And then

And then the scale came back. In a room where I hadn't seen them previously (husband's office; the plant was the parent Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana). Posting may be a bit off and on for a while, as I try to determine the extent of the problem and figure out what to do about it.

I'm also setting aside some time to pound my head on my desk, curse the day I was born, and that sort of thing.

Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica

Blogging in a hurry today, again, because I've realized that the post I'd planned for today is going to require me to get some more pictures; this was also the problem with the post I'd planned for Wednesday. Things do still keep happening, though, some more impressive than others. For example, my Sansevieria cylindrica. I didn't have it when it only had one leaf, though I assume that stage happened. By the time I got it,



It had two! Two leaves! Four years passed, and then last September, it grew another, which was extremely exciting.

So then we had three! Three leaves! I figured I'd have to wait until 2016 for a fourth, but guess what . . . ?

FOUR! FOUR GLORIOUS LEAVES! AH! AH! AH! [thunder, lightning]

One of the things this probably means is that I should have been letting it spend the summer outside all along, if I wanted it to grow. Live and learn.

Pretty picture: Hibiscus 'Heartthrob'

Not a lot to say about this one; it was at the ex-job, and I noticed it partly because hardy Hibiscus flowers are very difficult to ignore, and partly because I'd already been noticing them around in people's yards as we rode into Iowa City.

There's also not a lot to say because I've been heavily preoccupied by dental matters since Saturday. Saw somebody yesterday, and apparently the pain I've been feeling doesn't indicate anything particularly wrong and isn't something that requires any kind of intervention by a dentist. So everything's fine. It was still hard to convince myself to calm down, though, after spending a whole weekend on red alert over it. Dental problems have a way of seizing one's attention.

Microphotography: Portulaca grandiflora

I'm unclear on the specifics of where and how, but the husband, knowing that I've been looking for a microscope for some time, somehow obtained a used one for me. Which is one example of how he's the best husband ever.

The catches -- and of course there are catches -- are:

1) Okay, I don't know the proper names for anything here, but I'm going to call that thing in the middle, with the four things sticking out from it, the microscope's "udder," because that's what it looks like. Each of those barrels on the udder has a different level of magnification (I don't know what levels of magnification, because I cannot decipher what the barrels say), only two of which appear to function.
2) It's a regular, old-school, 1960s-ish microscope, so it wasn't designed with digital photography in mind. If the camera lens is not exactly centered over the eyepiece, the camera doesn't register anything being there at all. Likewise if it isn't precisely the right height above the eyepiece. My hands shake way too much to get pictures by holding the camera in the right spot myself, and although we do have a tripod, the base of the microscope is just large enough to get in the way of the tripod's legs, so I can get within about a centimeter (0.4 in.) of the eyepiece, but then no further. Except! When I took the below pictures, I actually could get the tripod directly over the eyepiece. I just couldn't do it again a few days later when I moved the whole thing outside to try to get a better set of pictures in stronger light, and I don't know why, and the whole thing was very frustrating. Which leads us to the third problem, which is:
3) Even when I do manage to line the camera up, using the tripod, the amount of light coming through the eyepiece is small, so my camera uses long exposure times, which results in blurry pictures, even at its best.
4) And at its worst, the camera autofocus chooses to focus on the eyepiece itself, instead of the image in the eyepiece. Or it focuses on some part of the microscope outside the eyepiece, so I get a perfect shot of the top of the udder but the actual image I'm trying to capture is too fuzzy to make out.

So the point is that there are some problems with this, and you should, consequently, not expect to see a lot of these pictures until such time as I can figure out how to get better ones. And I would love some suggestions from other people, because I know there's got to be someone out there who's taken photographs through a microscope's eyepiece successfully.

Having said all of that, there have been some pretty cool moments with the microscope already, which I will hopefully be able to share with you someday. Portulaca grandiflora seeds, my only successful photos to date, turn out to be much more interesting than the gray, metallic dust they appear to be with the naked eye. For example, I had always imagined them as more or less spherical, since a lot of seeds are, but they turn out to have a specific, weird shape, somewhere between a comma and a nautilus:

At the higher magnification, they also have an unexpected texture, which is probably the coolest and most surprising thing I've seen in weeks. It didn't photograph well, of course:

The pattern is sort of approximately that of a bunch of tiny interlocked cogwheels, covering the whole surface of the seed. Which is even stranger in combination with the overall iridescent metallic gray color. (I now suspect that Portulaca grandiflora are robotic plants.)

I also tried for photos of the pollen, but that went even less well, and wasn't very interesting:

And those are the only actual pictures I'm able to provide to you at this point. Possible coming attractions, if I can figure out how to take the pictures:

A lot of leaves are hairier than I would have guessed. (Pedilanthus being the most surprising.) Though most leaves are disappointingly boring.

The serrated edges on Yucca guatemalensis are a lot less regular in shape and spacing than I expected.

Cryptanthus pollen is even more dull than Portulaca pollen: basically just irregular little white rounded things. At least Portulaca pollen has a color to it.

Ceropegia woodii flowers look exactly the way you would expect them to look, and brought to mind both "eyelashes" and "houseflies." Aeschynanthus speciosus flowers are boring and look just like they do with the naked eye, except bigger. Neofinetia roots didn't do much for me. (Think "styrofoam.") The Euphorbia fungus (yes, I still have Euphorbia fungus) looked exactly like I expected (sort of a creeping white net), and was dull.

Broadleaf plantain (Plantago major) really does have flowers (when you let it bloom), and the flowers are actually sort of pretty. I mean, if they were twenty times bigger, you'd grow the plant as an ornamental: there's a white, fluffy bottlebrush sort of stamen, with lots of white spherical pollen grains, and then the stigmas, or something I take to be the stigmas, are sort of shaped like white tulips with purple stripes down the center of each petal. (Plantago major is high on the list of stuff to get pictures of, whenever I figure out how to do that, but you can get some idea from the picture here at Wikimedia Commons. There must be some natural variation, though, because that's a darker, solid purple than what I was seeing.)

Another high-priority item: Anthurium spadices. It's a little easier for me to believe that those are flowers, now that I've seen them close-up. (I'd link to a photo, but I couldn't find one easily on Google image search.) It should probably be noted that they're still not pretty. At best, interesting.

Spider mites are every bit as horrifying as you'd think they would be, and they will continue to suck sap out of a leaf even after it's been removed from the plant. They also do this weird thing where they either shake their back legs like a dog getting a belly rub, or they rub their rearmost pair of legs together like a person trying to warm their hands. I only saw it do that once, and it was fast. I was so surprised and freaked out by there being, suddenly, movement, that I can't tell you exactly what it was. It also convinced me to throw the leaf in the trash more or less immediately afterward.

I think I've seen spider mite eggs now, though they weren't all the same color, so I'm not 100% on that. (They were all somewhere in the yellow or yellow-orange color range, but the darkness varied a lot, from pale yellow down to almost black.)

Some unknown white thing that was on our lettuce was one of the scariest things I've ever seen. It somehow managed to evoke deep-sea crabs, skeletons, spiders, and ghosts simultaneously, and I'm pretty sure seeing them come into focus in the microscope took a year off my life. The best match I found on-line for them was here, on a forum where they were identified as the shed exoskeletons of a molted aphid here. (The pictures at the link aren't magnified enough to be upsetting, FWIW.) So "skeleton" and "ghost" were actually pretty close. That also explains why they weren't moving.

So the point is, there's a lot of potential for interesting new posts, if only I can figure out how to get the pictures. It's going to take some experimentation, and I only have so much time, so if anybody has any relevant expertise, I'd sure appreciate hearing from you.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Mr. Wonderful

I'm not sure Paphiopedilums can ever be less than okay, in my book. That said, "Wonderful" sort of sounds like it's trying too hard.

This particular hybrid dates back to 1916, though; maybe the word had different connotations then.

Paphiopedilum Mr. Wonderful = P. Knock Knock x P. Gloriosum

Saturday morning Sheba picture

I should maybe start giving Sheba treats after taking her picture. It's hard to get her attention.

Unfinished business: Amorphophallus konjac

Back in February, I asked the hive mind whether my bulb was coming out of dormancy; I haven't had it that long (since April 2012), and am still getting used to what it does, and when. The response from readers was somewhere between "not necessarily" and "probably not."

I went ahead and potted it up anyway, about six weeks after that, but it took forever to do anything visible. I started to get worried that it had rotted by late May / early June, just because it seemed like it had had more than enough time to grow, if it intended to, and I still wasn't seeing anything. Out of laziness and hope, I left it alone, and finally, on 11 June, I saw the tip of a leaf poking out of the soil. After which point things progressed more or less normally.

11 June 2013.

16 June 2013.

22 June 2013. This is possibly my favorite stage of development for this plant. Like somebody stuck a squid headfirst into the soil.

25 June 2013.

27 June 2013.

13 July 2013.
I'd thought, when this all started to happen, that it had started significantly later than in 2012, but when I checked the old posts here, it was basically the exact same date: the "squid" Amorphophallus picture in this post is dated 19 June 2012, as opposed to 22 June 2013. With any luck, I'll be able to remember this next year, and not spend so much time worrying about it.

Speaking of Amorphophallus -- did everybody else see Zach's recent posts about propagating A. atroviridis from leaflet cuttings? If not, you probably should: the first is here, and the second is here.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work on A. konjac, so I won't be able to try it for myself. (Unless I find some way to acquire another species of Amorphophallus, which I'm looking into. . . .)

Book review: The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms

DISCLAIMER AND STUFF: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher. There was no agreement that I would necessarily write a review, and no agreement that if I did write a review, it would necessarily be a positive one.

The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms. Holmberg, Pelle, and Hans Marklund.
Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY, 2013.
128 pp., about 6.5" x 5"
ISBN: 978-1-62087-731-9
$12.95
This feels weird to write. I don't know anything about eating mushrooms. I don't like them on pizza (it's the texture), and I don't get a lot of other opportunities to eat them. I've also never deliberately hunted for them in the wild (though I have family members who used to collect edible mushrooms regularly, and may or may not still). So I'm not really in a position to have much use for this book personally, but . . . well, is it weird if I admit that I enjoyed it anyway, just as a bunch of cool pictures of mushrooms?

'Cause I do like pictures of mushrooms. And these are awfully good pictures. Some books would just give you a picture of one specimen of each mushroom and call it good, but this book will show you what the cap looks like from above, what it looks like from the side, what the gills look like, what the whole thing looks like in cross-section, and what it looks like at various stages of growth. I appreciate the thoroughness.

Better still, the book is very interested in making sure you can tell the difference between the mushroom you're looking at and any similar species, whether or not the other species are potentially dangerous. Granted, you'd expect that a book about wild-collecting edible mushrooms would warn you about anything that could sicken or kill you, as sort of a minimum, but I was still impressed that the book includes fairly detailed descriptions, photos, and key points of difference between the edibles and inedibles.

The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms also includes, when relevant, information about how to prepare the mushrooms you've collected, noting which ones can be dried, which ones need to be cooked for a minimum length of time (and what that length of time is), what parts can be eaten, ways they're best prepared, and so on. No actual recipes, but where preparation matters to the flavor or toxicity, it gets a mention.

The worst thing about the book is probably that its geographical focus is narrow: it only really addresses mushrooms which are found in the northern U.S., Canada, and the UK. (This may be unavoidable: trying to include every edible mushroom and the potential lookalikes from every single part of the world would probably not wind up pocket-sized. One does kind of wish, though, that the title or back-cover description mentioned this somewhere.) So this is likely only useful if you live in the described region, but on the other hand, if you do, it looks pretty comprehensive. And it's a lovely book to look at either way.

Overall? I'm glad I have it (when the zombie apocalypse happens, I expect we'll need all the foraging tips we can find), I liked looking at it, and I found it interesting to read even if I'm probably not going to use it for its intended purpose. Someone who was going to use it for its intended purpose would probably get more out of it, though, obviously.

If you think you might be interested in this book and live in the U.S., Skyhorse Publishing has offered to give a copy to one PATSP reader. Leave a mushroom-related comment and an e-mail address where you can be reached if you should win. If you want to disguise your comment in some fashion to deter spambots, feel free: just make sure it's something I can untangle if the need arises.

I'll choose a winner by random number on Thursday, 15 August 2013, and send an e-mail to notify him/r and get an address to ship to and whatnot. If there's no response from the winner by Saturday, 17 August 2013, that winner forfeits, and I'll pick someone else.

EDIT 15 AUG 2013: a winner has been selected and notified.