Pretty picture: Rhyncholaeliocattleya Dick Smith 'Aloha Spirit'

This photo is the first orchid picture in quite a while that I thought turned out well, so I feel like I ought to write something about it, but it kind of speaks for itself, so I'm not sure what to say. I'm not crazy about the whole ruffly frilly Cattleya thing, but those colors! So pretty!

Rhyncholaeliocattleya Dick Smith 'Aloha Spirit' = Rhyncholaeliocattleya Hisako Akatsuka x Rhyncholaeliocattleya Hawaiian Lightning)

Unfinished business: Episcia-eating caterpillars

I am pleased to report that there has been a breakthrough in the whole camera-uploading-photos-to-dumb-locations business. The overall situation is still not great, alas, but that much has been settled, and this gives us hope for the future. Except where it comes to the scale-and-caterpillar part of the future, because my optimism has limits.

I do, at least, now have pictures of one of the caterpillars. (Not sure how many there were total, but it was in the neighborhood of ten.)

I'm getting used to a new monitor, so I'm not sure what kind of color fidelity I'm going to end up with -- how do people use LCD monitors? If you sit up slightly straighter, the whole screen changes color. Am I just going to have to get used to sitting very still? -- but you can surely get the general idea from this; it's not like my color fidelity has ever been very good in the first place.

As far as I can tell from the pictures, the caterpillars are more or less colorless on their own; they turn green when they eat green things.

It has not escaped my attention that the caterpillars bear a passing resemblance to the ones I found in the potter wasp nests, back in July. I mean, I don't think they're the exact same species, but they're roughly the same size and seem to have a similar overall shape, so it's possible that they're in the same family. As if I could feel any worse about the whole potter wasp thing.

Anyway. This is what they do to Episicas:

Or at least mostly what they do to Episcias. They also leave droppings (called frass) around, some of which get stuck in the hair on the leaves. So even the leaves they leave intact wind up looking worse.

Because caterpillars are frassholes.

Excuses, excuses

Hi again.

Whatever you might have heard, I have not run off to Ecuador with everybody's donations. (I don't even speak Ecuadorian.) What's happened instead has been sort of a perfect storm of blogular interference.

• As I've mentioned before, my computer has been essentially out of memory for a few months, so it's been difficult to get photos to post to the blog.
• But -- I've gotten a new computer! With Windows 7 (The old computer has XP.) and about eight times more memory! So there have been files to transfer, and programs to install! Which also takes time, even under the best of circumstances.
• But these are not particularly good circumstances. When I tried to upload a new batch of photos from the camera to the new computer, yesterday, it acted like there was something corrupted about the files and refused to upload them.
• My attempts to fix that problem resulted in accidentally installing at least one malware program, but I did upload the photos eventually.
• But after dropping everything to get rid of the malware, I discovered that I couldn't edit the photos I'd supposedly uploaded. I couldn't even locate them.
• This is because (it turns out) the photos weren't saved to the desktop, which is where I'd told the camera to save to, but instead, they were sent to a folder nine folder-layers deep, many of which folders have ridiculously non-intuitive names, and a few of which were even hidden (invisible) folders, so I wouldn't have been able to happen on them even if I'd searched the whole computer systematically. (C --> [my account] --> Users --> AppData --> Roaming --> OLYMPUS --> OLYMPUS Master --> store ["Store?!?" -Mr. S.] --> 20130914145749 --> the pictures.)
• And in the process of trying to unhide the hidden folders, I wound up with a desktop full of previously-hidden TMP files, which I then couldn't figure out what they were, how they'd gotten on my new computer in the first place, how to hide them again, or whether or not I wanted to.
• At which point I figured that, since every time I'd touched the computer yesterday, I'd just made something worse, it might be best to pretend that the day had never happened, and go back to the system restore point from before I'd tried to do all this stuff. Just erase the whole chalkboard and start over. But restore points don't work that way. Which is something I have to re-learn every time I'm tempted to use system restore, because I am not smrt. So, this didn't hide all the TMP files, remove the Olympus program, erase all traces of the malware, or do anything else I'd wanted it to do.
• Which is pretty much when I renounced all worldly possessions and became a Buddhist monk. Which is doubly weird, because I'm not even Buddhist.
• ALSO, I've been trying for a few weeks to get yearbook pictures of some of the plants, which is tiring on its own, and dependent on the cooperation of the weather.
• And there's the usual watering and stuff, which I don't keep up with incredibly well even under ideal circumstances.
• It's been intermittently cold at night, so I've been moving plants in and out a lot, which is exhausting,
• and also means that when I'm trying to water plants, I have to finish watering before it gets cold out, so I'm always doing it in a rush, plus
• it's the time of year when I have to be thinking about bringing them in permanently, soon, and where the hell are they all going to go?
• Also I've found more scale, on various plants, in various rooms as well as outside.
• And some unknown small but prolific caterpillar (one of the geometrid moths?) ate the Episcias in my office into dead lacy parodies of their former selves, so those of you who objected to me calling houseplant pest bingo two or three weeks ago, on the grounds that you can't count caterpillars as houseplant pests if the plant isn't actually in the house when it has the caterpillars -- well, I've done it for real now, then. (How this happened is a question I can't even begin to answer. The Episcias in question haven't been outside all summer, not even for a few minutes to take photos of.)

So.

Rest assured that I have not forgotten that the blog exists, I'm really unlikely to do so, and nobody's in the hospital or anything. I just don't have time, and when I do have time, I'm usually not capable of anything besides staring at a blank wall, whimpering quietly. Sometimes I'm not even together enough to whimper, and whimpering would be a sign of progress.

The good news, if there is good news, is that I'm still taking pictures of plants doing things, so someday, someday, there will be a whole lot of horribly outdated posts about what the plants were doing over the last six weeks or so.

Pretty pictures: Odontocidium Sunlight 'Pacific Sunset'

Odontocidium Sunlight 'Pacific Sunset' = Oncidium Mexico × Odontocidium Crowborough, though the orchid registry online doesn't know of the cross, so it's not clear how official this is.

Random plant event: Codonanthe serrulata

Still working on the Leuchtenbergia profile; things keep coming up and preventing me from getting as far on it as I would like. I'm hoping to finish by the end of this week.

Meanwhile, I felt bad for going so long between posts, so there's this.

I've had Codonanthe serrulata since May 2011, when I got three cuttings from a reader.

It didn't look particularly promising. And it's still not my most impressive plant or anything, but it hasn't died, which is more than I can say for some gesneriads. So whatever. In any case, I had it under lights originally, but it was relocated to the plant room at some point in the last year, and it got a little bit of sun in the new location. In early August, I noticed that there was a single flower bud on it --

9 August 2013.
-- which opened into an actual flower a few days later, as flower buds often will.

12 August 2013.

I only got the one single flower, which is a little disappointing, but I suppose it's an improvement on the zero flowers the year before. So I shouldn't complain. Maybe next year, if it isn't dead, there'll be two flowers? Stranger things have happened.

Anyway. Back to the profile mines for me, I guess. Just letting you know I'm still alive and everything. Plus I'd intended to blog about this anyway.

UPDATE: The Leuchtenbergia principis profile has since happened.

Pretty pictures: Ascocenda Princess Mikasa

Yeah, okay, so clearly the Leuchtenbergia profile didn't happen yesterday, either. Whoops. I've been trying to take yearbook pictures this week, which involves lots of sweating and lifting. And then it got cold at night on Monday and Tuesday so I had to move some plants inside for the evening and then back out again in the morning, which also involved some sweating and lifting. And then we made a trip into Iowa City, during which I basically just sat in a hot car for three hours, which was much lighter on the lifting, but there was serious sweating. So my point is that I've been exhausted, and maybe even a bit dehydrated.

Rest assured that the profile is still going to happen, just as soon as I can, but I'm juggling a lot of things at once so it's probably not going to happen as soon as either of us would prefer.

Meanwhile: an orchid. The background was unfortunate, and confused my camera, but it's lovely all the same.

Ascocenda Princess Mikasa = Ascocenda Royal Sapphire x Vanda coerulea)

UPDATE: The Leuchtenbergia principis profile has since happened.

Random plant events: Anthurium seedlings #59 and #282

Thanks to the generosity of four readers, I now have enough money to buy an entire used computer, and get most of a dental checkup/cleaning. So that's good. (More than just "good," really -- both of those things have been nagging small worries in the back of my mind for a long time, then in the last month or so became screaming huge worries directly in front of my face, so that's a couple fewer things to have to worry about.)

Ordinarily this would call for Gazania photos, Gazanias being the official PATSP flower of celebrations, but I have somehow neglected to take any since the last time there was something to celebrate, so we're going to make do with a double random plant event instead. Which is that two of the Anthurium seedlings really and truly have produced flowers. I've been fooled before, but this time it's real.

Anthurium seedling #59 ("Bijoux Tuit").

Anthurium seedling #282 ("Dave Trading")
These pictures are a week or two old, because the whole computer-memory issue makes it difficult to upload new pictures, but by now, the flower on #59 ("Bijoux Tuit") is unambiguously a flower, even if the spathe hasn't completely unfurled yet. #282 ("Dave Trading") looks about the same as its picture, so there's still a possibility that I'm misinterpreting something, but I think it's just slower than Bijoux.

I wasn't expecting flowers this soon. Bijoux is only a year and a half old (seed started on 1 February 2012), and Dave is just barely over a year (19 May 2012); most of the information I've run into on-line said I wouldn't see flowers for three years, at the earliest, and maybe I would have to wait five.

I also had kind of hoped that the colors would be different -- they're both basically the same red-pink as 'Gemini.' Bijoux's mother was 'Gemini,' and she looks just like 'Gemini,' from what I've seen so far. Dave's mom was 'White Gemini,' which has white spathes, but 'White Gemini' is a sport of 'Gemini,' hence the name, so it's maybe not surprising that Dave comes out looking like 'Gemini.' Plus it's totally possible that Dave's dad is 'Gemini.' Whenever I see one of the plants shedding pollen, I just kind of randomly go around smearing pollen on every spadix I see, because it's a pretty rare event for one plant to be shedding pollen while another is receptive, and if pollination did take place, it's usually several weeks before it's obvious, so I never know the male parentage for any of these seedlings.

Now that Bijoux and Dave have demonstrated that it's possible, we may be seeing a lot more flowers on the Anthurium seedlings. If so, I hope they start changing up the colors -- if I remember correctly, about 80% of the seedlings are from either 'Gemini' or 'White Gemini,' so it'll be really boring if they all produce identical spathes. But we'll see how it goes. I've got a good feeling about #202 ("Mason Pepperspray") and #46 ("Aurora Boreanaz"): they've both done well enough so far to get moved to 4-inch (10 cm) pots, and their mother is the NOID purple-blooming one.

This is not the special post.

In my previous post, I said would not be posting over the weekend, because I was trying to get a special post ready for today.

But I have failed.

Some of the problem is that I have almost filled up the memory of my eleven-year-old computer (37.2 GB capacity, 1.51 GB remaining), which makes photo-editing more complicated and time-consuming, for reasons I predict you will not care about. The Iowa City area is pretty much awash in used computers, and I could get a much better one for about $150-200, but at the moment, the money available for this is . . . less than that. So if you've got a large pile of money somewhere, and rolling around naked in it just isn't as exciting as it used to be, and you feel like me having a new (used) computer would make the world a better place, there's a PayPal donation button at the top of the sidebar, on your right, and this would be a better-than-usual time for you to use it.^{1, 2}

Meanwhile, I will keep working on the post. Here's a hint about its topic and format:

I'm thinking maybe Thursday?

-

¹ And obviously if you don't have a large pile of money, or rolling naked in it is still enjoyable, or you feel that I'm more likely to use a new computer for evil than for good, don't worry about it. It's not life or death.
² Funds collected in excess of what I need to get a computer (if any) will go toward: getting my teeth cleaned for the first time in about ten years (which is going to happen whether I can pay for it or not, damn it), a new camera, and potting soil, in approximately that order. The actual sequence will depend on how soon I need potting soil again.