File under "better late than never:"

It's been some time since PATSP's "Rumble Among the Jungle," in which PATSP readers voted in a single-elimination tournament to determine the Best Houseplant of All Time. The winner, Schlumbergera cvv., was declared a year and a half ago, in November 2011. (The results of all matches are collected here, if anyone cares.)

At the time, I made the comment:

The husband suggested photoshopping a belt, tiara, or trophy -- or all three! -- into the picture, in honor of the win, but I'm afraid I'm not skilled enough to do that, so you'll have to imagine.

Thanks to a reader,¹ we finally have that picture, and I've got to say it completely lives up to what I'd imagined (though is it just me, or does the belt make it look fat?):

So congratulations again to the Schlumbergeras.

I've occasionally thought about doing a second RATJ, but 1) Polldaddy seemed to forget that I had an account there shortly after the RATJ ended, which is irritating, and I haven't bothered to create a new account; 2) my memory of the first one is that it took a lot more time to run than you'd think; and 3) I'm not wholly convinced that Schlumbergera wouldn't just win again.² So maybe it'll happen sometime. Everybody did seem to have a good time, and we've got a different group of voters now than we did back then, so it could still be surprising.

In any case, thanks for the Photoshop work: if nothing else, I think it's convinced me that tiara-and-a-belt is a good look, and now I want to see that combination on some prizefighters and beauty queens.

-

¹ (I didn't know if you'd want to be credited for it by name or not, so I've erred on the side of privacy. But feel free to take credit in a comment, if you want to.)
² (Though that could maybe be dealt with by making a rule that plants who'd won previously wouldn't be eligible to compete again.)

Pretty picture: Rhyncholaeliocattleya Memoria Irene Feil 'Ruby Red'

The tag said Potinara, but apparently that's now Rhyncholaeliocattleya. Really we should know not to pay much attention to what the tags say anyway.

And it's not the best picture either, but you should probably also not be paying all that much attention to the pictures. Highly saturated reds and pinks always make my camera completely lose its mind: sometimes I can adjust it into a reasonable picture, and sometimes I can't.

Rhyncholaeliocattleya Memoria Irene Feil 'Ruby Red' is Cattleya Pink Doll x Rhyncholaeliocattleya Odom's Sweetheart, according to the International Orchid Register.

The Strawberries Finally Pay Off

Those of you who have been reading PATSP for a while will be familiar with the story, but just to make sure everybody is crystal clear about what this means:

We moved to the current house in 2009. I had a lot of ideas in the gardening department, and more enthusiasm than sense, so I'd bought all kinds of plants (where "all kinds" means "mostly annuals") in preparation for the move. One of the higher-priority items was a strawberry plant ('Fort Laramie'), because my family had had a substantial strawberry patch when I was a kid, and this was something I wanted to duplicate in the new place. (I had similar dreams regarding raspberries, lilacs, weeping willow, and rhubarb, none of which are anywhere close to happening, even after four years. And the willow is never going to happen, on account of not having the space for one. But I digress.)

Well. So when we moved in, all the plants I had purchased were either stuck somewhere immediately (mostly in containers), or thrown up against the side of the garage until we could figure out where to put them. The strawberries were in the latter group. Realizing (correctly) that we were likely to procrastinate for a while, they sent out runners and planted themselves by the garage, because strawberries are no-nonsense plants that will not put up with your shit.

Which was all great and everything, but they planted themselves too late in 2009 for anything to happen, fruit-wise. So then there was a fall, and a winter, and suddenly it was 2010.

They came back fine, next to the garage, and produced a few (very exciting!) flowers, which turned into a handful of little white fruits, which got bigger and bigger and redder and redder -- and then were completely consumed by birds / squirrels / rabbits.

And then there was a summer, a fall, and a winter, and suddenly it was 2011.

Which was the year that the husband decided that they needed to be moved away from the garage, because he had plans for the garage. Some of them got moved in the spring, and some of them got moved in the fall. The ones that were moved in the fall mainly died, and the ones that got moved in the spring lived, but were obviously set back a bit by getting moved. So no strawberries that year.

And there was a winter, and suddenly it was 2012.

2012 looked promising initially, but I think they were confused. The spring started super early, and they were still recovering from the move the previous year, some didn't survive the transplant, and then they got hit with a drought, so we didn't collect any strawberries in 2012 either.

And. There was a summer, and a fall, and a winter, and suddenly it was 2013.

With all that for context, then, you can imagine how excited I was about this:

This is only the first bowl; there have been another 1.7 bowls this size so far, and it seems likely that we're going to continue collecting fruit for another couple months. (I didn't find a lot of information about 'Fort Laramie's performance specifically, but this page claims that it "really does everbear," so we may be eating a lot of strawberries this summer. Not sure what to expect from it in our specific conditions, though.)

When I was a kid, Mom used to prepare them by cutting them up and then sprinkling a little sugar over them, so that's what we did with the first couple bowls. I wasn't quite prepared for the taste. Not that they don't taste like a strawberry; it's more that, compared to the ones from the supermarket, they're really intense. (Have you ever eaten something that was flavored with artificial strawberry flavoring, and thought to yourself, goodness gracious, no real strawberry has such an intense, cloying taste, what are the manufacturers thinking, trying to pass this off as "strawberry-flavored?" 'Fort Laramie' strawberries really taste like that.

I then ran into an article somewhere on-line, which I can no longer find, a few days later, which explained how this happened. Bigger berries, everything else being equal, are faster and easier to pick, which saves harvesting time and labor costs. And of course strawberries are sold by weight, not by sugar content or flavor or whatever, and the cheapest, fastest way to pack on weight is for most of their volume to be water. Therefore: tasteless, odorless strawberries the size of apricots. (Basically the same thing that's happened with other fruits -- supermarket oranges are why I no longer like oranges, for example, because they're so bland.)

These, though, are a lot softer and less fibrous, the individual berries are smaller, and you can -- I am not kidding -- smell them from twenty feet (~7 m) away. Why we're not having to fight more with the birds and squirrels, I have no idea.

So. I think I spent $7 for the original pot, and I'm guessing we've gotten at least seven pounds (~3.2 kg) out of them, albeit after waiting for four years. It's about damn time.

Giveaway results -- updated

I announced the book giveaway winner on Sunday, but it's been a few days and they haven't e-mailed to claim it, so I'm drawing again. The new winner is comment #2, Paul.

Paul: send an e-mail with your mailing address (I think I know which Paul you are anyway, but just to be sure), and I'll forward it to the relevant people so you can get your book.

Random plant event: Eucharis grandiflora

Finally it's gotten warm enough that this year's outdoor plants can all stay outside for a few consecutive days, which makes my life a bit easier. (It's also been very rough on me mentally -- it's just too weird to be hoping for the weather to be warmer.)

I'd put the younger Eucharis bulbs (the ones I bought two years ago) outside a while back, but then it got cold for several days, and I put all the plants back in their previous spots while we rode out the cool spell, and then for some reason I had neglected to move the Eucharises back out again when the weather improved. They were only out for a couple days, but apparently that short period of brighter light was all the encouragement one of the plants needed to decide to produce a bud.

The smell is as nice as I remember, though it's been a long wait. I didn't move the plant back outside until the flower was already well underway, but that doesn't seem to have hurt it: it's possible that it's lasting longer than the previous ones did.

I should probably note that the foliage behind the flower is not that of the Eucharis: that's this year's attempt to grow Salvia elegans. The two plants have apparently become friends or something. Which is good, since the Salvia was new and all.

Giveaway results

The randomly-chosen commenter for the book giveaway was #8, Dave.

Dave, please contact me by e-mail (address in the sidebar; please note the instructions) to let me know where to have it sent, as your links do not include an e-mail address.

A Cautionary Tale

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. I've tried, of course, to be conscientious about hand-washing and so forth, but as many Euphorbias as I have, and as long as I've had them, I was going to get Euphorbia sap in the eye eventually. So here's my report about that.

What happened: On Wednesday night, our weather forecast predicted a low of 58F/14C, which was probably warm enough that I didn't need to do anything -- the plants are all either right next to the house or right next to the garage, they're packed fairly close together, and most are sitting on or near a good-sized slab of concrete. So they're in a relatively warm microclimate to begin with, warm enough that 58F/14C shouldn't be that big of a deal.

But I decided to move the ones that were easiest to move anyway, because an extra layer of protection couldn't hurt. So I intended to wheel the sets of plants that are on carts into the garage. (A couple big plants also had to be moved before I could move the ones on carts, but that's not really relevant to the story.)

One of the carts had a Euphorbia lactea next to a Euphorbia tirucalli 'Firesticks.' I'd been keeping them outside because I've been stupidly hoping that being outside would do something to clear up their fungus problem -- which is still going on, and has been going on for at least a year now.

Back row, L-R: Euphorbia milii, Pachypodium lamerei, Pilosocereus pachycladus. Front row: Euphorbia tirucalli 'Firesticks,' Euphorbia lactea, Euphorbia milii.
I'm not sure what's going on with the E. lactea: it's gotten wobbly in the pot. Kept falling over into the E. tirucalli, as I rolled the cart over the rough surface of the concrete. So I kept picking it up again. I noticed that the lactea thorns were stabbing the tirucalli stems here and there, but this isn't the first time that's happened, and I didn't think it was terribly significant. I tried to keep my hands out of the little pinpricks of sap, and pressed forward, because it was already 8:30 PM and I had other stuff I was hoping to get to before bed.

Got everything in the garage, rolled the door down, turned out the light, went in the house, and sat down at the computer to do stuff. Got about half an hour into that when I absent-mindedly rubbed my left eye.

What it was like: Initially, it just felt like there was something in my eye; it was irritating, but not unusually so. So I rubbed harder, to get whatever it was out of my eye. As you do. And that didn't make things any better, so I got up and went to the bathroom to rinse it out in the sink. And that's roughly the point when I realized that this was no ordinary foreign-object-in-the-eye situation.

For one thing, it felt hot. And it was much more irritated, much faster, than if I'd just gotten a piece of dirt in my eye. I could still see through the eye fine. I found the husband and asked him to look at the eye in question and tell me if he could see anything in there; he couldn't. And that's about the point when I thought of the Euphorbia tirucalli I'd just moved, and put things together.

(So how was the pain? Once when I was about 19, I angrily opened a heavy wooden door, while barefoot, so it swung directly into my big toe, not only stubbing it but also ripping off the toenail. It hurt about that much: bad enough that it took some concentration to think about anything else, but not so bad that I completely lost control of my faculties. This, remember, is from what was probably a single pinprick of dried sap, though. Having experienced that much, I can totally believe that getting a squirt of sap directly to the eye would be completely incapacitating, and probably would involve a good bit of writhing on the floor and/or incoherent screaming.)

So. What you're supposed to do for Euphorbia tirucalli sap is, you're supposed to run cold, clean water on the affected eye(s) for 15 minutes, seek medical attention, and then (optionally) run water on the affected eye(s) for another 15 minutes. I didn't do that.

Why didn't you do that? I didn't do that because, although it felt considerably better with the water on it, and almost immediately so, even, I was having a difficult time keeping my eye open while running water on it, because . . . I don't know. I may have an overactive blink reflex, or something. It should also be noted that what my right eye was doing while this was going on was, it was getting to look at the inside of the kitchen sink. Which is not that interesting, so it's not like the time was passing quickly or anything either.

So what wound up happening was, I'd run the water for like 30-60 seconds, feel better, get bored, and start getting annoyed at trying to keep my eye open when every instinct was telling me to close it. So then I'd get up, try to locate the husband, discuss the situation with him, and then eventually run off to rinse the eye again.

After hearing that keeping the eye open with the water on it was a problem, the husband proposed that maybe it would work better for me to lie down somewhere, and have him holding the water, that maybe it would be easier to relax that way. So at one point, he'd constructed this whole thing where a couple of chairs were supporting a piece of plywood that stretched into our upstairs shower, tilted slightly downward so the water wouldn't run all over into the bathroom. When tried, that turned out to be considerably worse (cold water all over my back and scalp, a gazillion little jets of water spraying all over my face -- generally much, much closer to waterboarding than I felt comfortable with), so we abandoned that and I went back to the kitchen sink again.

Why didn't you just seek medical attention? Well, we did consider it. Since it was 9 PM or later through this whole ordeal, though, that would have meant going to the emergency room in Iowa City, which is a significant amount of time to spend in the car without any water to run over the eye, plus time spent parking, waiting in the waiting room to see a doctor, explaining the situation, and etc. At this point, I was having to go back to the sink every 3-5 minutes, so that didn't seem workable, plus the last time I went to the emergency room, it was also for something eye-related, and I didn't want the U of I Hospital people to be thinking that I was some kind of eye hypochondriac.

More seriously, though -- there was really no indication that the hospital would have been able to do anything much for me that I couldn't do for myself at home. I wasn't in unbearable pain, I was still more or less able to think, and there's not actually a cure for E. tirucalli sap in the eye anyway, as far as I could find on-line: basically you just flush it with water in the hopes that the sap will wash out (and because keeping the eye cool dulls the pain), and wait to see how bad it's going to be. And we had running water here already. So.

Resolution: At about 9:30 or 10 PM, I took an ibuprofen, because why not, and some benadryl (diphenhydramine), because somebody on-line had said that antihistamines were sometimes helpful. By about 10:30 PM, things had improved to the point where I was able to lie on the couch and watch TV ("It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") for a while without pain. Don't know if the drugs and the feeling better were related or not, but I suppose it doesn't matter.

Wound up going to bed at about 1 AM, and slept in until 11 AM. I don't know if the sleeping in is related or not either, but that's almost unheard of for me: I rarely sleep in later than 9:30 AM.

It's possible that my left eye is a little more prone to watering since this, but it's also possible that I'm just paying more attention to it. No lingering effects that are at all life-disrupting, anyway -- no pain, no problems seeing, no scarring.

What next? Damned if I know. I've had at least one E. tirucalli at all times since 2001, and this is the first time anything like this has happened. If I don't have to worry about it happening again until 2025, that's not so terrible.

On the other hand, the whole Euphorbia genus has made itself awfully annoying over the last year or so, with the ineradicable fungus problem, and there have been several occasions when I've been very tempted to just throw out all the affected plants¹ and start over. Or maybe not start over, even, since I don't know how to rid the house of the fungus. Also, this was likely just a tiny pinprick of sap. Next time it might not be.

A new thing they've come up with to annoy me: this branch just up and turned brown and died after it spent some time outside. Dunno why. But Euphorbia pseudocactus is on my list too.
Maybe I'm just done with Euphorbias. I'm certainly going to be thinking about it pretty seriously.

-

¹ Euphorbia tirucalli, E. tirucalli 'Firesticks,' E. drupifera (deceased), E. milii, E. milii 'Candyland' (deceased), E. milii large hybrid, Pedilanthus tithymaloides, P. 'Jurassic Park 2,' P. 'Silver Star,' Synadenium grantii, S. grantii var. rubrum, E. bougheyi variegata, E. lactea, E. trigona, E. trigona 'Red,' and E. pseudocactus.
All of these are officially Euphorbias at the moment, even if I've written their names as Pedilanthus or Synadenium.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Pinocchio

Paphiopedilum Pinocchio is a primary hybrid (hybrid between two species, as opposed to a hybrid of a hybrid) between Paphiopedilum glaucophyllum × Paphiopedilum primulinum. I can't say I see anything particularly Pinocchioish about the flower here, but I gave up a long time ago on expecting orchid names to make sense.

The flower looks more or less exactly like most of the primulinum pictures on Google; I can't tell from looking at it what this hybrid is getting from the P. glaucophyllum side.

One last reminder: today is your last chance to enter the drawing for the book giveaway.