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)

Anthurium no. 1589 "Anita Waistline"

Hello again.

So I've gotten to the point where the camera and I are sort of getting along (except for the speck of something that's gotten into the lens, which I haven't done anything about yet because I don't want to send the camera away while there are Schlumbergera seedlings blooming for the first time, lest I miss the chance to document the flowers entirely). The adjustment process has been about 25% finding default settings to use and about 75% adjusting my expectations for what the photos "ought" to look like.

After sitting with the last post for a while, and encountering other reading material and etc., I've decided to change the name of seedling 1592 "Maliena B Itchcock," but the next several names on the list of possibilities are also problematic in various ways, and I'm beginning to think that maybe the whole drag-queen-name thing was ill-advised from the beginning. So I don't know what the new name is yet, or when I'll have time to make the changes.

Anita Waistline isn't a brilliant or unproblematic name either, but it's okay, much like the seedling it designates:

The spathe is small. I think the plant has only produced one bloom so far, too, which isn't exactly a recommendation. The foliage is probably the best thing about it.

The seed parent was 0330 Faye Quinette; I was expecting much more interesting colors than this. But that's Anthurium-breeding for you.

Anita is a sibling of both 1592 (whatever her name's going to be) and the also-uncomfortably-named 1594 Roxy-Cotten Candy.

Let's see. What else?

The Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings (mentioned about a month ago) did in fact germinate, or at least a lot of them did:

When these photos were taken, the seedlings were a mere 15 days old.

Presently at 15 new first-time Schlumbergera seedling blooms, including a very disappointing one from one of the NOID yellow's offspring, which I won't spoil for you. You can find it yourself in the Schlumbergera seedling gallery, if you so choose: it's seedling 369A.

Have become more or less convinced that Schlumbergera 057A Pyrotechnic and Schlumbergera 057B Oxomoco are in fact the same seedling, and have begun calling them both "Pyrotechnic."

Also have some news about the weird yellowing-veins thing that "the Erlenes" do with their leaves, which doesn't answer the question of why they're doing it. but does provide more evidence.

I'll try to get that into the next post, whenever that is. Life is actually pretty acutely stressful right now and I'm having a rough time of things, so I'm not going to make any promises. But I haven't forgotten about the blog.

Unfinished business: Polyscias seedlings

I suppose "unfinished business" is misleading, as it implies that some kind of business is going to be finished here. It's totally not. But I thought you might be interested in seeing what the Polyscias seedlings are up to now that they're 21 months old.¹ (Previously: at 0.9 months, 1.8 months, 8 months, and 13 months.)

Of 53 seeds sown, eleven did well enough to become official plants, on the spreadsheets and everything. Seven of those are still with us. One of the more surprising things about this (aside from the fact that Polyscias hybrids are self-fertile in the first place, and the fact that it's even possible to germinate Polyscias seeds indoors) is how dramatically different they've been in vigor and appearance. Seedlings 5, 7, 10, and 11 all died. Seedlings 6 and 8 are still with us, but are very short -- measured from the soil line to the top of the plant, seedling 6 is only 7.5 inches tall (19 cm), and seedling 8 is only 4.5 inches (11 cm). Which sucks, because seedling 8 was really interesting.

But. The remaining five plants are all doing well, for some definition or another of "well."

Seedling 1 most resembles the parent plant, though it has more finely-divided leaves, and the leaves are spaced further apart, or something. Mostly it's annoying because it's top-heavy, and flops over when it gets dry. But it has, at least, started to branch since the last time we checked in, which means that the base of the plant is filling in with foliage. Maybe this will help keep the main stem upright.

Seedling 2 was my favorite, and remains so. It's deceptively small-looking in the photo because after I repotted it into an 8-inch pot, the main stem started to grow sideways. I felt like I had the stem straight when I repotted, though that's happened with a cutting of the original plant too, so maybe I'm bad at judging what's vertical when I'm repotting.

In any event, the cutting was itself very large (large enough that I didn't think I should remove all of it, which is why the plant still leans to the left in the photo), and I've managed to root it in a large plastic container already. Haven't potted the cutting up yet because it has a lot of leaves, and I'm afraid that it's going to need a bigger root system to support them. But in any case, seedling 2 is the first one to be propagated.

Though seedling 3 wanted to be the first seedling to be propagated. In February, it bloomed.

The flowers opened and closed, just like they're supposed to, but I was unable to pollinate them. I don't know what the problem was. After this, seedling 3 went through a terrible awkward period where the stem that had bloomed fell apart (dropped leaves and buds), and then some branches developed from the bottom and took over so it filled in. Not sure what to expect it to do next.

The leaf color remains unusual as well; the photos are crap² but the leaves are nearly black, much darker than those of the parent plant. (Similarly, seedlings 1 and 4 are both very green; seedling 2 is green but shows up bluish in photos because the leaflets are broad and waxy; seedling 9 is a very dark green, similar to 3.)

Seedling 4 is the shortest of the "tall" plants. It retains leaves almost perfectly, which is all the more remarkable because the leaves are very thick and three-dimensional; you'd think they'd shade one another out really badly and then the plant would lose the ones that were most shaded. But no. It's very very thick, and very very fluffy, and I think it's probably the one most likely to have commercial appeal (very fluffy looking, slow grower, little/no leaf drop), though personally I'm more interested in 2 and 3, because they look the least like anything I've seen before.

And finally, number 9, which very nearly didn't make it -- when it was young, a few of its leaves developed a bunch of yellow spots and then dropped off. I was pretty sure that it would linger and then eventually die, but it bounced back and seems more or less fine now. Granted, it's not especially pretty. The foliage is too sparse, and it's only just now starting to branch from the base. So I'm thinking it's probably got the least commercial potential of the five.

I think at this point, it's pretty safe to assume that these five will be with us for a while longer, and it would be nice to have some way to refer to them besides the numbers. Which means I'm officially asking for name suggestions. Ideally, we're looking for a list that's basically infinite (like types of music³ or mass nouns⁴), a list of things for which there are five main ones and then a near-infinite number of smaller ones, like Lakes of the United States,⁵ original Buffy: The Vampire Slayer "Scooby Gang" characters,⁶ or auto show locations,⁷ or groups consisting of only five things, if it's possible to imagine extending the list with additional, plausible-sounding names, like the Spice Girls⁸ or Marx Brothers.⁹

In any case. If you have a group of names that you've always wanted to see used for a group of five Polyscias seedlings but you never suggested the idea because it's not really an everyday sort of opportunity, now is your time to shine. As it is, I'm kinda leaning toward the Spice Girls, and I can already tell that that's a terrible idea.

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¹ (Alternately: I thought you might be willing to pretend to be interested, if it means getting to look at something other than an Anthurium or Schlumbergera.)
² I had to take the full-plant photos in this post outside, because the plants no longer fit into the photo setup I've been using. The lighting, as a result, is not what I'm used to, and seedling 3's photo turned out especially poorly because the tops of the leaves are very nearly the color of the fabric behind them.
³ (seedlings 1, 2, 3, 4, and 9 could be Classical, Top 40, Death Metal, Country, and Alternative, perhaps)
⁴ (Mass nouns are things that aren't directly countable, like Air, Gravel, Lava, Sand, and Ashes: you don't say one sand, two sands, three sands, etc. -- if you have to quantify an amount of sand, you specify units and then attach the numbers to those, like six grains of sand, or three tons of sand. If you're part of the International Society of Rare Sands Collectors, and you have samples of sand from sixty different locations in little vials in a display cabinet on your wall, then I guess you can talk about having sixty sands, but that's a very special circumstance, and even then, everybody would know that what you really mean is samples of sixty distinct kinds of sand.)
⁵ Erie, Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Ontario.
Later seedlings, if any, could take Great Salt, Of The Woods, Iliamna, Oahe, Okeechobee, Pontchartrain, Sakakawea, Champlain, etc.
⁶ Cordelia, Willow, Giles, Buffy, and Xander. Though it might get weird having a non-willow plant named "Willow."
Subsequent seedlings, if any, could get Anya, Angel, Oz, Tara, etc.
⁷ Paris, Tokyo, Detroit, Geneva, and Frankfurt are "the Big Five" per Wikipedia, but without even having to look it up I know they have auto shows in plenty of other places, so it's basically infinite.
⁸ Baby, Sporty, Scary, Posh, and Ginger; could maybe be extended to Dreary, Sundry, Fairy, Glory, Sleazy, Spacy, Weary, Wary, Hangry, Tiny, Rosemary?, Hairy, Fiery, Tory, Marsh, Harsh, Danger, Lager, etc., though I feel like the number of plausible additional spice girls is pretty small. It doesn't take very long at all before you find yourself seriously considering Notary Spice, Dairy Spice, and Laundry Spice.
In fairness, some of the names they actually went with seem super-questionable to me, too. Like, I don't think I would ever have come up with "Baby Spice," because ew. Also Scary is fine, I guess, but giving that name to the only non-white member? Really?
⁹ Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, and Gummo; additional Marx Brothers names are also pretty limited, but I suppose we could consider Banjo, Bongo, Cheapo, Cargo, Combo, No-Go, Rambo, Limbo, Dorko, Dingo, Jumbo, Turbo, Stucco, Devo, Loco, Crisco, Dodo, Judo, etc.

Unfinished business: Polyscias seedlings

Time to check in with the Polyscias seedlings again. When we last saw them, in May, there were 11 seedlings in all, and they were about 7 months old.

They are now one year old, and three of them (5, 7, and 11) have died; one more (10) is a bit shaky, but still technically alive. I've moved all but one of them (#10 again) to 4-inch pots. The differences in their leaves are now pretty well-established, and I'm thinking that may be as pronounced as those get; instead I'm focusing more on differences in the overall plant shape, and their ability to retain their leaves. So let's take a look.

#1
Seedling 1 has nice leaves -- finely-divided, with good color and well-defined midveins on each leaflet. It doesn't seem to have great leaf-retention skills, though. There's a side-shoot barely visible near the bottom of the trunk here, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'd take the growing tip off the top if I thought it would help, but since there's only the one side shoot, I imagine I'd just replace one tall, bare-trunked stem with another. Not the worst of the survivors, but I'm disappointed; it looked really interesting in May.

#2
Seedling 2 was my favorite in May, and it's still doing well in October. I worry a little bit about it, in that it's not as tall as some of the others, and it's dropped a couple leaves since this picture was taken, but it sure seems to have a lot more light-collecting area than the other ones,

also #2
so I'm hoping it will be all right. #2 is the only one I really care that much about, so keep your fingers crossed.

#3
#3 has darker, flatter leaves than most of the seedlings did. In May, I liked that, but the flatness of the leaves makes it harder for the plant to look full in photos, it isn't branching either, and the petioles are all pretty long. It's okay, but unless it starts branching, I'm not expecting much to come of it.

#4
Number 4, on the other hand, has really thick, fluffy leaves, holds them well, and has already branched at least twice. It looks enough like the parent plant that I find it difficult to get excited about, but even if it's not that original, it's still a nice-looking plant.

#6
Seedling 6 is trying to branch, and might get there eventually. It looks kind of bare here because the newest leaf got partly broken off in the process of development, so there's just a petiole stump where there ought to be a leaf. 6 doesn't do much for me either, but it's trying.

#8
Number 8 is the one with the really, really narrow leaflets. They're so narrow that they've become kind of a problem, actually: they get tangled in themselves, and then tear when I try to straighten them out. It doesn't strike me as pretty, still, but it's dense, it's branching on its own, and it's different from what I started out with, so I'm pleased. A plant that actively tears pieces off itself when the wind blows probably doesn't have much potential as an outdoor landscaping plant, but that's not as big of a problem indoors.

#9
Number 9 is the one where a couple of the leaves suddenly developed a bunch of yellow spots and then dropped off; I figured it for an overwatering error at the time, and I don't have a better guess now. It hasn't done it again, though as you can see, there aren't many leaves, the leaves it does have aren't very interesting, and there's a lot of space between the leaves, so it's not likely to ever become my favorite.

#10
And then, finally, number 10, the only one that hasn't been moved up to a 4-inch pot yet. It was growing along okay for a while, and then the growing tip died and all the leaves fell off. It started a new growing tip from the side, but that doesn't seem to be doing so hot either, and it's so much shorter than all the others that it has a tough time getting any light, so I imagine #10 is going to be dead before the next update.

I don't know if I trust these enough to give them names quite yet, but it would be sort of nice to have something to call them besides numbers. I have an idea for a series of names but part of my brain is like, no, Jesus, that's a really bad idea, don't do that, so if you have suggestions, I'm listening.

Unfinished business: Lenophyllum texanum

The reader may or may not recall that back in August 2014, I put up this post, in which I said that it had been twenty months since I was officially been growing Lenophyllum texanum in the house, that I'd thrown out the potted plants I had and marked it as officially deceased on the spreadsheets and everything, but I still technically had some.

L. texanum is terrible about dropping leaves any time it gets moved or bumped, and each leaf is capable of growing a whole new plant, which was the reason why I got rid of it in the first place -- I was sick of having to constantly pick leaves and plants out of pots. But, when I threw away the original pots, of course some of the leaves fell off, and some of those leaves landed in the tray the plants had been sitting in, and they were too big to get washed down the drainage holes, so twenty months later, I had whole L. texanum plants growing in the bottoms of the flats. Here's the picture from August 2014:

So the months went by, and plants came and went above them, but the Lenophyllum texanum plants formed a little mat and collected a little water every time I watered the official plants in their flat, and after a certain point I was like, okay, so let's see how long you can survive this way. This post is because I have concluded that Lenophyllum texanum can, in fact, survive indefinitely with no soil or pot and very little light, water or fertilizer. This is the same bunch of plants in June 2016, three and a half years after I was officially no longer growing this species:

A close up of the group on the left side of the previous photo.
Not looking quite as healthy, sure (I think that I'd pulled them up at some point to look at the roots, which is at least part of why they're floppy: I couldn't put the mat of plants back in exactly the same spot.), but obviously still alive and everything. So I was like, okay, guys, I'll let you have a pot and some soil, good job, you win. I didn't even try to plant them. I just got a pot, filled it with some moist potting mix, and set the little mats on top of the soil. And the change was almost instantaneous. The above photos were taken on the day that I put them into pots, 16 June 2016. Here are the exact same plants on 18 August 2016, a mere 63 days later:

I assume the color change was due to stress (a lot of succulents turn redder when stressed, though the usual reasons -- cold, excessive sun/UV -- wouldn't apply here), as they were always gray-green when they had soil before, and turned back to gray-green as soon as they had soil again.

So, I mean, I still don't especially like L. texanum as a houseplant: it's messy, and invasive, and not even particularly pretty at its most beautiful. But I feel obligated, after what I've put them through. All that, and they're fine.

Obviously they will never not be fine.

Anthurium no. 0538 "Ada Buffet" / Unfinished Business

And we're back to the crappy seedlings again. Ada's a little quirky, in that she seems to have trouble keeping her spadix inside the spathe, even as a bud,

but that's one of those things that seedlings tend to grow out of eventually.

If they're allowed enough time, that is. Which Ada probably will not be, because the finished bloom doesn't have anything going for it. Small, scarred, uninteresting color.

The leaves are better. In fact, they're occasionally even nice.

But only occasionally.

Ada might get a chance to try again, so I can be sure there's nothing special going on here, but I'm already pretty convinced. Best-case scenario, we've got a serviceable pink-red / yellow from the BH seedling group, and at this point, those are worth basically nothing to me.

I should mention, though, that I've seen something interesting happen on an older BH seedling. 0527 Ms. Lucia Love, the seedling that changes spadix color from (spathe-contrasting) white to (spathe-matching) red, has really gone on a tear making blooms, and in the process has revealed that there's another color-change, after the red. She goes from white to red to green, as the spadix ages. Here's a bad photo showing all the spadix colors at once:

This may not be particularly desirable, but it's interesting, because the spadix starts out with no red, flushes completely red, and then goes back to no red again. Normally if a spadix starts turning a little green, the previous pigment remains, and it winds up going kind of brown overall (if the base color was red or pink), or gray (if the base was purple). Lucia was already sort of an oddball for being the first (only?) seedling to start out with a contrasting spadix which becomes a matching spadix, so this is doubly odd. I'm glad I kept her.

Anthurium no. 0428 "Helen Bach" / Unfinished Business

Sometimes it's worth waiting for the second bloom before deciding what to do with a seedling, and sometimes it's not. Here was Helen's first inflorescence:

The second was a little less chewed-up, but otherwise indistinguishable:

Neither the leaves nor the plant as a whole are particularly interesting, either.

So Helen's probably gone in the next purge.

In other seedling news, we've gotten a second bloom from 0512 Landon Sky, which is decidedly worse than the original (and the original was pretty bad).

L: first bloom, 29 December 2015. R: second bloom, 26 August 2016.
The original assessment of Landon was that he was obviously not a keeper, but I'd probably keep him around out of laziness, unless he developed some sort of dramatic pest problem. Not sure that this quite qualifies, but he's basically daring me to throw him out.

Also testing boundaries: 0532 Amber Alert.

L-R: 25 October 2015, 6 February 2016, 1 September 2016.
I mean, none of those were great, but that last one is just pitiful. So, odds are, both Landon and Amber will be in a landfill shortly after you read this. Helen isn't fantastic, but she's at least moving in the right direction.

Unfinished business: Clivia seedlings

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Unfinished business: Strelitzia juncea

I was surprised to find out that the last time I mentioned my Strelitzia juncea seedlings was in May 2014. Back then, there were only two of them: I thought that was all I was getting, but then a third came up in a pot of Coffea seedlings a few months later (I'd reused the soil without taking the Strelitzia seed out.).

The three aren't setting the world on fire with their beauty or speed of growth or anything, but they're all still alive, and nearly at their third birthday now. I don't have a photo of the three of them together, because I don't have a large enough background for that (as it is, I can barely photograph either of the larger two), but they're pretty similar-looking anyway so I'm not sure it matters. Here's one of the first two, in February, in a 6-inch (15 cm) pot:

And here's the late arrival; its pot is 4 inches (10 cm) along the diagonal:

In both cases, it looks like there's one leaf that's much longer than the others. This is partly a matter of perspective, but the two larger plants have been making dramatically longer leaves recently. I think this is how they're supposed to work, and not a sign of inadequate light, but I have to admit I don't know what normal looks like with this species.

As a houseplant, S. juncea isn't meaningfully different from S. reginae or S. nicolai. They had a minor scale problem quite a while ago, when they were small enough to wipe down with rubbing alcohol, and thrips were a problem once too. I don't actually know how I got rid of the thrips; they just kind of . . . stopped.¹ A miracle, perhaps.

Flowers are unlikely. Every year, I think about maybe putting them outside for the summer (which wouldn't guarantee blooming but would make it more likely), and every year I come up with plants that deserve the honor more. (Space is limited; I have to prioritize.) But maybe someday, if the seedlings last long enough.

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¹ (They never did much visible damage; my suspicion was that they were landing on the Strelitzias in the course of running around the house but not actually feeding on them. Either that, or they were trying to feed and it just wasn't working.)

Unfinished business: Leuchtenbergia principis

An update on the Leuchtenbergia seedlings today. I haven't had a lot to say about them because there hasn't been all that much going on. None of them have died since the last update, I think, though I've sold a few. Of the original fifteen, I'm down to seven, and I just moved those up to 3-inch pots on 2 June. (The first one of those I did may have been damaged in the process: the roots had stuck hard to the side of the pot, and I couldn't figure out how to get them out, so I tried jamming a thin metal rod in through the drainage hole, which broke the tip of the root because the root was right on top of the hole. I figured out how to get them out with less trauma after that, but until I did that first one, I had no idea what sort of roots I might find.

Seedling no. 2. Pot is 2-inch (5 cm) in diameter.
The seedlings don't look much like the young plants I've seen occasionally in stores, like these:

Specifically, my seedlings have more of a trunk on them already, and the leaves are curved instead of straight. Both things are probably due to me not having quite enough light for them, though I'm not sure. In their natural habitat, they're often shaded as seedlings, so they really ought to be more flexible about this than a lot of other cactus seedlings might. I don't know.

Seedling no. 6. Pot is 2-inch (5 cm) in diameter.
In any case: still here, doing fine. They've possibly sustained some thrips damage on the upper surface of the leaves; a while back I noticed that there were little scars appearing. I haven't actually seen thrips on any of them, and you'd think the seedlings' skin would be too tough for thrips, but that's the only explanation I can come up with. I've heard tales of woe regarding Leuchtenbergia and scale, but so far, I haven't seen scale on them. The species of scale I've been dealing with here seems to be particular about which plants it likes to eat (Agave, Yucca, Anthurium, Aloe) and which plants it doesn't (Dracaena, Coffea, Spathiphyllum, Schlumbergera), so maybe scale in general are a problem for Leuchtenbergia, just not my personal pet scale.

Seedling no. 12, after the repotting. Pot is 3-inch (8 cm) in diameter.
I started these seeds in May 2013, getting the seeds from an on-line supplier, so seedlings are just over three years old now. I've also cross-pollinated two adult plants in 2013. Both plants produced fruit, though I think I only collected seeds from one: I can't remember. In any case, I still have lots of self-produced seeds, in addition to the leftover online seeds, and I've thought about trying to start the self-produced ones outside this summer, but I'm not sure what I'd do with them all if they germinated. The species is an acquired taste, and not in particularly high demand, so although the seeds cry out to me to be sown (as all seeds do), I can't come up with a perspective that makes me feel like it would actually be a good idea to start them. So we wait.