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.

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: Neoregelia ampullacea 'Dark Star'

It wasn't long ago that this plant surprised me by beginning to produce an offset, something I intended to blog about but apparently never got around to.

N. ampullacea 'Dark Star' is one of those plants I've had forever (since October 2008) that have just never gotten the signal to do much. It's grown a new rosette of leaves a couple times, the first time being in August 2009, and it's lost a rosette once, which I didn't bother to record. But it's always been more or less the same size, growing new leaves occasionally, but not in any hurry or anything. So the offset was interesting, but I figured it just predicted the death of one of the old rosettes of leaves.

It turns out that yes, that's probably what it predicted, but at least I'll get flowers first. Neoregelia flowers (previously) (previouslier) are one of those flowers that I think are actually prettier and more interesting before they open, so I'm happy to have gotten to see them while still buds: usually the whole process happens too fast to catch.

Sharp-eyed readers will also notice that my thrips problem is still ongoing, as of 18 December when this photo was taken: it's one of my better thrips pictures, actually, and I didn't even see it until I had uploaded the pictures to the computer and was flipping through them to decide which one to use for the post. S/He's more or less directly to the right of the tip of the largest flower bud, and directly up from the tip of the flower bud in the lower right. More detail is visible in the full-size view of the photo.
By the rules of bromeliads, this means that the rosette of leaves which is blooming will have a period of time in which to produce new rosettes, after which point it will die, so the whole thing is very good-news-bad-news, but that's plants for you.

Ten(-ish) Things I Have Mistaken for Scale

So we're in the fifth week of checking all the plants in the basement weekly (on the east and south sides) or every second week (on the west). I'm not finding many actual pests anymore, for two reasons:

The first reason is that there's just not that much to find anymore, since any plants with obvious, easy to see infestations were already thrown in the trash.¹ The second is that I'm not looking as hard, because it's extremely time-consuming and tedious to do, and I'm tired of it.

As a result, almost every scale insect I've seen lately has been a false positive of one kind or another. And there are many kinds. So here is a list of ten things I have managed to mistake for scale in the last five weeks:

1. Scars -- on everything. Oh my god. You've never imagined how many little tan corky spots there are on the leaves, petioles, and stems of your plants until you've had to check each one individually to see whether it rubs off. And of course there's no way to actually remove them, because they're part of the plant, so I wind up checking the same scars over and over, week after week. This is far and away the largest and most irritating category of false positives.

Multiple scars on Epipremnum aureum 'Neon.'
Leaf scar on Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips.'
Not actually sure what this thing on a NOID Cryptanthus is, but I think it's either edema, a scar, or edema that became a scar.
Multiple irregular scars on the back of a Begonia x 'Erythrophylla' leaf.
Scars from thrips (?) on one of the Anthurium seedlings.

2. Dots of dried sap -- they're generally the wrong color to be scale, but the size and shape are close, so they have to get checked out anyway. Arguably a subcategory of scars, though distinct because dried sap rubs off. (Usually.)

Dried sap on Euphorbia trigona.
And on Hoya something. (Sold as H. kentiana, probably actually H. wayetii.)

3. Marginal burn, tip burn -- It doesn't happen a lot, but sometimes when a leaf is burnt in just the right way, the dead spot looks like a scale insect hanging right on the edge or tip of the leaf. Since the actual insects tend to congregate around the spot where the petiole attaches to the leaf, on and along the midrib and other major veins, this isn't terribly confusing, but it happens.

The margin spots on this variegated Yucca guatemalensis didn't make it through the recoloring / cropping process in very good shape, but they're there, along with a more obvious scar in the center of the leaf.

4. Aerial roots -- the shape is often not quite right, but when they're first developing, some aerial roots are small, oval, and tan. Best distinguished from scale by the facts that they don't wipe off and that they're pointy.

Aerial roots on a somewhat unhappy Selenicereus anthonyanus.²
Roots forming on a Stapelia gigantea stem.

5. Dirt -- dirt gets splashed all over when I water, so some of it ends up on the leaves and stems. Because there's no wind in the basement to blow it off, it stays attached. The irregular shape usually gives it away, but some pieces of bark are rounded enough to be momentarily alarming, and vermiculite is about the right color, so this is occasionally a problem.

A tiny fleck of potting mix on an Aglaonema 'Peacock' leaf.
A couple bits of dirt on an Anthurium seedling.

6. The natural coloration of the plant -- some plants just naturally have lots of little bumps or brown spots or whatever. In most of these cases, I've either given up on checking altogether because it's impossible, or the plant got scale a long time ago and has been thrown out. Aerial roots is technically a subdivision of natural coloration, now that I think about it, but it's so common and specific it probably deserves a separate entry anyway.

Close-up of a Ficus microcarpus stem, showing peeling bark, aerial roots, and a bunch of other random stuff.
Some of this Schefflera actinophylla's brown spots, if not all of them, are capable of becoming aerial roots if the air is sufficiently humid, but usually they just expand to form bark.

7. Edema -- again, bumps due to edema are usually irregularly shaped, so I don't have to resort to the squish test, but this has still happened plenty of times.

Surprisingly bad edema on a Billbergia nutans leaf, probably because I moved it into a bigger pot and then set it in front of a cold window.

8. Spiders -- only once, but still.


9. Mineral deposits -- parts of the plants that are in contact with the soil will sometimes get a tan, crusty mineral buildup which can resemble a big infestation of closely-spaced scale. Hatiora salicornioides seems to be especially prone to this, but I also see it on Anthurium quite a lot.

Mineral crust on Hatiora salicornioides.

10. Hallucinations -- and occasionally I just straight-up see things that aren't there. Which is usually a sign that I should take a break.

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¹ The last few scale insects I've found also appeared to be dead already. Or at least they were really, really tired, being flat and dried out and crunchy. One hopes that this has something to do with the imidacloprid.
Although thrips aren't really the focus of the post, for readers who are curious: the thrips are still around, here and there, and when I see them they're generally alive. I'm only finding them in a particular fairly narrow section of the basement shelves, though, and I didn't find any last week, so this is maybe progress. I also got my first thrips photos -- none are very good, but they're an improvement over no photos at all:
The thrips in question was photographed on notebook paper (hence the blue line in the top image), through a tiny magnifying glass lens, if this gives you any sense of the size.
² I have two Selenicereus anthonyanus plants, one in the basement and one in the plant room, and neither one has ever seemed very happy to be here. Mostly they just don't grow very fast, and the new growth is thin. Likely a light issue, but I don't have any better spots available.
It's weird, because Selenicereus chrysocardium is fine in very similar spots. I don't know what's wrong.

In Which I Nearly Achieve Houseplant Pest Bingo

There are too many plants in the basement, and too many plants needing water elsewhere in the house, for me to have been able to check everything in the basement this week. But here's where things are since my last post about the Great Purge of 2013:

I've discarded 125 more plants, 70 of which were Anthurium seedlings.

This is both worse than I had feared, and not nearly as bad as I had feared. I'd assumed that I would find a handful of locations that were just swarming with scale, but most of the collection would be clear. The reasoning was that there would be a lot of insects near the spots where they were first introduced, but since they don't crawl very far or very fast, they wouldn't have had time to spread very far away from those initial sites. And that actually is more or less what I found among most of the collection -- a few hot spots, but mostly clean. However, among the Anthuriums, it was basically the opposite: lots of plants that only had one visible insect, occasionally two, but no plant that was heavily infested, and the affected plants were sort of randomly scattered around the flats of seedlings. I don't know what that means, exactly, but it must mean something.

I also discovered, in the process of giving everything close inspections, that I have thrips. For sure. I'd thought this was possible, because I've seen damage on a few plants (especially the Anthurium seedlings) consistent with thrips, and on two occasions, I've seen fast-moving skinny insects that might plausibly have been thrips, but 1) they're so fast that by the time I realized that I had seen something, the something was no longer there to see, and 2) it's only happened a couple times over a long period of time, so by the time I saw the second one, I'd mostly forgotten about having seen the first.

As far as it goes, I only saw two thrips on this round, but I got a better look, and one thrips¹ actually held still long enough to be identified (though not photographed). So it's been confirmed.

Which means that, among other things, I have finally reached the point where I have had all seven of the major houseplant pests,² which feels like an accomplishment of sorts. I have not yet gotten Houseplant Pest Bingo, see below, but am now in a position where I'll almost certainly have Bingo with the next pest I see, regardless of what it is.

Slugs, earwigs, caterpillars, snails, root mealybugs, or borers/weevils would all get me a Bingo. And then I win! (Something!) C'mon, caterpillars!³
Most of the scale sightings were of the same species over and over again, which is what I'd expected. The species in question is nearly circular, brown, and very flat, and what makes me think that it's the same species consistently is that unlike most pictures of scale I've seen, on this one the legs are almost always visible through the shell. (In fact, seeing legs is as good as the squishability test, as far as determining if a random spot is scale or just a scar.)

The species of scale I've been seeing on everything. Left: younger one, on Eucharis grandiflora. Right: a couple more mature individuals on Alworthia 'Black Gem.'
However, I think there may be more than one species in the basement, because I found one plant that had these instead:

Many unanswered questions about this. Where did they come from? How did they get to be so huge without managing to spread to the plants around them? (I was being awfully thorough: if other plants had these, I would surely have seen them.)

But so the point is that in the course of trying to get one problem under control, I've discovered two more problems. Which is less depressing than you might think, because the stuff I was already planning to do should also get rid of the thrips and the new scale. The imidacloprid may yet do something, and I've decided to go ahead and keep spraying the Anthurium seedlings with neem oil, on the theory that it can't hurt, and may help. Plus I'm about to begin another sweep through the basement to check for scale (or whatever), and anything that has scale, or a major problem with something else, will be thrown out. There may be no magic bullet, but perhaps there's a magic shotgun shell.

As far as losing plants that cannot easily be replaced, there have been a few, but not as many as I was expecting. Most of the hard-to-replace plants were thrown out because they'd never done well for me, not because I saw scale on them. The only plant that really qualified as a sad event was a NOID Nematanthus with pink/orange blooms, where I lost all five plants I had. I also lost both the Murraya paniculata I'd propagated from a cutting, and the one I'd propagated from seed.

And then there were the three that I should have thrown out, but cheated and kept parts anyway:

1) I threw out the parent, but propagated an Epipremnum aureum 'Marble Queen' that had belonged to the husband long ago. It didn't seem like it was that badly infested, and although 'Marble Queens' are easily replaced, this specific 'Marble Queen' wasn't. I washed the cuttings off (including power-washing with the sprayer attachment set to "annihilate"⁴) and am water-rooting. I'll check them over a few times before potting them up, but considering the plant's history, I didn't want to get rid of it completely.

2) I also propagated Agave lophantha from offsets, after power-washing, though I did it kind of backwards. The main plant didn't have visible scale on it, but the offsets did. The weird part was where. My A. lophanthas have been producing lots of offsets (at least ten per plant) on long, skinny stalks, with thin, stunted leaves shielding the stalks all the way up. After the stalk is a certain length away from the soil, the offset starts growing thicker, heavier leaves, and settles down into a rosette form like the mature plants have.

I didn't think to take any pictures of the runners that had actual offsets growing at the end. This is a picture of one of the long, skinny stalks with the thin, stunted leaves, though.
On my plants, the parents were clean, and the thicker leaves of the offsets were clean, but there were scale hiding under the thinner leaves up the stalk.

This makes it sort of silly of me to spare the offsets, and there's a good chance that the scale kept appearing on the offsets because they were crawling over from the main plant, maybe beneath the soil. But, the parent plants had grown large enough to be dangerous and unwieldy, and I didn't want to throw out the entire plant, because I don't see them for sale very often. So power-washing the offsets and then potting them up was sort of the best compromise I could manage. I get to keep the species while shrinking it to something more manageable, and hopefully any scale present was either discarded along with the stalks and parent plant or washed down the drain during the power-washing. If scale show up on the offsets later, I suppose I'll throw them out, but I'm hoping the scale will let me get away with cheating, at least on this one species.

3) The non-variegated Agave americana was also spared. Again, the parent plant seemed to be clean, or at least cleaner, but the offsets had scale. So I pulled the offsets out, threw them away, and kept the parent. This is probably kinda stupid, but the plant has only just started to get big enough and healthy enough to resemble a full-grown plant: I didn't want to have to start all over again if there was any way to avoid it. And I have a soft spot for Agaves anyway.⁵

Pot diameter: 5.5 in / 14 cm.
So, overall, it was worse for the Anthuriums than expected, but better for everything else. There were several borderline cases, where I saw honeydew spots but couldn't actually find insects, so I don't know if those plants were infested or just near plants that were. So there will probably be more plants on the way out this week, when I recheck. Also, this round of inspections only covered the south and east sides of the basement; I have another 57 plants on the west side that need to be checked for the first time. But so far, things aren't terrible.

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¹ "Thrips" is one of those words that is both plural and singular. One thrips, two thrips. There is no such thing as a "thrip." It's especially confusing in this case because the words that do this don't generally end in "-s," so it seems like there ought to be a "thrip." But there is not.
² (spider mites, aphids, scale, mealybugs, whitefly, thrips, fungus gnats)
³ Also: I'm not 100% certain about the viruses, since I've never had that checked out by a lab or anything. But I've seen enough things that I thought could be viruses that I figure one of them probably was. The most recent has appeared on one of my seed-grown Aglaonemas:

As with the other occasions, I can't be positive that there's a virus here, but a Google search for "ring spot plant virus" turns up a number of photos that look like this. I haven't thrown the plant out yet, but I realize I probably ought to. Maybe in this next round.
⁴ It's one of those garden-hose attachments with multiple settings. The settings are something like: mist, gentle shower, cone, jet, pulse, julienne, stun, liquefy, annihilate. For watering, I pretty much only ever use mist (for seedlings) and gentle shower (everything else), but when I feel the need to really blast the hell out of something, I use one of the others.
⁵ Indeed, from the perspective of the Agaves, I am nothing but soft, stab-able spots.