Random plant event: Rhipsalis NOID

I think these are maybe Rhipsalis rhombea, but I'm not sure. The tag when I bought it said it was Rhipsalis micrantha, but I decided some time ago that the tag was probably wrong.

In any case, I bought it in March 2011, and it flowered for the first time in February 2012. The flowers are self-fertile, and will produce fruit on their own, so I had seeds a short time later. I started the seeds on 15 Jun 2012. This is where they were as of mid-August:

For a sense of scale: the square of vermiculite in the photo is about 2 inches / 5 cm on a side. The vermiculite isn't normal vermiculite color, because I used un-sterilized vermiculite from a previous project, so there's . . . black stuff on it. I don't know what the black stuff is. I suppose it could be something bad, but I have more fruits, and they're fast germinators, so I can always start again.

And by the way: I know it'd probably make more sense to propagate cuttings, if I were going to propagate this plant, but 1) previous attempts to root cuttings have mostly been unsuccessful, and 2) if one of my plants produces seeds, I am unable to resist trying to germinate them.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum NOID

No tag again. Interesting flower, though the picture perhaps doesn't do it justice.


wrong tags: 5
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 9

It's occasionally very weird to me to realize that a plant as unusual as this one actually lives in a person's house (or greenhouse, at least). And most likely, it's a house that's not even that far away from me. Midwest, at least.

There's not really anything more to that thought; I just occasionally have to recalibrate my sense of what's exotic and what's mundane, and I guess this is one of those times.

I had a similar moment a couple weeks ago, except about age/time instead of exotic/mundane, when I realized that I own and use a set of towels that are older than most of this year's University of Iowa freshmen. (Towels were from 1991; the freshmen are mostly from 1993-94.) I suddenly felt very, very old. Also highly committed to buying our next set of towels from JCPenney, 'cause damn. Some quality towelage there.

Scalepocalypse 2012 update:

Aloe 'Firebird' (4 Sep 2012, basement) -- neemed.

Walkaway: Aechmea 'Little Harv'

This is one of those plants that I would have been super-excited about if I'd encountered it in, say, 2009, when I still had money and space and was collecting plants faster than I ever had before (or ever would again). But it was a solid 3 or 4 feet (0.9-1.2 m) across and cost $50, so there was no way.

These pictures don't match my memory of the colors very well at all; in my memory, the bracts were more violet and less orange, and the leaves were less green and more gray. Google sides with my camera, though, in both cases, so apparently neem fumes have damaged my brain or something.

There was a pup to the side of the main plant (in the first picture, it's barely visible to the left of and slightly behind the parent), which I thought about asking if they'd sell to me. The size thing would eventually be a problem one way or the other, of course. More sensible impulses eventually prevailed. Maybe someday.

Pretty pictures: Zygopetalum Arthur Elle

Pictures turned out a little too dark on this one, maybe.


Don't know much about this plant. Arthur Elle is a cross between Zygopetalum Blackii and Zygopetalum B. G. White. I've never tried to grow a Zygopetalum, and don't anticipate ever doing so in the future. (Nothing personal against zygos; it's more that I suspect them of having something personal against me.) I enjoy the flowers, though.

Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica

I have had this Sansevieria cylindrica since June 19, 2008. It had two leaves when I got it. It still had two leaves four years later, on June 19, 2012.

Now it has three leaves. I suppose technically it's more like two and a half, but it'll be three at some point.

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Ox Firebird 'OX1495'

I go back and forth on whether or not I like this kind of Phalaenopsis flower. Currently I'm thinking it seems a little busy.



Scalepocalypse 2012 update:

Aloe striata (1 Sep 2012, plant room) -- discarded because the infestation was pretty far along, and because the plant had sort of outgrown its spot anyway and I had already been toying with the idea of throwing it out.
Philodendron 'Congo Green' (1 Sep 2012, plant room) -- only one actual insect spotted, so I neemed it.

Apparently the scale on the Alpinia was not as confined to the Alpinia as I'd thought, as these two were both in the same general area. Other plants in the vicinity have been pre-emptively sprayed.

*sigh*

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture, with bonus Question for the Hive Mind

I mentioned in the last Sheba/Nina post that the Ctenanthe burle-marxii I'd planted in there had died and I wasn't sure what I was going to replace it with.

That question has been settled, at least for the moment: I bought a Peperomia puteolata ($3 at the ex-job) to fill that space, and also put in a Canna seed just for the hell of it.

There's no picture of the latter, because it hasn't actually produced any foliage yet. I just made a hole in the seed coat, soaked it in water until I saw a root emerging, and then planted it in the terrarium, so it may or may not work. If it does work, it will either quickly become too large for the space or struggle along without enough light until I take pity on it and kill it. Not sure which way that will go. But I had a ton of seeds from last year that I never got around to starting, so I figured I may as well try that and see how it goes. Nina, I'm sure, would like something in there that's a bit more climbable.

Meanwhile, Nina is shedding her skin again.

That's not as big of an event as I've made it sound -- she does it all the time, actually -- but I don't very often get a picture of it happening. In the above, the fungusy-looking stuff in the upper left is just dead-leaf debris from the Episcia -- I'm pretty sure there's no actual fungus. The brown and green in the upper right is a Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' leaf that the crickets have eaten a hole into. When the picture was taken, Nina had only managed to clear the old skin from her face, though when I looked in again about half an hour later, none of the dead skin was there anymore.

Speaking of skin: Sheba's whole allergy situation is improving, though slowly and incompletely. We could probably be more aggressive about the Benadryl: I've been giving her 25 mg in the morning when I feed her, but she usually doesn't get a second dose. Even so, her right side is basically filled back in completely. Her left side still has some spots, but they're noticeably better than they were two weeks ago, which I suppose is something.

I also have a weed-ID question for your consideration, which may or may not be related to the Sheba-allergy stuff. When the weeds first started to come up this spring, I decided to let a couple of pokeweeds (Phytolacca americana) stay, because I think they're kind of pretty. One of the pokeweeds turned out to be something else: although the young plants looked more or less identical, and both have developed extremely thick stems (maybe 2 inches / 5 cm in diameter?), the leaves on one of them never got any bigger than about 4 inches (10 cm) long, and are narrower than those on P. americana. Also the stem has stayed green, not pink, and the flowers are tiny and white and obviously something completely different. The non-pokeweed also grew much taller (about 12-15 feet / 3.5-4.5 m), as you can see in this picture:

And here's a close-up of the flowers:

I've let it continue to grow, because . . . I don't know. After the drought got to a certain point, I kind of decided that I was happy enough to see anything growing, and I didn't care what it was. Plus I was curious about what it was going to do. The overall plant shape, and the shape of the leaves, resemble some of the Amaranthus species pictures on line, especially A. tuberculatus, A. australis, and A. cannabinus, but none of those are quite a match (maybe the flowers haven't developed enough yet, though). In any case, I'm wondering if anybody knows what this is, and whether or not it, by itself, could be causing Sheba allergy problems. The flowers are fairly small and inconspicuous, so wind-pollination wouldn't be out of the question, right? And if it's wind-pollinated, maybe it could also be allergenic?

Random plant event: Columnea orientandina

In the beginning, there was the Columnea orientandina.

(May 2011)
It arrived in May 2011, and has been a bit up and down in the 15 months following; one of the original cuttings died, but it's flowered a few times, and it's noticeably larger than it was when it arrived, so overall I think it's doing okay.

(August 2012)
One point of interest about the plant is that it's self-fertile; the berries are pink-purple. Here's one from last August:


I wasn't prepared for this to happen, so by the time I'd found out how to germinate the seeds, the fruit had already dried up. (It might still have been possible to germinate them anyway; I didn't attempt it.) This didn't seem like a big loss, since it had flowered and fruited within a pretty short time of rooting, so I figured I'd have another chance very soon.

Eleven months later, I got the second fruit. Scooped out the seeds, stirred them around in some water to separate them from the pulp, poured them onto a paper towel to dry overnight, then sowed them on damp vermiculite in a plastic clamshell container on 19 July.

It only took 13 days for the first seeds to sprout:

(1 Aug 2012)
And by 16 August, I had about 55-60 individual seedlings:

(Not all seedlings are shown in photo.)
I don't know how many of those are going to transfer successfully to soil, so there's no telling how many new plants I'm going to wind up with when all is said and done. I should probably be hoping that most of them fail: I already have ~250 Anthurium seedlings potted up and growing, plus ~600-700 Schlumbergera and about 20 Rhipsalis NOID (R. rhombea?) seedlings started but not big enough to pot up yet. I've tried a couple times to cross Episcias as well, but, happily, they aren't cooperating. (I say that I want to reduce the number of plants I have, often and recently, but I clearly don't mean it.) We'll see how everything shakes out, I suppose.

If none of the seedlings survive the transfer, it looks like I will have another berry relatively soon to start over with; the above photo is from 23 August.