness knows it didn't always work, but I did try to throw in something that wasn't just "water when dry; bright indirect light; propagate by cuttings; watch for scale, mealybugs, and spider mites."

Though I suppose sometimes you just want to know when to water your Aloe, and digressions about artificial insemination of sheep and rants about the herbal supplement industry only get in the way.

If readers want to suggest some other houseplant blogs for other readers to look at, please, leave a link in the comments. I promise not to say if your blog is one of the ones I refused to endorse above.⁴ Though I also don't promise to publish your comment: see footnote 2.

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¹ This piece (probably NSFW) by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books, which I strongly encourage you to read even if the internet seems fine to you, is the best description I have yet found of the way being on the internet has become unpleasant to me personally. (It won't necessarily help you understand what I mean; I just don't have anything better to point you to.)
² (Though some of you will have noticed that I am getting a lot pickier about which blog comments I approve, in ways which probably feel arbitrary and ridiculous to you but make sense to me. Though they are actually probably just arbitrary and ridiculous. But perhaps adding an element of gambling to blog commenting will make it more exciting?)
³ (assuming you ever look at the archives anyway, which I doubt)
⁴ Oh, and -- if you have a houseplant blog and you know that I've looked at it in the last two or three years, you shouldn't feel offended that I've declined to endorse it. Choose whichever option makes you feel better:
A. Mr. Subjunctive looked at my blog and then forgot about it; he's declining to endorse other blogs, not mine. Probably blocked it from his mind because he was jealous of my brilliance.
B. I don't give a fuck about whether my blog meets Mr. Subjunctive's criteria for being a good houseplant blog, because it's mine, and the only person who has to be happy with it is me. Which I am.

Anthurium no. 1715 "Tyler Linoleum"

So now I'm faced with a sort of problem. It's a completely optional problem, but it's still a problem.

The thing is that there's a completely unreasonable number of unblogged Anthurium seedlings,¹ and most of them are not interesting on their own, at all. I could possibly make them interesting by talking about some other, barely related thing and ignoring the seedlings entirely, but that's kind of exhausting to do, particularly if I have to do it dozens of times.

So the plan is to write about the five or six most interesting ones,² and see how I feel about the others once I'm finished. This will probably take a while, because having a new computer means I can have new games, and playing video games is a lot more fun than blogging about Anthuriums, even interesting Anthuriums.³ But we'll see how things shake out.

In the meantime, right at the moment, we have Anthurium seedling 1715, which is simultaneously one of the weirder, prettier, and more information-rich seedlings in a very long time.

"Pretty" may or may not be obvious from the photo, but Tyler is consistently right on the line between red and orange, which I don't think I've ever seen before. Previously, they've always fallen pretty solidly on one side or another; the in-between color is really striking in person. There's also some green on the back of the spathes, like we've seen with 0330 Faye Quinette (who I suspect of being the pollen parent), which is unusual enough to qualify for "weird."

"Information-rich" comes from the foliage. You may remember that there's been a long-standing puzzle about seedling 0115 ("Erlene Adopter") and her clones (0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, 0581 Adam All, 0586 Vera Special). All four of them, and none of the other 1500+ seedlings, will periodically and for no obvious reason go yellow at the veins, usually along the minor veins rather than the midrib or other larger veins. Sometimes it's only a couple spots, sometimes it's the whole leaf. It looks like this when it happens:

If I only had one Anthurium and it was doing this, I would assume a nutrient deficiency of some kind, but since I have lots, which are all in the same soil, all getting the same fertilizer at the same strength, etc., and only the ones that are clones of this particular seedling do it, I was thinking maybe it's genetic, or a virus or other disease which the original plant had, so all its clones did too.⁴

The virus theory's looking less likely now. I have thrips around, and thrips can transmit viruses, so if it were a virus, I should have seen this happen to other seedlings. But it's still only ever been the Erlenes.

And so now we have Tyler, whose seed parent was 0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, and look at his leaves. Mostly they're fine:

 

And they don't get gradually worse over time, as far as I can tell. The yellowing happens,

and then it stays. Doesn't reverse itself, doesn't get worse. The below photo is the same leaf, about a month after the above photo:⁵

I mean, that might look a little worse because of differences in how the photos were taken -- the latter was more strongly backlit than the former -- but if you look, the spots haven't gotten bigger, and except for a couple along the leaf margin at the top left, which possibly just didn't show in the first photo because of reflection off the leaf surface, there aren't any new spots, either.

Occasionally the colors are much more dramatic.

So now the situation is that all the clones of one plant, plus the offspring of one of those clones, does this. Which looks like support for the genetic theory, though the only other surviving seedling from the Erlenes (1727 Mercedes Sulay) has normal green leaves that stay green. And also I don't think any of the Erlenes ever produced a leaf that looked like the one in that last photo: that's pretty extreme.

Tyler would have been a keeper regardless, for the bloom color and suckering, but as the Erlenes are pretty robust plants in general,⁶ and I'm interested in whether the leaf weirdness will be passed to a third generation, it's really really a keeper. I doubt it has any commercial value: even if it's not sick in some fashion, it looks sick, which surely wouldn't sell terribly well. But I want it around at least until I understand it.

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¹ "Unreasonable" = 35.
² Definitely 1332 Alexis Gabrielle Sherrington; probably 1409 Ramona West and 1733 Jayyvon Monroe; possibly 0650 Phyllis Deen, 1438 Johnny Cockette, 1716 Tess LeCoil, 1718 Charo Beans DeBarge, and 1767 Constance Waring, depending on whether they still seem interesting to me later.
³ Dishonored 2 is incredible. There could be even more incredible games, I suppose, but my gaming tastes are very specific (single-player; realistic graphics or at least not blocky, pixelated graphics; interesting art; for shooters, I like stealth/nonlethal play as an option, if not the whole point of the game; multiple routes to the same end goal; high replayability), and Dishonored 2 sits exactly in the center of, like, all of them.
I've also recently gotten Prey, Thief (2014), Assassin's Creed, and Cities: Skylines, each of which fits my criteria at least a little bit, so I'm going to have something to entertain myself with between rounds of watering for a very long time. Though apparently the first Assassin's Creed is not great and I was supposed to have started with Assassin's Creed 2. I didn't know.
⁴ Also, for what it's worth, I have tried adding magnesium to the fertilizer, in the form of Epsom salt (MgSO₄), and that had no effect. I don't have element-specific sources of other nutrients to try to add, but the fertilizer I use does contain most of the trace elements plants need: boron, iron, copper, manganese, etc.
⁵ (31 October 2017 vs. 29 November 2017, for the record.)
⁶ (with the exception of the ghost mites, to which they seem more susceptible than average)

Explanation

Intended to be posting Anthurium photos by now, but I got sick, then my computer monitor died and had to be replaced, then I got sick with something else that was worse than the first thing, then the computer's power supply blew up and the computer was dead and had to be replaced, and so on. So posts are coming, but I'm going to have to get my life back to normal first; it's unclear how long that will take.

Anthurium nos. 1336, 1714, 0963, 1219, and 1508

The main hangup for posting has been that I didn't have photos ready for the various seedlings that needed posts; I caught up on that a few days ago. (Getting names chosen for the Schlumbergera seedlings is also an obstacle, but at least I can do Anthuriums.)

So I now have 62 unblogged Anthurium seedlings, and 48 Schlumbergera seedlings. If I were to do one post per day, with one seedling per post, then I won't manage to catch up until the middle of November, and by mid-November more of both kinds of seedlings will have bloomed.¹ I don't think I can do more than one post per day (one post per day is already pretty unlikely), so the obvious thing to try is to do more than one seedling per post. So here we are.

So my plan is to lump some of the less-interesting Anthurium seedlings together in bundles of five, and get them out of the way that way, and hopefully that will free up enough time for me to find names for the Schlumbergeras. (Interesting Anthurium seedlings -- and yes, there are some -- will still get individual posts.)

Anthurium no. 1336 "Erica Rae O'Hara"

Erica Rae isn't bad, just nothing we haven't seen before. The inflorescence is a good size, and the spadix is maybe slightly interesting -- don't see brown spadices very often --

-- and the foliage is actually pretty nice. Very shiny, more thrips-resistant than average,

and the plant has a nice form overall.

The new leaves are even kind of ornamental on their own.

So I'll keep her.


Anthurium no. 1714 "Augusta Wynndt"

Similar story with Augusta: blooms are a good size and look nice,

though the two cameras don't agree on what color the spathe is, and I don't remember what it looked like well enough in person to be able to tell you which is the real color. Old camera:

New camera:

Leaves are again nice and mostly unbothered by thrips, though the texture is different from Erica Rae's:

And the overall form is pleasant.

Also a keeper.


Anthurium no. 0963 "Cassandro"

It's possible that Cassandro will do something prettier in the future, or would if given a bigger pot in which to grow, but I'm not impressed so far.

Even if subsequent blooms were bigger and less damaged, he's not doing anything we haven't seen before, and the plant overall is pretty weak-looking.

I suppose the narrowness of the leaves is maybe mildly interesting.

But overall, no compelling reason to keep Cassandro.


Anthurium no. 1219 "Niles Marsh"

Niles has a slightly unusual color.

I mean, we've seen pale pinks before, but not very often, and Niles has produced quite a few blooms since he got started, which is a point in his favor.

Unfortunately, light pink is a really terrible color for thrips damage -- I still haven't determined whether the thrips are more attracted to lighter spathes, but thrips damage definitely shows up a lot better on light-colored blooms. Which dampens my enthusiasm a bit. The leaves are nevertheless pretty nice,

and it hasn't seemed overly bothered by the thrips otherwise. I'm a little concerned about the growth habit -- that stem looks kind of long, for a plant with such a small number of leaves --

but we can probably keep Niles around and see how things go. The spathe color is enough justification to keep the seedling, as long as the thrips don't get too extreme.


Anthurium no. 1508 "Tabbi Katt"

And finally, the very misleadingly-named Tabbi Katt (the name of a real drag queen), which has decent blooms in a boring color,

though the thrips seem to be more of a problem on Tabbi than on the other seedlings from this post. That notch on the left side of the spathe shouldn't be there. The thrips don't seem to be a problem on the foliage, though, which is nice,

And the plant is otherwise pleasant.

So Tabbi's also a wait-and-see kind of seedling, but I like her chances a lot better than Cassandro's. Not a bad group of seedlings overall, just less interesting than I would like.

Next post on Saturday.

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¹ Indeed, the 2017-18 Schlumbergera season hasn't even ended yet. Ordinarily, the blooming is basically over by the end of April, but this year I've had seedlings bloom for the first time in May (470A, 426A, 376A), June (183A), and July (473A, 434A, 421A, 123A). Which shouldn't be happening; my guess is that the air conditioning, plus the downstairs lights being on timers, has convinced some of the seedlings in the basement that it's November year-round. For the sake of being able to do a Schlummies post for the 2017-18 season, I'm going to arbitrarily set the cutoff at 1 September: anything that blooms after that will officially belong to 2018-19.

It's been almost a month

and I haven't written a new post yet. Sorry. Still here, still intending to blog.

I do at least have name finalists chosen for a lot of the Schlumbergera seedlings, so once I start again, I should be able to rip through those pretty quickly. Not sure what to do with the Anthuriums; with a few exceptions, the blooms are mostly repeating themselves, which is a problem, and the second problem is that I'm feeling a little weird about the drag queen names ever since the 1592 Maliena B Itchcock post. Not sure how to deal with that; haven't even exactly been able to articulate to myself what I'm uncomfortable about.

So: Schlumbergera posts soon, Anthurium posts maybe sometime. Sorry.

More of the Same

A nice photo of Schlumbergera 070A Delia Webster. 070A appears to be campaigning pretty hard to win the Schlummy for Most Improved Returning Seedling, 2016-17 Season: it started blooming early (23 October), it's been blooming heavily and continuously since then, and the flower color seems a bit more intense this year besides.
The Canon is now officially mine, paid for and everything, and we are . . . getting used to one another.¹ I have some default settings to use,² and I (briefly) managed to get gallery photos for all the Anthurium seedlings that had bloomed up until that point. (Some seedlings have bloomed since then, so I'm not caught up anymore, but for a little while there I was, and it was glorious.)

Unfortunately, I feel like I'm not that much closer to resuming regular posting than I was a week ago; things keep coming up. Purged the 3-and 4-inch Anthuriums, moved a bunch of the survivors around, potted up 64 new seedlings, started a bunch of Anthurium and Leuchtenbergia seeds,³ replaced some light fixtures, had a (routine) doctor's appointment, another (less routine) doctor's appointment is coming up, I've been mildly sick (just a sinus infection; unrelated to the doctor stuff), I moved a batch of Schlumbergera seedlings into the plant room on 17 October,⁴ I still haven't found new places for the Coffeas that summered outside this year to live during the winter, there are a couple family visits coming up, and so on and so forth. Just a lot of stuff going on. None of it's a big deal, some of it's actually nice, but all of it takes time and energy to deal with, and the blog is the logical thing to drop while all this is happening.

So the good news is that everything is basically fine; the bad news is that I don't know how much longer it's going to be before I can start blogging like I was, because I don't know how much more unusual stuff I'm going to have to deal with. In the meantime, I'm still taking, sorting, and editing photos, and sooner or later posting will have to get back to normal.

Probably around Thanksgiving / Hanukkah / Christmas / New Year's when you are all too busy to read the posts.

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¹ (, he said, through gritted teeth)
² Not the same default for all photographic subjects, unfortunately: currently there's one group of settings for light orange, tan, beige, and brown; one for red-adjacent oranges; and one for everything else. Which still doesn't work all the time, but it's better than what I had before, and I don't have to take a dozen different sets of photos in the hopes that one of them will give me something serviceable.
³ I don't know whether the Leuchtenbergia seeds will be viable; they're from the cross-pollination in 2013. I mean, you'd think that a desert plant would be willing to wait around for a few years before germination, in case there was just no rain that year, but I don't know. Either way, I suppose the odds of germination were getting worse the longer I waited, so better this year than the next.
⁴ All of which are new, and a couple of which are definitely old enough to bud, because they started and aborted buds a few times while in the basement. They all got moved too late to be blooming now, but I'm guessing they'll start in mid- to late December. When that happens, the hope is that we'll see a bit more color variety from the Schlumbergeras: the seed parents of this batch include a few we've already seen (the NOID magenta and NOID white, both pretty boring seed parents last year), a couple we haven't seen previously but that aren't likely to give us anything terribly new (the red/white 'Exotic Dancer' and the red-orange/white 'Stephanie'), some second-generation seedlings from 025A Clownfish, 026A Brick Wall, 057A Pyrotechnic, 082A Strawberry Madeleine, and 088A Cyborg Unicorn, which might or might not do anything interesting, and then a solid chunk of NOID yellow seedlings, from two different batches, which are probably our best bet for something interesting to happen.
And so we wait to see buds.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Norman's Jade

By now, the reader will have noticed that PATSP has been nothing but orchids for the last six weeks or so, and I feel like I should explain. The plants, led by the Anthurium seedlings, chose November to try to break my heart. It's not yet clear whether they succeeded in breaking it, exactly, but it's at least pretty damaged. And this is on top of the episodic panic attacks and what have you; the plants waited until I was weak to strike. As they do.

November was shitty.

How did they try to break your heart, you may be asking. Well, on top of the scale that I've been trying to get rid of for the last five years or so, which I periodically get really close to eliminating via imidacloprid and then discover that nope, it's still here, and on top of the thrips, which have been uglifying the Anthurium flowers and leaves for nearly as long, and for which the only remotely effective cure is "white oil," which not only makes the whole house smell like rancid vegetable oil for weeks afterward but also causes all the Anthuriums to drop any flowers or buds they might have, and doesn't even eliminate the thrips, I've added two new ongoing and ineradicable¹ plagues to the Anthurium seedlings.

The Xanthomonas infection has been spreading through the Anthuriums for most of this year (also likely before this year -- I suspect it came in on the NOID pink/green Anthurium -- but bacteria that spread via water droplets really go nuts when you start spraying all the foliage with water every time you water, in an attempt to blast off the thrips, which didn't even work), and is now uglifying some of the seedlings which had remained more or less pristine through the thrips and scale. There's also, as far as I can tell, nothing I can actually do about it, save for throwing out all the affected seedlings. I'm aware of a treatment that places beneficial, or at least non-harmful, bacteria on the leaves, making it harder for Xanthomonas to establish itself, but as far as I can tell, that's only a preventative measure, and doesn't do anything to cure plants once they've been infected. If there's a way to cure infected plants, I haven't run across it yet, and if I did run across it, odds are good that I wouldn't be able to afford it. So it's possible that the only option I've got is to throw out all the affected plants and hope to outrun the Xanthomonas, which I'd be more optimistic about if that had worked for me with any plant pest or disease ever.

And then in just the last couple months, the mysterious unidentified mites from this post in 2014 have made their way to the Anthuriums downstairs. (They'd been on the upstairs ones, intermittently, for longer, but I hadn't made the connection between the mites and the leaf damage until the last few weeks: I'd been assuming thrips. The ghost mites² prefer to feed on larger leaf veins, and appear in such numbers that affected leaves wind up looking like they've been hit by especially anal-retentive thrips: dead brown streaks that follow all the large veins, with relatively little damage in the spaces between them. The ghost mites also seem to be perfectly happy hitting older leaves, as opposed to the thrips, which prefer new growth, so really there was no reason to ever think that this was thrips damage, but perhaps I can be forgiven for not being willing to believe that I had another plant pest in the house, given the circumstances.

And it hasn't just been the Anthuriums, of course. Had a scary bunch of defoliation happen on the Neofinetia falcata out of nowhere, which briefly had me convinced that it was in the process of dying. (It has since stabilized, or at least wants me to think it has. No doubt waiting until I'm weak again.) A number of Dracaenas have broken out in spots that remind me of pictures I've seen somewhere. I can't remember if the pictures were of a bacterial leaf spot disease or a fungal leaf spot disease, as if the distinction matters. A very tall Pilosocereus pachycladus fell into my shoulder during watering, which hurt (spines in the shoulder! Lots of them!) and then hurt (the part of the cactus that hit me the hardest hollowed out and turned blue, purple, and finally black -- it's not clear whether the damage is continuing to spread).

I had decided in the spring of 2016 that I was done with the Euphorbia grandicornis. It was a salvaged cutting from a much larger plant that had never done very well for me, due to inadequate light, but I couldn't quite bear to just throw it out, so instead I planted it in one of the Canna beds, figuring that it could live (for a while) if it wanted to, and we'd see how that went. Naturally it loved it outside, even after the Cannas grew over it and I forgot that it was even there. Saw it in the fall and was like, holy crap, that's pretty impressive, maybe it deserves a chance to live in the house after all.

So I pulled it up and brought it inside,

You can probably figure out which is this year's new growth, yes?
and gave it its own pot of fresh soil. Whereupon it immediately shriveled, blackened, and died, proving once and for all that the Euphorbiaceae is the least appreciative plant family. A Gasteria seedling (the last one in this post, the light green one with thin leaves) died on me without warning or explanation. Lost another Polyscias seedling (#10), and now #8 isn't looking so hot.

Even the Schlumbergera seedlings are letting me down a little bit this year. As predicted, I've finally seen some colors outside of the red / orange-red / red-orange / orange / light orange spectrum, which should be good. But A) not nearly as many as I had expected, and B) the non-red/non-orange seedlings have been very similar to plants I already had: the NOID white seedlings have been either white/white or magenta/white, and the NOID magenta seedlings have been magenta/white, white/white, or in the red-to-orange spectrum. The three second-generation seedlings (all from 025A Clownfish) have been orange/white (239A), orange/pink (240A), and red/pink (244A). So I'm not breaking any new ground at all, color-wise.³ Plus, the most recent first blooms have been all chewed-up,

(Seedling 069A, first bloom)
because the thrips have finally eaten enough Schlumbergera petals from the early-blooming seedlings that they've multiplied and prospered. Now the thrips can start attacking the late-blooming buds, meaning the late blooms look like shit as soon as they open.

And this isn't even all; there's one plant-related thing from November/December that is literally still too painful for me to tell you about,⁴ there's the usual steady stream of Anthurium-seedlings hitting the walls and exploding⁵ (28 seedlings since mid-November), there are the mostly-disappointing new Anthurium blooms,⁶ there's the first scale sighting on a Clivia since I've had Clivias. And, mostly, there's the increasingly firm conviction that nothing I do is going to make any of these things go away. There are too many plants, too many hiding places -- the only way forward is to dump a bunch of them, cure the remaining ones, and then build back up again. Or maybe the smart thing would be not to build back up again.

So the reason I haven't been blogging about the plant collection is that the plant collection is horrible, and hurts just to think about, and I've been on the verge of throwing out like 95% of the Anthuriums for something like the last six weeks but haven't been able to bring myself to do it. Throwing them all out is clearly an overreaction, throwing none of them out is obviously an underreaction, throwing some of them out requires hard choices about who lives and who dies and why, plus if I keep a seedling I should have thrown out then I don't even get rid of the problem. So I've been continuing to water and despair, postponing the decision, while everything gets worse. I'm no longer starting new Anthurium seeds already, as of 23 October: the berries just wither and die on the spadices now. This wasn't originally a conscious decision, but once I realized I was doing it, I decided it was just as well, so it's a conscious decision now. Not sure whether I'm going to bother potting up all the seedlings that have already germinated: I'm postponing that decision too.

I'm toying with the idea of going on indefinite hiatus from the blog as of late March, when the last of the 2016 orchid photos is scheduled.⁷ This is more likely to happen than not, I think, because the plants have been steadily less and less fun over the last five years and there are things I would rather do with my time,⁸ but I do still want to get the Schlumbergeras named -- hardly urgent, but I've come up with some names I like and want to use them -- and although I'm not sure you need to see all ten, at least half of the Anthurium blooms since the last Anthurium seedling post are interesting in one way or another. So there will probably be some non-orchid posts coming eventually. We'll see how I feel about plants in March. (If you hear me humming "Freedom 90" a lot in February,⁹ brace yourself.¹⁰)

Almost doesn't seem worth bothering with the orchid, but I promised a Phalaenopsis in the title, so here you go.

*deep breath*

"Jade" seems like an exaggeration. I mean, yeah, yellow jade is a thing, as an image search will confirm for you, but it's not the color people think of when they hear "jade." I have a note here that the bloom closest to the tip of the spike was darker yellow than the others, but I can't remember whether that means it was the youngest bloom or the oldest bloom. Which direction do Phalaenopsis buds open, again?

I also noted that I got really tired of light yellow, when I was going through the photos from this year's show. Didn't notice it as a theme when I was taking the photos, though.

I found photos of a couple named clones of Norman's Jade ('Green Angel' and 'Montclair Canary'), the first of which seemed sort of green, but alas, both were on a site that sells orchids, and the pages have been taken down since I found them, presumably because they're no longer selling those particular clones.

I suppose in the abstract, this is a nice color,¹¹ but it doesn't do much for me as a Phalaenopsis.

Phalaenopsis Norman's Jade = Phalaenopsis Prospector's Dream x Phalaenopsis Norman's Mist (Ref.)

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¹ (?)
² (My own term; I still don't know what they are. I'm positive they're not cyclamen mites or spider mites, though. Or at least not the normal species of cyclamen/spider mites: they're not rounded and shiny enough to be cyclamen mites, and they're the wrong color, and not mobile enough, to be spider mites. They also don't produce webbing like spider mites. Therefore: ghost mites. Until I come up with an ID.)
³ It is beginning to seem plausible that the cross that started this whole thing, the 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach, was the only cross I could have made that would have resulted in anything new or interesting, and it's just dumb luck that it happened to be the cross I started with.
⁴ Q: well Jesus, Mr. S., if you're not going to tell us what it is then why even bring it up?
A: I don't know. I'm sorry.
⁵ Dramatization (you have to imagine that the cars are seedlings):
⁶ As well as two that weren't disappointing at all. Or, well, one that wasn't disappointing at all -- 0802 Dana International, my first dark(ish) purple -- and one that looks likely to be my first green seedling, provided that the bud doesn't drop (1268 Lil' Miss Hot Mess). It'll be a while before 1268 is officially not disappointing.
⁷ Why not immediately? Well, I made notes on the orchid posts when I uploaded the pictures, so I don't have to work as hard to come up with something to say about them. Schlumbergera- or Anthurium-seedling posts require more work. Posts about other plants are even more work than that.
⁸ Like what? I dunno. Maybe I'll dye my hair. Maybe we'll move somewhere. Etc.
More seriously, I'm working out a lot. Like, a lot. It helps with the panic.
⁹ (♫ Take back your pictured pollen grains / Take back your yellowed, dead dumb canes / I just hope you understand / Sometimes the plants do not make the man ♩♪)
¹⁰ Also, RIP George Michael. :^(
¹¹ I mean, if you get abstract enough, any color is as nice as any other. They're just varying proportions of photons, of different energies, hitting your retina and being interpreted as color by your brain. Seems silly to say this combination of photons is beautiful but that combination of photons is disgusting. But we say that. All the time.

Semi-hiatus

I've been having a tough time keeping up with the posts as scheduled, and I haven't been feeling like I was doing a particularly good job making them interesting anyway, so I'm going to take a break of undetermined length. Everything's fine; I'm just tired.

Orchid posts will continue as usual.

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.

-

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.)

Question for the Hive Mind: Blog Subscriptions

For unknown reasons, I've gotten two e-mails in the last week that asked how to subscribe to PATSP, and . . . well, I have no idea how to answer them, aside from telling people to find a feed reader and subscribe to the PATSP RSS feed. It's not a problem I've had to deal with personally, because Blogger comes with a feed reader and has not yet given me any reason to look for something else, but if people are going to keep asking, I suppose I should try to figure out a good answer. People especially seem to want to know how to get new posts sent to e-mail. (I'm kind of against that, since I want you to have to come here to read it -- if you don't visit the page, I have no way of knowing you ever read anything. But I can't make you come here if you don't wanna.)

So: how do you keep up with new PATSP posts? Feed reader? Just check in every so often? Something else? What should I be answering, when people ask how to subscribe to PATSP?

Pretty picture: Enanthleya Joseph Romans

I didn't exactly intend to go for two days without posting, but what's happened is that my brother took advantage of a we're-so-sorry-we-screwed-up-everything-associated-with-the-SimCity5-launch-so-terribly offer from game publisher Electronic Arts (EA), wherein they were selling a bundle of five games very cheaply (I want to say $5 but am too lazy to check on this), and then he gave me the redemption code for one of them because he already had it. And the game in question is Sims 3. And it happens that I now have a computer capable of running Sims 3, so . . . well, you see where this is headed.

The good news is, 1) Sims 3 shouldn't affect the actual posting frequency all that much. With the previous computer and Sims 2, the computer wasn't powerful enough to do anything else at the same time as Sims, plus whenever I wanted to play, I had to set aside an hour and a half or so for the game to load first (no, seriously), plus however much time I wanted to spend actually playing. I don't have these problems now, so Sims won't be cutting into my time nearly as badly. Also 2) I've made considerable progress on dealing with the huge number of photos I took in September, so some of the random plant events from August and September that I haven't posted about yet will be coming relatively soon.

The bad news is, part of the reason Sims isn't going to affect the projected posting frequency very much is that the projected posting frequency was already pretty low. This is because it's that time of year when I have to bring plants inside for the winter, and that's an extremely complicated, boring, and time-consuming process. At the 60% complete mark, I've already run out of room, so some fairly extreme things are about to start happening to the plants with scale, and to the larger underperformers.

Meanwhile, there's an orchid. It's not going to set the world on fire with its beauty or anything, but it's okay.

And really, setting the world on fire is an unreasonably high standard to have for orchid beauty, now that I think about it. (When's the last time that even happened?)

The tag said "Cty. Joseph Romans," but after some investigation this turns out to be the equivalent of Enanthleya Joseph Romans, which itself is a hybrid of Cattlianthe Portia with Encyclia phoenicea.

Saturday morning Sheba picture

I had planned on taking a new Sheba picture to post today, but then it rained all morning yesterday, making that difficult. So instead you get a photo from August 2010, not terribly long after we first got her (in March 2010).

Sheba's been fine as far as I can tell, though her latest thing is dandruff. Terrible, terrible dandruff, from like her rib cage on back to her tail. (Though I doubt it would show up in photos -- it really was the rain that was the problem, I swear.) This has never happened before. She doesn't seem particularly bothered by it, and dandruff is (barely) preferable to bald spots, so we're not freaking out or anything, but still.

Excuses, excuses

Hi again.

Whatever you might have heard, I have not run off to Ecuador with everybody's donations. (I don't even speak Ecuadorian.) What's happened instead has been sort of a perfect storm of blogular interference.

• As I've mentioned before, my computer has been essentially out of memory for a few months, so it's been difficult to get photos to post to the blog.
• But -- I've gotten a new computer! With Windows 7 (The old computer has XP.) and about eight times more memory! So there have been files to transfer, and programs to install! Which also takes time, even under the best of circumstances.
• But these are not particularly good circumstances. When I tried to upload a new batch of photos from the camera to the new computer, yesterday, it acted like there was something corrupted about the files and refused to upload them.
• My attempts to fix that problem resulted in accidentally installing at least one malware program, but I did upload the photos eventually.
• But after dropping everything to get rid of the malware, I discovered that I couldn't edit the photos I'd supposedly uploaded. I couldn't even locate them.
• This is because (it turns out) the photos weren't saved to the desktop, which is where I'd told the camera to save to, but instead, they were sent to a folder nine folder-layers deep, many of which folders have ridiculously non-intuitive names, and a few of which were even hidden (invisible) folders, so I wouldn't have been able to happen on them even if I'd searched the whole computer systematically. (C --> [my account] --> Users --> AppData --> Roaming --> OLYMPUS --> OLYMPUS Master --> store ["Store?!?" -Mr. S.] --> 20130914145749 --> the pictures.)
• And in the process of trying to unhide the hidden folders, I wound up with a desktop full of previously-hidden TMP files, which I then couldn't figure out what they were, how they'd gotten on my new computer in the first place, how to hide them again, or whether or not I wanted to.
• At which point I figured that, since every time I'd touched the computer yesterday, I'd just made something worse, it might be best to pretend that the day had never happened, and go back to the system restore point from before I'd tried to do all this stuff. Just erase the whole chalkboard and start over. But restore points don't work that way. Which is something I have to re-learn every time I'm tempted to use system restore, because I am not smrt. So, this didn't hide all the TMP files, remove the Olympus program, erase all traces of the malware, or do anything else I'd wanted it to do.
• Which is pretty much when I renounced all worldly possessions and became a Buddhist monk. Which is doubly weird, because I'm not even Buddhist.
• ALSO, I've been trying for a few weeks to get yearbook pictures of some of the plants, which is tiring on its own, and dependent on the cooperation of the weather.
• And there's the usual watering and stuff, which I don't keep up with incredibly well even under ideal circumstances.
• It's been intermittently cold at night, so I've been moving plants in and out a lot, which is exhausting,
• and also means that when I'm trying to water plants, I have to finish watering before it gets cold out, so I'm always doing it in a rush, plus
• it's the time of year when I have to be thinking about bringing them in permanently, soon, and where the hell are they all going to go?
• Also I've found more scale, on various plants, in various rooms as well as outside.
• And some unknown small but prolific caterpillar (one of the geometrid moths?) ate the Episcias in my office into dead lacy parodies of their former selves, so those of you who objected to me calling houseplant pest bingo two or three weeks ago, on the grounds that you can't count caterpillars as houseplant pests if the plant isn't actually in the house when it has the caterpillars -- well, I've done it for real now, then. (How this happened is a question I can't even begin to answer. The Episcias in question haven't been outside all summer, not even for a few minutes to take photos of.)

So.

Rest assured that I have not forgotten that the blog exists, I'm really unlikely to do so, and nobody's in the hospital or anything. I just don't have time, and when I do have time, I'm usually not capable of anything besides staring at a blank wall, whimpering quietly. Sometimes I'm not even together enough to whimper, and whimpering would be a sign of progress.

The good news, if there is good news, is that I'm still taking pictures of plants doing things, so someday, someday, there will be a whole lot of horribly outdated posts about what the plants were doing over the last six weeks or so.

This is not the special post.

In my previous post, I said would not be posting over the weekend, because I was trying to get a special post ready for today.

But I have failed.

Some of the problem is that I have almost filled up the memory of my eleven-year-old computer (37.2 GB capacity, 1.51 GB remaining), which makes photo-editing more complicated and time-consuming, for reasons I predict you will not care about. The Iowa City area is pretty much awash in used computers, and I could get a much better one for about $150-200, but at the moment, the money available for this is . . . less than that. So if you've got a large pile of money somewhere, and rolling around naked in it just isn't as exciting as it used to be, and you feel like me having a new (used) computer would make the world a better place, there's a PayPal donation button at the top of the sidebar, on your right, and this would be a better-than-usual time for you to use it.^{1, 2}

Meanwhile, I will keep working on the post. Here's a hint about its topic and format:

I'm thinking maybe Thursday?

-

¹ And obviously if you don't have a large pile of money, or rolling naked in it is still enjoyable, or you feel that I'm more likely to use a new computer for evil than for good, don't worry about it. It's not life or death.
² Funds collected in excess of what I need to get a computer (if any) will go toward: getting my teeth cleaned for the first time in about ten years (which is going to happen whether I can pay for it or not, damn it), a new camera, and potting soil, in approximately that order. The actual sequence will depend on how soon I need potting soil again.

Very Large Numbers

If Google's count can be trusted -- and why wouldn't it be; it's Google -- this is PATSP's 2000th post. It is not at all clear to me how I should be feeling about this, but I think we can all agree that it's a pretty big number, blogularly speaking. Consequently, there should be some Gazania photos ('New Day' mix, if you're keeping track), as Gazania is the Official Celebratory Flower of PATSP.

We also passed the one million word mark last November. Is there really that much to be said about plants? Probably not really, but, you know, I repeat myself sometimes.

Of course, we also got the three-millionth page view at the end of last March, too, so I guess people don't mind a little redundancy.

What's in the future for PATSP? I don't exactly know. For a lot of different reasons, I'm less interested in plants than I used to be. This has more or less killed the plans for the book. I feel bad about that -- I wanted to read it just as much as some of you did -- but I just can't force myself to work on that now. I did try. This may (MAAAAAAY) mean that the plant profiles are coming back in the next six to twelve months.

Having said that, the blog itself will probably endure. I am uncomfortable with having this much information about myself in Google's hands, and have been for some time, but that particular toothpaste has been out of the tube for years; nothing much to be done about it now. I do still have plenty of ideas for posts, including a solid half-dozen ideas right this minute, so my personal expectation is that Google will give up on hosting PATSP for free before I give up on writing it.

I'll still be surprised if we reach post #4000, but my surprise is not a reliable predictor of things. So we'll see what happens. 2000 posts is still an accomplishment, so let's have one more Gazania:

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

A bunch of things have been happening -- new plants, sightings of interesting and/or pretty things, discoveries of articles on the internet that you may find relevant or important -- but I've been unable to write during the last few days because 1) all the plants had to come back in the house for a few days, and then 2) in the process of bringing all the plants back in the house for a few days, I exhausted myself, to the point where I was questioning whether or not I might actually be sick.

All available evidence suggests that no, I was not sick, only tired, but it doesn't really help at all to think that there's probably no actual virus or whatever involved.

Sheba in the plant room, before everything came back in. It's always that messy, but usually you can't see the mess because there are plants there to hide it.
So anyway. I'm debating whether or not to put the plants back out again immediately once the weather warms back up. Since they're already semi-acclimated to the light level out there, it seems like a waste of the effort I've already put in not to move them back out immediately. On the other hand, the nights aren't going to be warm enough to leave them out for a while, so if I put them out, I'll have to move them twice a day until it is warm enough. Which isn't very appealing at the moment. So it looks like I'll have to procrastinate on making the decision.

Site-related: anonymous comments

On Saturday, I'm going to disable anonymous commenting on PATSP. This might inconvenience some of you, so I thought I should let you know sooner rather than later. It is my understanding that existing anonymous comments will not be affected, just the ability to leave new ones.

The reason for the change is that I am getting flooded by spam comments, and have been since about last November. First I tried to ignore it, then I tried to enjoy it, and now I'm trying to shut it down entirely.

The Google/Blogger spam filter does catch a lot of them, but there seems to be a bit of a time lag. It looks like a lot of stuff gets sent to legitimate-comment moderation initially, and then after a few hours, the system detects it as spam and puts it into the spam filter. Which means that I am constantly noticing "Yay! A new comment!" only to be disappointed when I check it out and it's a bunch of gibberish like this:

If you really want to read this, it will probably be necessary to open it in a separate window.
The worst part is that it seems to be accelerating. PATSP receives a new spam comment every 40 minutes, on average. It's making me crazy. I considered just adding Captchas and retaining the anonymous comments, but Captchas are kind of annoying, and I'm getting the impression sometimes that the spam might be being left by actual people who can solve Captchas anyway. (Those of you with blogs who use Captchas should let me know how well they've been working for you.)

So anyway. I apologize to those of you who will be affected by this. It's not personal. I held out as long as I could.

Site-related: Template tweak

I'm looking for feedback about whether the new, wider blog template is working okay on computers other than my own. I haven't fiddled with the template much over the years, mostly because I'd figured out how to get the blog to do more or less what I wanted it to do and look more or less like I wanted it to look, and didn't see much point to changing stuff just because everybody else was changing stuff. But then I got a look at the site on the husband's new, football-field-sized monitor, and realized you know, there really is an awful lot of blank space on either side of the text.

If it doesn't display well for enough people, I can change it back, or expand it in a less drastic manner, or something, but for myself, I kind of like this version, so I'm inclined to keep it like this if nobody has any huge complaints about it.

Here is a picture of the Euphorbia milii hybrid with the big yellow flowers, just to keep this post from being completely unrelated to plants:

Top 18 PATSP Posts of 2012

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

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


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


I just liked how the photo turned out, basically.


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

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


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


Also just a nice photo.


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

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


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


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


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


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


12. Cribplants, yo. (28 November 2012)

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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


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

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


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

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


1. The Brick Joke (16 January 2012)

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

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

-

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