Tina! Bring me the ax.

Scalepocalypse 2012 2013 update:

So two things happened Saturday night. The first thing was very unpleasant. (A Pilosocereus pachycladus fell backward onto me as I was transporting it to be watered, leaving spines stuck in a small patch on my right shoulder and a somewhat larger patch on my right forearm.) The second was a hundred times worse.¹

I went to pick up the Philodendron squamiferum, to take it into the plant room to water it, and there were scale insects all over the new growth. The same scale that it had on it when it arrived here.

Not so terrible in and of itself, granted. But it's what this means.

I'd noticed the scale on the Philodendron squamiferum immediately, when it arrived last May. I'd wiped off the leaves, individually, on multiple occasions, with soapy water, and sprayed every surface of the plant with neem, every time I watered, and I kept it as isolated from the other plants as possible under the circumstances. At some point, I don't remember when (September? October?), I threw some imidacloprid granules in the pot as well.

Imidacloprid is an insecticide, which is supposed to be particularly good against scale and mealybugs, because they have a waxy, water-repelling coat that shrugs off most water-based insecticides. Imidacloprid gets around this by being taken up by the plant's roots. It then circulates throughout the plant's tissues, so that no matter where the insect might bite, it's going to be sucking up a mouthful of poison as well. And then it dies.

Or at least that's the theory. But obviously: if the scale population has increased from invisibility to the point of overrunning the new growth in the span of a month, that means that the imidacloprid didn't work. And neither did the neem, or the hand-washing.

Also, I'd declared the plant officially clean, at some point last fall or early winter, and placed it with a few other important plants (Ficus maclellandii, the BDSP), on a table. Which means that there's a good chance that the other plants on that table also have scale now, scale which is resistant to the one pesticide that's supposed to be halfway decent at dealing with scale.

Which means that the week I spent dumping imidacloprid granules into all 585 plants in the basement was almost certainly wasted effort.² It's a different infestation of scale in the basement (brought in by Aloe polyphylla instead of Philodendron squamiferum), granted, so hypothetically the imidacloprid resistance might be totally different in the basement, but what are the odds I could be that lucky? Or maybe I've misapplied it. Maybe I wash too much out of the pots when I water. In any case, it doesn't seem like the imidacloprid is likely to be helpful, which makes me REALLY GLAD I spent all that time and money on it.

Now. I had been depressed for much of the month of January anyway, because I spotted some scale on New Year's Day. New Year's was depressing because it meant that the six or seven weeks before that, when I hadn't spotted any scale, was false hope, and they hadn't gone away. So the Philodendron on Saturday night was pretty much the worst thing that could have happened: even my backup hope, the imidacloprid, is probably also false hope.

And if fairly conscientious and repeated use of neem / hand-washing / imidacloprid hasn't worked so far, then the way I see it, I have basically three options.

1) I continue to fight with the inadequate tools I have, and maybe pick up new ones.

This is a non-starter. I've already exhausted and depressed myself dumping imidacloprid into the plants in the basement. There is no way in hell I could hand-wash every leaf of every plant in the house, and it apparently doesn't even help. I might as well sing Tom Petty to the scale.³ I reached the point of not even liking plants anymore at some point last summer, and things have only gotten worse since New Year's. So I am not going to fight. I'm not going to try your home remedy for scale, I'm not going to wait until spring and then move everything outside, I'm not going to buy more and bigger pesticides, I'm not going to buy predatory mites or lacewings or ladybugs or whatever, I'm not going to try to swab a thousand plants with a 50-gallon drum of rubbing alcohol and a pallet full of Q-Tips. I refuse to hope for a cure. I also refuse to give up and just try to coexist with the scale the way I do with fungus gnats or (to a smaller degree) spider mites, 'cause scale is just too damaging, contagious, and icky. Next option?

2) I throw all one-thousand-and-whatever plants in the garbage.

Just pile them up on a snowdrift in the back yard and let them freeze, taking the scale with them. That's not really going to work for me either. It's true that I hate the plants;⁴ I want to punch them all in their smug green photosynthesizing non-faces until they beg me to stop. (And then keep punching them, because I ain't gonna take no orders from no plant.) But I'm not a monster;⁵ I'm not going to spite-kill plants that have shown no sign of scale infestation and live in a part of the house where the scale are not known to have spread. Even as bad as things are -- and it cannot be over-emphasized that things are very, very bad, the kind of bad that involves mental health care professionals⁶ -- there are still plenty of plants in the house that are probably fine, due to natural resistance, luck, or both. Besides which, if I were to get rid of all the gray-variegated Yucca guatemalensises and Anthuriums, I would be inconsolable, because I hate them the least.

Which only leaves . . .

3) The back-burn strategy. I take a zero-tolerance policy toward any scale sightings. I'm not even going to pretend that I can eliminate them from an infested plant. Instead, I'm going to throw away any plant that shows any sign of scale, however beloved or irreplaceable the plant in question might be. If I suspect infestation strongly enough, I'll even throw away plants that have merely been adjacent to scale-occupied plants. The hope is that if I throw plants out fast enough, maybe I can out-run the scale. Eventually, mathematically, I have to reach a point where no plants in the house are infested. Maybe I'll only have twenty plants at that point. Maybe only six. Maybe one. But eventually.

That's a pretty unpleasant-sounding idea all on its own, of course. But wasn't I the indoor-plant blogger who'd been saying that I had too many plants and I desperately needed to pare down to a more manageable number? And haven't I been saying this for pretty much the entire time I've been writing the blog? Well, what's a more manageable number than one?

So that's where we are at the moment: full metal "Tina! Bring me the ax."⁷



The plants Scalepocalypse 2012 2013 is responsible for killing so far (I'm keeping the list so I know what to write on the eventual memorial):

Alpinia zerumbet variegata • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Aloe NOID, variegated • Aloe polyphylla • Agave desmettiana (?), variegated • Aloe vera • Aloe vera • Aloe vera • Gasteraloe x beguinii • Gasteraloe x beguinii • Gasteraloe x beguinii • Aloe 'Silver Ridge' • Aloe 'Doran Black' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Sedum rubrotinctum 'Aurora' • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Philodendron hederaceum micans • Peperomia obtusifolia variegata • Peperomia obtusifolia variegata • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x unknown • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Aloe striata • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Begonia NOID • Begonia NOID • Callisia fragrans • Cyrtomium falcatum • Asparagus macowanii • Anthurium seedling • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Begonia x 'Erythrophylla' • Begonia x 'Erythrophylla' • Aloe 'Firebird' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Ardisia elliptica • Ficus benjamina 'Midnight' • Ficus elastica 'Tineke' • Haworthia attenuata • Haworthia attenuata • Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips' • Podocarpus macrophyllus • Philodendron squamiferum⁸

And everything down to Aloe 'Firebird' was before the zero-tolerance policy. We're just getting started.

-

¹ A hundred times worse, in the sense that I would rather do the Pilosocereus thing a hundred times than have the other thing happen once. And yes, I thought about this choice for quite a while: the number is not arbitrary.
² Imidacloprid does sometimes take a month or two to build up in a plant's tissues before it reaches an effective concentration, but the Philodendron had definitely had a month or two to work already.
³ ("Don't Come Around Here No More," obviously.)
⁴ (Not an exaggeration. I've been getting negative enjoyment out of them for the last eight months, with the possible exception of August's Epiphyllum-and-Clivia bonanza, and I've only been willing to tolerate the misery for this long because I thought it might end at some point.)
⁵ (yet!)
⁶ An overreaction? Well, sure, I suppose for most people it would be an overreaction to go bonkers over finding some bugs on a few houseplants. You have to bear in mind, though, that I have lived and breathed indoor plants, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, for about six years. And it has made Jack a very dull boy, and I wasn't even that good at it compared to some people, but it was at least a direction, a vague plan, a sort of goal. You know: here is a thing I enjoy. Maybe I could make a self-supporting amount of money from this, somehow.
You try hating the thing around which you've let six years revolve and on which you've constructed all of your future plans, and then tell me what's an overreaction.
There is, no doubt, some sort of cautionary tale in all of this about the dangers of turning hobbies into careers. Or the dangers of being generally inept at having careers. I don't know what it is exactly, but I can smell a cautionary tale in here somewhere.
⁷ (Helga, I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the scale.)
⁸ No, I did not get to salvage any of the Alworthia 'Black Gems.' Had 27 at the beginning of all this, and none of them have managed to not have scale at some point or another, so I am 'Black-Gem-'less for the first time in almost six years. This despite heavy and repeated neeming, a summer outside, careful inspection upon re-entry, and imidacloprid.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Prim-N-Proper

Tag: Paph. Prim-N-Proper (is correct)

Origin: Paphiopedilum praestans x Paphiopedilum primulinum

Pretty picture: Oncidium Space Race 'Coco'

I'm kinda meh about these flowers, but I find the unopened bud in the top left corner kind of interesting.

Space Race is a hybrid of Onc. Sphacetante and Onc. Pupukea Sunset. The former tongue-twisty name is a clumsy mashup of its parents' names, Oncidium sphacelatum and Oncidium Debutante (I would have recommended "Debutatum," if anybody had asked me, but of course nobody ever does.), and I didn't care to track down the ancestry of Debutante, so that is left as an exercise for the reader. Pupukea Sunset is a hybrid of the two species Oncidium fuscatum and Oncidium cheirophorum.

Space Race most strongly resembles O. sphacelatum, which is also yellow with some brown or red-brown spots. I much prefer the looks of O. fuscatum (brown, with a large pink and white labellum) or O. cheirophorum (solid bright yellow), but that's just me.

Random plant event: Spathiphyllum

I want to note, first off, that this does not necessarily mean I'm returning to regular blogging. Very little is going on here, and what is going on is mostly not good, so I'd prefer not to commit myself just yet. However, there is a tiny bit of news, in that I've potted up the Spathiphyllum seedlings from last October/November. (Previously seen on 31 October, 5 December, and 18 December.)

I normally wouldn't have potted these up quite so early, but 1) there was something growing¹ on the surface of the vermiculite, in some of the other sections of the germination container, and I didn't want it to reach the spaths even though I wasn't positive it would hurt them, and 2) they were getting big enough that I was concerned about them shading one another to death like a bunch of drag queens.² Potting them up now (17 January, technically) is a gamble, but it seemed safer than leaving them where they were.

Observations:

Spathiphyllum seedlings grow faster than Anthurium ones do. It's not a huge difference, but there's definitely a difference. It's especially noticeable with the roots: Anthurium seedlings are often content to grow a single thick, short, brittle root and then focus on leaves, often taking four months or more to add a second or third root. Spathiphyllum seedlings produce three to five long, thin, silky-looking, flexible roots pretty much immediately, and apparently never stop adding them.

The sandy-looking stuff in the center is imidacloprid. The best place for these at the moment is in the basement, and the basement is not yet definitively free of scale, therefore the seedlings get dosed just like everything else down there.
Aside from the difference in speed, though, Anthurium and Spathiphyllum have remarkably similar-looking seedlings. The Spathiphyllum leaves are lighter in color, which was unexpected (the one known parent was just your basic medium green, not as dark as peace lilies usually are, but considerably darker than the seedlings), and there are some subtle differences in leaf texture (Spathiphyllum leaves are thinner and more flexible, just like in the mature plants), but I wouldn't be able to tell which was which at a glance.

I can't report anything definite about the germination rate, because I didn't record how many seeds I started in the second batch, from 1 November. The first batch had 8 seeds, of which 6 germinated, and 4 got transplanted. The second batch produced 46 seedlings that were transplanted, from an unknown number of seeds. In addition to those 50, I also threw away 5 seedlings that had germinated but looked too small to bother with.³ So that's 55 viable (?) seedlings from a single inflorescence.

If I were trying to create my own special Spathiphyllum cultivar, I suppose I should have potted the seedlings individually, one to a pot, but since I'm not, and since I expect some of them not to survive transplant, I put most of them three plants to a pot.⁴ If one of them happens to do something really cool, in theory I can rip the other ones out, or get it tissue-cultured, or whatever. But probably none of them will do anything really cool anyway.

The next step in the process, I suppose, is to grow some of the seedlings to blooming size. There's little information available about how long that might take; the one site I found that addressed it at all suggested that they might be mature enough to bloom in two years. So those of you who are following PATSP strictly for Spathiphyllum seedling news should check back in late October 2014, I guess.

-

¹ (or possibly dying)
² For those in the audience who don't know: 1) you should be watching RuPaul's Drag Race, and 2) "throwing shade" is slang for insulting another person, though it's a specific kind of insult-throwing. Like, if you ask Mariah Carey for her feelings about Madonna, and she says, I don't listen to Madonna, that's an insult to Madge, but it's also not really throwing shade. It's too direct, and there's no cleverness to it. On the other hand, if Mariah says I really haven’t paid attention to Madonna since about like 7th or 8th grade when she used to be popular (something Mariah has apparently actually said), that's shade. It's basically a difference of style, I guess? And insult density? The first sentence is just a plain, unadorned insult which is also a statement of fact; the actual Mariah quote contains three insults: I don't listen to Madonna, Madonna's way older than me, nobody else likes Madonna either.
I don't know. I'm probably not the right person to be trying to explain this, since it's not actually a term I use in everyday conversation, but that's the basic idea as I understand it. This is a long way to go to explain something that was a fairly stupid pun in the first place, but you know me: always willing to go the extra thousand words to explain a joke that wasn't particularly funny to begin with.
³ Considering how many seedlings I had, and how I don't even especially like Spathiphyllums in the first place, I felt like I could afford to be choosy. I threw out about 60% of the Schlumbergera seedlings I potted up on the same night, because I had the same problem with them but worse.
⁴ That's maybe not a smart assumption. With the Anthuriums so far, the transplant survival rate has been 286/310, or a hair over 92%, though some of those are still pretty young. It could eventually fall to 85-88%. With the Schlumbergeras and Aglaonemas, I think I'm at 100%; with Columnea orientandina it's in the neighborhood of 20%. So it's tough to predict what will happen to the Spathiphyllums.

Pretty pictures: Vanda Wirat Blue

I couldn't find anything about Wirat Blue at the International Orchid Register, which makes me question if it's a real name or not.


There's a Vanda Wirat, for example, and if you do a Google search for Vanda Wirat, you get a lot of hits for both Wirat Blue and Wirat Pink, neither of which are in the IOR. Could it be that the Wirat cross produced offspring which were blue (or at least "blue," the aspirational name given to certain shades of purple in the horticultural world) and other seedlings which were pink? Or is it more complicated than that? I don't know.


I suppose the important thing is that Vandas are pretty.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum NOID

So. Much. White.


No tag, so:

wrong tags: 9
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 14

Imidacloprid has now been added to all the plants in the basement, so the only thing left to do is wait and see if more scale show up. I bought two more pounds of imidacloprid last Wednesday: one pound I opened but only used a tiny bit of, and the other I didn't open at all and could probably return to the store. The question now is whether to be an optimist and return the latter, or be a pessimist and use the nearly two remaining pounds to dose some more plants (maybe everything in the plant room?), on the off chance that that might make anything better.

Actually it's not that much of a question. We already know I'm a pessimist.

Not that I'm telling the plant collection what to do or anything, but remember how last summer when everything was horrible, and then the Epiphyllum and Clivia both bloomed and I was all like okay, I guess I can't stay mad at you, and things got better for a while? This would be a really excellent time for the Eucharis to decide to grow a flower. I'd even accept one of the Begonias, or Aechmea fasciatas. In my wildest dreams, maybe the Brassolaeliocattleya (still, inexplicably, alive) or Selenocereus chrysocardium. I do feel like the collection owes me something for all this.

Pretty (?) pictures: Schoenorchis paniculata

Well, I suppose it's different, at least.




No, the scale situation has not improved. I have so far (as of last night) dumped approximately 2 pounds of imidacloprid granules into about 500 plants' pots. The idea is to do everything in the basement, and leave the scale nowhere to run. This is tedious, exhausting, depressing, and very possibly unhealthy, but it will be worth it if it gets rid of the scale.

If it doesn't, well. Let's just say you wouldn't want to be here when I discover the survivors.

Pretty pictures: Miltoniopsis Echo Bay 'Midnight Tears'