Random plant events: Hatiora and Schlumbergera

Oh hi. Apologies for the three-day gap in posting.

Imidacloprid II: The Imidaclopridatening¹ has finally ended, so all that's left to do is sit around with my fingers crossed until I find out whether or not it's worked. I'm finding scale less often now, which might be a good sign. It also might just be a sign that all the really badly-infested plants were thrown away, and the ones left are only slightly infested. Time will tell.

In other news, Sheba and I are both extremely itchy lately. Losing-sleep kind of itchy. Biting-bald-spots-into-the-whole-inside-of-your-leg itchy.² I have no idea why: there are no bumps or rashes or anything, we haven't changed laundry detergents, etc. The main environmental change is probably the addition of all the imidacloprid, but that really should be staying confined to the pots, and in any case I'm not pouring it down my legs, which is where I'm having the worst problems.

Besides imidacloprid, the other theories include: mold, weather, the house heating system, karma and/or divine retribution, allergies, excessive washing, inadequate washing, witches, and bunnies.³ This has always been going on to some degree or another -- I first blogged about Sheba getting hot spots a year and a half ago, and I first noticed that I was feeling itchy frequently last July. But it's so much worse right now, for both of us, that I'm thinking surely this can't be a coincidence.

Of course, thinking about it also sometimes sets it off, so I should move on to another topic quickly. Maybe plants?

The plants are still doing things, and I'm still taking pictures, though it's been hard to get very good pictures lately -- too cold and/or rainy to go outside for good light, too dark to get good pictures inside. So I apologize for the quality, but:

My NOID orange (but sometimes not-orange) "Easter cactus" has bloomed again. This isn't supposed to happen when it's not Easter, as far as I know, but perhaps it's been confused by the temperature in the plant room -- we were late setting up the heater, so it's been cold in there. Some plants like this more than others. Historically speaking, the flowers are red when they first open, then gradually turn more orange. Not sure what happened this year that we're starting out with orange at the beginning. Maybe that's temperature-related?

In any case, the buds were initially kind of a light pink, then magenta --

-- and opened up orange, with no red stage this year at all. I guess Hatiora likes to keep a person guessing. Or at least this Hatiora likes to keep this person guessing. Perhaps the appropriate "person" for Hatiora's eventual plant profile should be M. Night Shyamalan.⁴

The plant is approximately the same size now as it was in February. Maybe a little bigger. It's not that it hasn't grown quite a bit in that stretch of time; it just drops pieces whenever I'm not watering perfectly, and sometimes when I am watering perfectly, so the net growth is basically zero. There remains a strong argument for Patsy Cline as the profile "person."

Meanwhile, and more predictably, the Schlumbergeras are in full swing at the moment as well. 'Caribbean Dancer' (above) is the main bloomer, but that's to be expected, since it's the largest and oldest of my plants. I also have a salmon/peach variety, which is just barely visible in this photo (slightly to the right of center, under a couple layers of 'Caribbean Dancer' blooms), which is having its biggest year to date, a magenta one (not pictured) that's got some buds but no actual flowers yet, and a white one (also not pictured) with plenty of buds that are only just now beginning to open. The previously-reported bud on seedling number 25 aborted shortly after I took that picture, I guess because I wasn't feeling bad enough about the plant collection. If I can figure out a way to move the seedlings into the plant room by February or so, I might start seeing buds on the seedlings that actually open. And boy will that be a crazy day.

Just to end on a bit of a tease, other random plant events coming up this week:⁵ Phragmipedium, Anthurium, Leuchtenbergia, Billbergia, Strelitzia, and some unidentified trees in downtown Iowa City.

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¹ (1. dumping imidacloprid into the pot of every plant in the house. 2. Well it's a word now. Deal with it.)
² (more Sheba than me on the bald spots. Though if I could reach . . . . In any case, I'm pretty sure we're both having trouble getting to sleep, and then waking up early, because of itching.)
³ Some of those are jokes. Which ones are jokes is left as an exercise for the reader.
⁴ Pro tip: you do not want to get me started about M. Night Shyamalan.
⁵ (where "this week" = a vaguely-defined period of time which includes not only this week but also the following week, a solid chunk of December, and never, and where "random plant events" means random plant events, stupid plant tricks, and possibly graffiti)

Pretty picture: Zygopetalum (Kiwi Klassic x Mishima Goddess)

Do all Zygopetalums look like this? It seems like they all look like this. Though usually they're less blurry.

Grab bag

Not much to report lately; I'm heavily preoccupied with trying to dump imidacloprid into all the plants. It isn't particularly difficult to do: it just makes watering take longer, so there's less time for anything else. And of course I'm still finding scale as I go, though less of it than I expected.

Here are five things I've found interesting enough to stop and photograph, but not interesting enough to write a whole blog post about, in the last couple weeks:

1. Coffea arabica

Of the eight pots of Coffea seedlings I started back in February, I still have six. (The other two got sold at a consignment store in Iowa City.) I up-potted them to 6-inch/15 cm pots a couple weeks ago, because they were drying out before their turn in the watering cycle came around. I've been surprised at how quickly they've grown: I once believed that the plants we got in at the ex-job, about this tall, in 4-inch pots, were probably about a year old, but it seems more likely now that they were only six months. If even that.


2. Corn

The cornfield behind the house got harvested yesterday.¹ Sheba sometimes worries when the machinery shows up to do things to the field (understandable: it's a large, blurry object making growling noises in the back of the house where she plays: I'd be alarmed too), but she either didn't notice it this time or she's getting used to it.

This is slightly sad for me; I like when the field is planted in corn better than I like when it's planted in soybeans. Since we've lived here, they've alternated plantings, so next year will probably be a soy year.


3. Neoregelia 'Gazpacho'

As expected, the Neoregelia 'Gazpacho' has continued to bloom. Less expected is the fuzzy white fungus that appears to be growing on the spent flowers. I can't recall seeing this before, and my ongoing battle with fungus on the Euphorbias has me worrying more about this than I otherwise would, even though I doubt it's the same fungus.

Aside from that, though, the Neoregelia is behaving normally. It already has two good-sized offsets on it.


4. Ananas 'Mongo'

Speaking of offsets.

This is a lot faster than I was expecting. The fruit is still on the plant and everything, though the reduced light indoors has made it lose a lot of its color. Pretty sure all the true flowers have opened and closed already.


5. Spathiphyllum NOID

Finally, one of my older Spathiphyllums (I got it in January 2007) has self-pollinated a number of times, and has produced a couple hundred seeds, but the seeds have so far mostly fallen to fungus, instead of germinating. I had been hopeful that this spadix, which appeared to have been pollinated successfully, and which seemed to be developing normally, might provide another chance, but instead it started to get these white cauliflower-like bumps, and then I accidentally broke it off its stem while I was trying to get it ready for photos, so I never got to see the cauliflowers develop into whatever they were going to develop into. This may be a good thing, depending on why the atypical growth was happening, but I was a little bummed all the same.

There is one exciting thing to report on the whole Spathiphyllum-breeding project, though: my biggest peace lily (likely 'Mauna Loa' or 'Sensation'²), which I've had since January 2003, is blooming right now, after a long bloomless period. The spathe hasn't opened yet, and I don't know for sure if it will be interfertile with my other plants when it does, but I've wanted to propagate it for years now. In almost 11 years, it has never offset, so the only way I'm going to propagate it appears to be by seed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

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¹ (Also our first snow, though I didn't get a picture of that.)
² I'm guessing those cultivar names on the grounds that they're the main varieties of Spathiphyllum that I'm aware of which get really big. 'Mauna Loa' is one of the oldest and most popular of the big varieties, and 'Sensation' is the largest variety the growers' guide could come up with that's at all common -- supposedly 'Sensation' can reach 5 feet (1.5 m). Mine's not anywhere near 5 feet tall, but it's been indoors for 11 years, so some stunting would be understandable. Even under my non-ideal conditions, the leaves are all a solid 13-19 inches (33-48 cm) long, and it's vastly bigger than my other spaths.
Allegedly there are even peace lilies out there somewhere that can reach 9 feet (2.7 m) tall, though the largest I've personally seen was this guy:

Who was maybe 5 or 6 feet (1.5-1.8 m), and sold to us as 'Sensation.' Even if not the world's largest Spathiphyllum, I wouldn't want to run into it in a darkened alley or anything. Not considering some of the things I've said about spaths in the past.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium lindleyi var. majus

I'm increasingly impressed by Google's ability to figure out what species I mean when I search for a mangled name. (This one's tag: "Den lindiyl var majus.")

Granted, that's a double-edged sword, since Google also likes to torment me by correcting things that I've typed incorrectly on purpose, or correcting things that aren't even wrong, just less common than whatever it thinks I should be looking for. But even so. It's getting smarter.

Not the greatest picture, alas. So it goes.

Random plant event: Euphorbia leuconeura

The Euphorbia leuconeura story continues. When we last checked in, there were flowers starting to appear on one of the two plants. It's taken longer than I was expecting, but there are now finally some seedlings popping up:

Six so far in this pot (one has emerged since the photo was taken); I've also spotted one seedling in a neighboring plant's pot.

Not sure what, exactly, to do with these; obviously my initial impulse is to give them their own pots and begin mass-producing them, because that's always my first impulse, but A) that's going to take space, and I was already planning to start cranking out Coffea seedlings starting in December, so I really don't have the room, and B) it's kind of a stupid idea for me to be making more plants to take care of, what with the ongoing scale infestation.¹ So I guess they're going to stay where they are for the foreseeable future. Hopefully root crowding won't be too big of a problem; I suppose I'll know based on how quickly the pots dry out.

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¹ I am now in the process of adding imidacloprid to all the plants in the house. (Last year I just did the basement, which was apparently not good enough.)
I'm doing it as I water, which means that I won't actually be done until around the end of November, and imidacloprid takes a month or two to reach full effectiveness, so I won't really know how well it worked until around late January.
And my chances aren't great, mathematically speaking. I don't know how likely it is to both fully eliminate scale from plants that are currently infested and prevent new infestations from starting on clean plants, but if it's 99.9% effective, which is optimistic, and all 936 plants are either infested or exposed, my chances of actually getting rid of the problem once and for all this winter are only (0.999)^936, or about 39%.
I can do things to help boost those odds: remove branches or leaves that have visible scale on them, throw out some more plants, wipe plants down with rubbing alcohol. And it's likely that not every plant is either infested or exposed right now. It could be that I only have to eliminate or prevent scale on like 75 plants, in which case a mere 99% success rate would give me roughly 50-50 odds of victory.
So there's some room for optimism. Just not, you know, very much.

Texts From an Anthurium

Preface: as much as I'd love to claim credit for it, I did not create this form; it belongs to Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, and she's done way better things with it than this. (I particularly recommend Text Messages From a Jack-O-Lantern, though be warned: it's sad. Texts From The Lorax is also really good, and more upbeat. They're all recommended, though.)

---------------------------------------------------------------

Hi
Im touching the top of the thing now

what thing

i dont know its solid and clear
and making me bend

plastic?

?

ill get you yr own pot soon

dont rot first ok?

its just kind of uncomfortable is all
my petiole hurts

---------------------------------------------------------------
my roots feel funny

yeah the potting mix

isn't the same as the vermiculite

i know

youll get used to it tho

its not bad exactly
just weird

well give it some time

it tastes different
i dont feel anchored properly
like i might come loose and fall

you wont fall

itll be ok

---------------------------------------------------------------
i dont know if im supposed to
talk to you abt this or what
but the soil feels dry

oh geez

sorry

i should have watered yesterday

instead of playing the sims

no worries
i think im ok
just maybe water soon ok

---------------------------------------------------------------
aaa aaa aaa aaa

what

what is it

theres something on me

what

theres something on me and
oh god
i think its eating me
do somethign pls

ill be right there

where did it come from
what is happening

its probably scale

a scale insect

ive been trying bu

theyre hard to get rid of

well hurry up
i dont like scale insects

im coming

i dont like them either

---------------------------------------------------------------
hey

hi bob

did you mean to turn out the light

i didnt turn anything off

no

cause the light above me is dark
and usually its bright
at this time of day

probably one of the bulbs burnt out

they dont last forever

or maybe the fixture went bad

sometimes they break

can i come down and fix it in like half an hr?

ok
its just darker
and im hungry

do you want me to come down right now?

i could do that

well if its not aa problem 4u
but you dont have to
RIGHT now

no its ok

ill do it now

im not doing anything important anyway

just the blog

---------------------------------------------------------------
help
theres sometihng on me again

what

more scale

no its different
it moved really fast
i dont know if its still there or not
but it was big
lots bigger

oh

was it trying to eat u

i dont think so
it just ran across
its gone now

it was probably just a spider

did you count the legs

spiders have 8

i didn't count
i was distracted

well let me know if it comes back

ok
thank you
sorry to bother you

---------------------------------------------------------------
hey
bijoux just made a funny leaf
its all red
and theres a weird dangly bit
are they ok

what like a flower

whats a flower

oh god

why is it bad
to have a flower

i dont know how to explain

its not bad

maybe kind of embarrassing

its where seeds come from

seeds like i used to be

yes

i cant believe i have to give the birds and bees talk

to a plant

what are birds and bees

actually its probably not birds and bees

for anthuriums

its probably beetles or flies or something

maybe i shoudl google that

before i try to explain

whatever
as long as i know
theyre not dying

not at all

its a good thing

it shows theyre growing up

and humans like me

think flowers are pretty

usually

so you wish i would make a flower?
are you disappointed

no no no

its not like that at all

youll bloom when you bloom

theres no pressure at all

i like leaves too

---------------------------------------------------------------
ive got a surprise for you

a happy surprise?

yes

should i come down now and look

no
not yet
its not ready yet
wait a few weeks

should i guess?

is it a flower?

maybe
youll just have to wait and see

when shouldi check

couple weeks

ok

---------------------------------------------------------------
so what did you think

about the flower?

it was nice

omg i am so horny right now
do you think theres a way i could

tmi tmi tmi

get my pollen over to bijoux
sorry
its hard to think about anything else
but was the flower nice?

yeah

tho i wondered why you went with

pinkish-red

dont know
it seemed like a nice color when bijoux did it
you dont like pinksh red?

no

i mean its a fine color

its just that most of you guys

are doing pinkish red

i was thinking thered be more variety maybe

oh

but thats not to say

its a bad color

i mean its not white

if all of you did white flowers then

that would be really boring

i can try to do something else next time

i dont think it works like that

but seriously dont worry about it

im sorry i said anything

ppink-red is great

and youre right bijoux does wear it well

and so do you for that matter

---------------------------------------------------------------
help

what

i think my flowers going to fall off
its all dry and shit

oh

is that all

what do you mean
is that all
i dont want 2 go back
2 just having leaves again

well but

having flowers si so much fun

you know you can make more flowers right?

and pollination is the
i can make more flowers?

yes

bob

you can make more flowers

most anthuriums do

oh thank goodness
if i couldnt make any more flowers
id be so depressed

a lot of plants dont bloom more than once actually

so youre kind of lucky

they just bllom and then go back to making leaves forever?
that doesnt make any sense

no

usually they bloom once
set seeds and then die

oh
yeah dying sounds abt right
i cn understand that

i wouldnt have thought blooming was

such a big deal

dont humans bloom

well sort of

but its different

but you wouldnt want to bloom once
and then die right?

no

youre right

you make a good point

now youve got me feeling bad for annuals

thats what the plants that do that are called

being an annual must be terrible

yeah maybe it is

id never really thought about it

Pretty picture: Rhyncholaeliocattleya Firey Leopard x Rhyncattleanthe Martha Clarke

The International Orchid Register says it's Firey Leopard. The tag said Fiery Leopard (and also called both parents Potinara). Google corrects Firey to Fiery. None of the flower pictures that come up in Google image search for any combination of spelling (Firey / Fiery), parents (Firey Leopard / Martha Clarke), or genus name (Potinara / Rhynchocattleya / Rhyncattleanthe) look much like this photo, so I'm inclined to believe that this photo is a shared delusion between me and my camera and never actually existed.

Your Love is Like / a Rollercoaster, Baby, Baby

Weird times. The plant collection is at once thriving in previously unprecedented ways and going completely to hell, which I guess is something that can happen once a collection reaches a certain size. Sort of like how Texas can be a disaster area due to flood and drought simultaneously.

On the one hand, I've been finding scale infestations all over the house, including on some very special plants,¹ which has at times left me despairing of ever getting things under control. (For good reason -- this has been going on for almost two years already, and only seems to be getting worse. It's showing up in new rooms, it's showing up on plants I thought I'd cured, and it's particularly bad on the plants that were outside for the summer.²) I'm not seeing scale on that many plants, really (probably only about 50, in a collection of 955), but of course it's the scale you're not seeing that's the real problem.

Also the Euphorbia fungus has returned as well. It probably never left.

On the other hand, the Stapelia giganteas are blooming like crazy, which is delightful, in that special way that the smell of dog shit can be delightful if it's being smelled for the right reasons.³

Anthurium "Bijoux Tuit" is working on a second bloom, making it the second of my Anthurium seedlings to bloom twice. Three more Anthurium seedlings are producing first blooms,⁴ for a total of thirteen. I'm not completely used to the idea of the Anthuriums blooming, even though it's been a few weeks now, so this is neat every time I'm reminded of it. About 40% of the Clivia seeds I started are producing leaves.⁵ I just took a whole bunch of berries off the Coffea and started seeds drying.⁶

Seeds on lower right.
I had one Schlumbergera seedling, #55, produce a flower bud about 14 months after it was first sown.⁷ The Spathiphyllum seedlings are looking like actual plants now, and have been for some time.

They're even suckering!

So the teal deer here is that the most incredible, wonderful, and exciting things are happening with the plant collection, and I am honestly thinking about throwing it all in the trash, shuttering the blog, and taking up a less emotionally draining hobby, like competitive jam-jar rolling.

For the time being, I've just been throwing out plants⁸ and looking for sources for bulk imidacloprid.⁹ Should I find scale on the Anthuriums again, however, absolutely anything might happen.

LATE EDIT: While watering on Tuesday night, I found out Schlumbergera number 25 has decided to try and bloom as well:

Hopefully that bud will do better than #55's did.

-

¹ The original Murraya paniculata, all four of the gray-variegated Yucca guatemalensis, and the Furcraea foetida 'Medio-Picta,' to name a few.
² Lesson learned: don't put scale-infested plants outside in the summer. I blame ants.
³ So far, I have six blooms open at once in the plant room, plus at least one on the smellier Stapelia variegata, and I'm not finding the combined odor objectionable or even noticing it much. Which might mean that I've just gotten used to it, but the husband hasn't said commented on any unusual smells, and he spends less time in the house. So I'm thinking maybe it's just really not that bad unless you're up close. They're not a flower you want to stick behind your ear or anything.
⁴ #118, "Elijah Sturdabowtit;" #46, "Aurora Boreanaz;" and #235, "Rowan DeBoate." Rowan is particularly of interest, as her spathe is sort of a pale peach/cream color, which I haven't seen before on my plants.
⁵ No, it does not seem to have mattered much whether I rinsed them with hydrogen peroxide before planting, though I can't say for certain that it doesn't matter at all. The un-peroxided group of five seeds currently stands at: 0 rotted, 3 inactive, and 2 germinated and producing foliage. The peroxided group of eight seeds has 2 rotted, 1 inactive, 2 germinated but not doing much of anything, and 3 germinated and producing foliage. If we're only counting the seedlings that are visibly growing and healthy-seeming, that's a success rate of 40% on the first group and 38% on the second.
⁶ I took one berry off on 7 October, which gave me two seeds. Then on 27 October, I removed a whole cupful, and got 138 seeds. Though at least three got washed down the drain while I was trying to clean them off, and I'm planning to give a few others away, so I'm probably going to wind up starting about 130 seeds from this batch on 22 December. And that's not even half the berries that are on the plant.
Unrelated point of interest: in large quantities, Coffea berry skins smell sort of oniony, it turns out.
⁷ No pictures, because the bud dropped. It had either already given up on further development when I took it out of the flat it was in, or I knocked it off the plant in the process of untangling it from the other seedlings, 'cause by the time I went to get the camera to take a picture, it was no longer attached to the plant. Considering that it had no business even thinking about blooming in the first place (it's in the basement, under artificial lights, so it doesn't get the long, cool nights it should require for setting buds, and it was also a couple years too young to be blooming besides, according to all the reputable websites), I figure this is a pretty good sign. The moral? Between this and the Anthurium situation, I'm thinking that it's best to ignore when people tell you that plants have to be X years old before they'll bloom, because plants can't read and will bloom when they feel like it.
⁸ I had 1017 plants at the beginning of September, 1001 at the beginning of October, and it looks like we're going to be somewhere around 950 at the beginning of November. Since most of the plants that were easy to get rid of got thrown out ages ago, every plant I discard now is like a knife to the heart, pretty much.
⁹ For comparison, I've been paying $8.50 for one pound of 0.22% imidacloprid; the stuff at the link is $3.08/lb for 0.5% imidacloprid, before shipping. Do I actually need that much in order to dose the entire collection all at once? No, probably not that much. My best ballpark guess is about 25 lb. of what I've been getting, or 11 lb. of the bulk stuff.
Some of you will, at this point, be thinking about telling me I should try something else, something other than imidacloprid, like neem oil or rubbing alcohol or whatever. The reason why I'm not considering these as options is because sprinkling imidacloprid granules on soil is fast, covers the whole plant, and only has to be done once. Spraying neem or rubbing alcohol, or anything else, takes much longer to apply, covers only the areas I can reach with the spray (not so bad for large-leaved plants like Strelitzia, but spraying every surface on a Polyscias fruticosa? Fuggedaboutit.), and has to be re-done at least every week or two to keep up with the freshly-hatched larvae. As the size of the collection decreases, rubbing alcohol or whatever might be more of an option, but at the moment, there's really no way I could keep up. It's not like I haven't tried before.