Anthurium no. 1271 "Boy Child"

So "Boy Child"¹ is an unexpected name for a drag queen, though after I thought about it for a little while, I decided it was pretty clever. And then I discovered that she's not even a drag queen, she's a drag king, if anything, and probably more accurately a performance artist, not really drag at all. I couldn't decide if that made it more clever or less clever.

Internet searches for "boy child," as you can imagine, don't get you very close to learning anything about the performer, but I did find some YouTube videos that way. Not great video or audio quality, but good enough to determine that what she's doing is not at all to my taste (NSFW examples 1 and 2). Found better stuff looking for "boychild," including (also potentially NSFW!) a couple interesting interviews. Not really for me, but not everything has to be for me.

As for the Anthurium seedling, well, she's produced a lot of blooms, but they've all been pretty small,² they don't last very long, and the thrips are a problem.³

Though, strangely, the thrips don't bother the leaves much.

She's also notable for being the first seedling of 'Joli' to produce a bloom; so far there have only been three. 1171 Chris of Hur is less interesting, and 1325 Dixie D Cupp is more interesting; Dixie might end up being a keeper due to her spathe color.

In any case. Not great overall; I'll probably toss it the next time there's a purge.

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¹ I'm using the version of the name I found first for the seedling, since the alternative is to change a bunch of spreadsheets and blog posts and whatever, but the performer apparently prefers "boychild," all one word, no caps.
² Though not all as tiny as the first couple, one of which is the flower photo in this post. Apparently I didn't consider the later, slightly larger blooms photo-worthy. Sorry.
³ I guess it took the thrips a while to find the plant after it bloomed, so the first couple spathes were fairly clean, and I'm asserting something that the photos don't actually show again. I swear it's true, though: the later blooms have been slightly larger and riddled with thrips scarring.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 244

Seedling 244 is primarily notable for being the most interesting seedling of 025A Clownfish to bloom so far. 239A is fine, but it's not like I've never seen an orange/white bloom before, and 240A Schwa was notable mostly for its crappy execution of a boring color combination. But 244A I like.

Name finalists: Adrenaline, Fire On Babylon, Sinead O'Connor, and That's My Purse.

I don't know why this seedling evokes singer/songwriter Sinead O'Connor specifically. Best theory: I was listening to more of her music around the time I was coming up with names (including, particularly, her song Fire On Babylon), and sometimes that sort of thing bleeds into the naming process.

And I realize that people may have strong feelings about O'Connor, particularly if the last you heard of her was during her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live, when she tore up a photo of then-Pope John Paul II. It's certainly true that she could have done a better job at explaining herself: I kinda feel like anyone could have told her ahead of time that "fight the real enemy" was going to be misunderstood.¹ But, as we've learned in the 25 years since, there really were some problems in the church: it's not like she was just some crazy person who attacked the Pope for no reason.

Anyway. Fire On Babylon is a Sinead O'Connor song, one that I was finding oddly soothing last winter. (My understanding is that it's about her abusive mother, which connects to the Saturday Night Live stuff.)

That's My Purse was previously considered for 057B Oxomoco; I rejected it on the grounds that it was maybe a little too much of an inside joke, but now I'm thinking maybe it doesn't matter.

And Adrenaline is just the hormone; there's no real connection to the flower, except insofar as the color is intense, and so is adrenaline, and I've kind of always liked the word.

So as much as I (obviously) like Sinead O'Connor, she kind of has the Joycelyn Elders problem of being divisive. I imagine all the people after whom I've named seedlings are villains to someone,² but some people are obviously more problematic than others. So I'll reluctantly drop that option. (I can always bring her back if I reconsider.)

And Adrenaline seems a little plain. Maybe I'm just in an odd mood.

So that leaves Fire On Babylon and That's My Purse, and . . . surely Iraq has enough problems at the moment. Which gives us 244A That's My Purse, though process of elimination. Which is not where I thought this was going to end up, when I came up with the list of options, but there you go.

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¹ Not that she would necessarily have listened, of course. This was intensely personal for her. There's a really good article in The Atlantic about this, which is worth reading if you're interested in what O'Connor was getting at, and why, and why that specific image of the Pope instead of some other one, etc. The article might even be worth reading if you're not interested, as far as that goes.
And it kinda sounds like O'Connor had one of the better experiences with the Magdalene laundries: here's an article about some of that.
² Well. It's hard to imagine anyone having serious problems with Yayoi Kusama or Dolly Parton. Though one should never underestimate the ability of people to find reasons to object to other people.

Germinating Clivia seeds

This is the process to which I referred in last Saturday's post, the one that got me ~91% germination on a batch of gift seeds. (This is the last day to request your own Clivia seeds.) It works a lot better than the process I used on my Clivia seeds in 2013.

You will need: ripe Clivia fruits, a germination container, vermiculite, vinegar, a pot in which to boil water, a bowl, paper towels, a warm but not hot surface on which to set your container.

(EDITED to add photos, 4 May 2017)

1. Get ripe fruit that contains seeds. I'm not actually super clear on how you know when a fruit is ripe, but I figured it out in 2013 so I'm going to assume it's pretty obvious.

2. Boil some water. (Tap water is fine; softened tap water is not.) This is mostly for your germination medium, so how much water you need depends on how many seeds you're starting, but, you know, it's just water, and it's about as easy to boil a lot as it is to boil a little. Once that's done, cover it, set it aside to cool, and hope that it will be cooled down enough to use by the time you get to step 6.

3. Open the fruit. I just kind of squeeze it until it comes open; this is kind of messy, but not as messy as you'd think, since almost the entire volume of the fruits is dedicated to seeds, so there's very little pulp.¹

4. There is a thin membrane or skin covering each of the seeds individually, which will likely tear as you separate the seeds from one another. You need to remove all of the membrane from the seeds. It's fairly easy to see and feel the difference between covered and uncovered seeds, as the membrane is a little bit fibrous, and thick enough to be visible. It also peels off of about 80% of the seeds really easily, and is impossible to get off of the remaining 20% because the whole thing is kind of wet and slimy and the seed itself is round so there's no easy way to get a tear started. (I had some success with setting down a paper towel on the work surface and rubbing one particular spot on the seed lightly against the paper towel until a hole started.)

This is the most annoying step of the process; it's all downhill from here.

5. Next you'll need to get a container to start the seeds in, and a growing medium. I used vermiculite for my growing medium, and strongly recommend that you do too.² For a container, I used the same clear plastic containers I use for germinating everything else,

but there's a lot of leeway there. Mostly what you need is a container that allows light in, but not air (or at least, not a lot of air -- you don't want the seeds to dry out), and is deep enough to accommodate 1-1.5 inches of vermiculite at the bottom while still leaving a couple inches of room for leaves to grow.

6. You need to moisten the vermiculite. If your boiled water has cooled off to 90F/32C or below, go ahead and saturate the vermiculite. (90F/32C is a guess; I'm pretty confident it's safe, but that doesn't mean 95F/35C is necessarily not.) Pour off any excess water, then cover the container.

7. Rinse the seeds in dilute white vinegar. I was told 2% vinegar, but I didn't actually measure it out when I did it: I just filled a clean large bowl with water, added a couple splashes of the vinegar, and dropped the seeds in.³

8. Pour the vinegar solution off the seeds, rinse with more of the boiled water and pour that off too, then set the seeds in the vermiculite, eyes down. (The eye is a slightly-raised bump on the seeds; it's easy to locate because it's the only distinguishable feature they have.⁴)

9. Cover/close the container and set it in a location with bottom heat (on top of a refrigerator or hot water heater; maybe on a heat mat specifically for seed germination if you're fancy⁵) and wait.

I saw the first leaves and roots begin to appear after about two weeks. They won't necessarily all germinate at once. Some small percentage are likely to be duds, that do nothing at all (about 6% of the total, in my case), and a few others germinate but then just stop developing (about 3%). Since so many did work, I didn't bother trying to figure out what was wrong with the ones that didn't.

10. Seedlings are ready to transplant to individual pots of potting soil (about 2-3" diameter) when the roots are about an inch long. Usually you see the surface of the seed shrivel and dull a little, too.

It's fairly obvious where the soil level should be: the plant starts growing out of the side of the seed, with leaves going one direction and the root going another. Plant it so that the root is below the soil and the leaf is above the soil. The seed will usually wind up mostly above the soil.

My source recommends a mixture of orchid bark, perlite, and a little bit of time-release fertilizer like Osmocote, though I didn't follow most of those suggestions⁶ and my seedlings seem to be fine.⁷

11. I set my potted seedlings on a low shelf in the living room (which means strong air movement, cool temperatures, and brief morning sun) but I don't think they're super-picky about location. I do watch them pretty closely to see whether the soil is drying out, and so far have been watering them about once a week; if we didn't have the ceiling fan going, I could probably get away with less frequent watering.

And that's pretty much it. The tricky part, for me, is getting Clivias to bloom: they need cooler temperatures than we have in the house. I may try keeping some of them outside this year so they're properly chilled.

This is not the only process that people have gotten to work; my source reports being able to start them in damp paper towels sometimes, and that some people soak them in water until they germinate though that doesn't seem to work as well. A few people just plant the whole fruit in potting soil without doing anything else, and apparently get seedlings out of that sometimes. My source says that on at least one occasion, she didn't have time to sow the seeds after stripping the membrane off of them, so she put them in the bottom drawer of a refrigerator, in perlite, and forgot about them, and a substantial percentage of those germinated when she checked them later. But I can vouch for the method outlined above, not the others, so it's what I'm recommending.

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¹ Also, if you have problems with getting gross stuff on your hands from time to time, boy are you in the wrong hobby. I'm just saying.
² I've tried perlite and potting soil previously. Perlite doesn't seem to work for me, though some people apparently can use it successfully. They'll germinate in potting soil, but the main obstacle to germination is fungus, so things work out a whole lot better if you use a sterile medium like vermiculite.
³ I'm told it doesn't necessarily hurt anything to rinse the container out with some of the vinegar solution, followed by boiled water, at the beginning of step 5, but I was pretty confident that my container was clean already, so I didn't bother.
⁴ I'm not convinced that the direction of planting makes that much difference, personally, since the roots are bad at burrowing into the vermiculite. What winds up happening is that the seed scoots around on the surface of the vermiculite, or turns itself upside down, or whatever, as the root tries to grow downward but can't penetrate the surface of the vermiculite. I include it anyway because it was in the instructions I got, and I'm not sure it doesn't make a difference, either.
⁵ The light fixtures on the shelving units in the basement are warm enough that I just set my Clivia seeds on the shelves and let the light for the shelf below them provide the heat.
⁶ The roots were 2 or 3 inches long on most of the plants. (I potted them up on 30 March, about 7 weeks after sowing; some of them were probably ready to go after 4 weeks. Compared to Anthurium and Schlumbergera, Clivia seedlings grow very quickly.)
I did use 2.5" pots, but I used my regular potting mix (about 45% composted bark and 40% chopped sphagnum moss), and I fertilize with the Miracle Gro I use on my other plants.
⁷ I did lose a few. A couple were, I think, late germinators that weren't developed enough to pot up yet. I broke the tip off the root of one of them, which either set it back or killed it. (I'm not sure which one of them it is.) A couple got knocked out of place when I watered, buried under the potting soil, and may or may not be able to grow enough to dig themselves out. I'm still going to end up with about 60-65 seedlings, from an initial 77.

Anthurium no. 0929 "Asia Persuasia"

NOTE: this is a reminder that there are Clivia seeds on offer and time is running out quickly.

A little uncomfortable with the name here, but I'm giving Asia the benefit of the doubt that she knows what she's doing. Which she probably does: per this article, she has an MBA and a Masters in Gender Studies, and as of 2015 was pursuing a Ph.D.¹

The flower is less interesting than the queen, alas, and is probably not going to be a keeper. All the blooms so far have had a lot of thrips damage, and the second one was so screwed up that the spathe only partly unfurled.

The leaves are interesting, in that they're longer and narrower than average,

though those have problems with thrips (and Xanthomonas) as well.

So overall, not great, and she's probably gone with the next Anthurium seedling purge, whenever that is. I'll recycle the name, and maybe the second Asia Persuasia will be better.

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¹ Not that being knowledgeable about gender issues necessarily makes you knowledgeable about racial ones, but Asia is, herself, Asian, so it's safe to assume that she's, you know, spent some time thinking about it. If a white queen were performing under this name, I'd have a different reaction.

Clivia seeds available

A reader has sent me a batch of Clivia seeds, more than I can realistically grow out.¹ She also provided instructions for their germination that got me 91% germination, and 88% post-transplant survival.² If you're in the U.S. and have always wanted to try growing Clivias from seed, this is your chance to try it out.

How many seeds you get will depend on how many other people want them (and how many you want to get). If a lot of people are interested, I may have to ask you to cover the cost of postage, but if it's just 1 or 2 readers wanting them, I don't mind mailing them out for free.

Contact me by e-mail (mrsubjunactive@outalook.com, minus the two a's) if interested to get the addresses / quantities / money straightened out. I don't know how long they'll remain viable, and I was hoping to mail them out on Monday or Tuesday (1 or 2 May), so sooner is better than later.

Also if you have cats, you may want to pass. Clivia are toxic to cats. It sounds like fatalities are rare, but I wouldn't be comfortable taking the risk, personally. Clivia are also toxic to dogs, though I didn't find out how toxic until, like, today, and since Sheba's never shown any interest in the Clivias I assume she's not going to suddenly develop any. Decide for yourself how much of a gamble you want to take, but I figured I should say something.

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¹ Because I got a big batch of seeds in February already. I'm good for Clivias for the foreseeable future.
² About half of the first batch, as of 22 April (sown 7 February, so they're about 10 weeks old in the photo):

You were probably expecting to see the germination instructions down here. Sorry. I'll try to get a blog post up about this soonish.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 096

Seedling 096A bloomed relatively late in the season, along with the other plants on the same flat: I moved them all up from the basement last Halloween, which you'd think would be plenty of time to set buds and bloom along with all their brethren, in mid- to late November, but apparently not. Moved them on Halloween, and they all started blooming between about Christmas and mid-January. 096A is notable for its intensity of color

and the number of blooms produced at once. Normally I don't try to get pictures of multiple blooms, because it's tough to find an angle to photograph from, but 096A made that easy:

Many of the early batch of blooms had weird petal edges. Not sure what to call it -- "frilled" sounds more deliberate and regular than I think it was. Maybe "lobed?" "Ragged?" In any case. I don't think the thrips did it, since they normally leave the structure of the petal intact: in this case, the plant appears to have just declined to grow part of the petal. It also hasn't been consistent: some of the blooms have the weird margins,

and some of them don't.

And they are all the same seedling. I checked. But anyway. Should get to the naming before I run out of photos. I came up with: I'm Really Sorry, Tamika Flynn, Wheel Keeps Turning, and You Look Great Today, which seemed like a much stronger set of names before I started writing this post than they do now.

I'm Really Sorry is one of the names intended to honor particular people from my life. I mean, I'm Really Sorry technically could be referring to (almost) anybody I've ever known, but there's a particular person intended here. And it's kind of timely.¹

Tamika Flynn is the character from Welcome to Night Vale, previously considered and rejected for 083A Psychedelic Bunny, 078A Art Party, and 089A Halloween Moon.

Wheel Keeps Turning and You Look Great Today are maybe not exactly self-explanatory, but I don't have any explanation to add.

Of the four, I think I'm least interested in Wheel Keeps Turning, so I'll drop that. And You Look Great Today seems to imply that the plant and/or flowers are going to look great as well, or at least invites the reader to look at the plant with a more critical eye to its appearance, which I suppose can't really be guaranteed.

Which gets us down to I'm Really Sorry or Tamika Flynn, and as much as I like Tamika, the timing of the journal stuff is too much to resist. And anyway I was kind of picturing a Tamika Flynn seedling being more of a magenta or purple. So I'm going with 096A I'm Really Sorry.

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¹ I've mentioned before that I've kept a daily personal journal since 1987. A year or two ago, I started typing the old, handwritten entries (Feb. 1987 to May 2002) into my computer. I then got distracted by other stuff and stopped it, but I resumed in early March. I've transcribed roughly 445,000 words since March so far (for comparison: Moby-Dick is 206,052 words long; The Lord of the Rings is 455,125; War and Peace is 587,287); I expect to finish in August or September 2017 if I keep typing at the same speed.
Presently, the typed journal is 5,257,000ish words long; I estimate that it'll be somewhere between 6.2 and 6.6 million words when complete, plus whatever I wind up writing in the journal between now and whenever I finish transcribing. (6.4 million words is the length of not quite eleven War and Peaces, for reference.) No doubt that sounds like a lot, but remember, this is over 30 years, too: it averages out to like 600 words per day. And 600 words is nothing.
The journal transcription has made life super weird for me lately, in good and bad ways. I'm spending enough time transcribing (about 2.5 hours/day of transcribing, on average, plus contemplating and puzzling over the stuff I've just transcribed) that a substantial part of my life is spent reliving the events of other years: sometimes it feels like I am living simultaneously in, e.g., 1993 and 2017. Which is not all bad, though it's also not all good. I've occasionally been motivated to look up music I haven't thought about in a long time, most perfectly and appropriately Peter Gabriel's "Digging in the Dirt" (1992) --


-- which has been really nice. And sometimes things that were confusing or mysterious at the time are obvious and clear now; it's always satisfying to able to say oh, that's what was going on, even when what was going on was unpleasant or makes me look bad or whatever. Occasionally it leads to new mysteries, things that made sense at the time but are now puzzling; sometimes the other people involved are around to be asked, and sometimes they're not. Some stuff is healing, some stuff reopens old wounds.
Occasionally some delightfully strange thing will show up that I'd forgotten completely about. (Hey, remember that time you were at that bar and that total stranger had a picture of his own surgically-removed testicle in his wallet and he wanted to show it to you and everybody else in the place? Why no, I didn't. Thanks, 1998!) Surprisingly often, I discover that I've been remembering things wrong: trips and conversations that couldn't have happened, people who weren't present, objects I remember belonging to other people that were actually my own, bizarre events that actually did happen but I'd convinced myself were too weird to have been real.
Also it's easy to see how choices that ended up determining the rest of my life barely registered as choices at the time. Stuff like deciding which year to take high school chemistry. Picking a destination for Spring Break 1993 and 1994. Making a phone call. Writing a letter. Discarding cigarette butts in one spot instead of another. (All those were the wrong decision except the first one.) This is actually a little upsetting (particularly the Spring Breaks; never take my advice about where to go for Spring Break. I'm life-threateningly bad at it.), though I suppose there were probably lots of inconsequential-seeming decisions that also saved my ass from catastrophe that I'm not aware of because the catastrophe never happened. For all I know, the only reason I didn't get shot in an IHOP in El Paso in November 1995 is because I skipped all my classes on October 2, 1992. For example.
In any case. The point is that doing a deep dive into your own past is really weird, to the extent that I have trouble even coming up with words to describe how weird it is. And the original point is that the person connected to I'm Really Sorry is on my mind a lot because of what I've been transcribing recently, even if the name's not particularly related to the qualities of this particular seedling.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 077 (again again)

This is another "C" seedling (previously: 058C Consternation), which means I'm not sure if it's a legitimate new seedling or just one of the old seedlings blooming in a different color. 077A Grendel is a pretty dark orange, or at least has been previously, and 077B Bad Reputation is orange-red, so this sure seems plausibly different from either of those. But there's only been one bloom so far, and I only have one photo of that bloom, so it's hard to even make guesses. It looked different enough at the time.

Name candidates: Blended Family, Chop Wood Carry Water, Flickering, and Stowaway.

Blended Family and Stowaway are both references to the seedling sharing the pot with two (?) other seedlings; Flickering both refers to the single brief flower so far and to the color and shape -- orange and pointy like a fire or a candle flame.

Chop Wood Carry Water is from the Zen Buddhist saying, "Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water." As I discovered from searching the net, exactly what this means varies somewhat depending on who you ask, but mostly people seem to read it as meaning that being enlightened doesn't free you from the normal everyday activities of being alive; you don't suddenly wake up in a mystical realm where chopping wood for your stove or bringing water home for drinking and bathing are no longer relevant to you or are no longer your responsibility. In the particular context of this seedling, I'm mostly just making a weak joke about the sameness of the orange-blooming seedlings, but it's also meant to be sort of a reminder to myself that even if the world occasionally feels like it's been turned upside down, certain things have to be done anyway. (It's possible that it's also a reference to the monotony of watering all the plants every day; I don't know.)

In any case. Blended Family and Stowaway are referring to the same situation, but Blended Family is a lot more positive-sounding under the circumstances, so I'll drop Stowaway. And I like Chop Wood Carry Water, but it's long (21 characters), and I'm not even sure there is an 077C to be named; I don't want to waste an otherwise-acceptable name on a seedling that I may not still be using this time next year.

Which leaves Blended Family and Flickering, and I think I prefer Flickering. It'll be especially appropriate if it turns out that 077C doesn't exist. Therefore: 077C Flickering.

Anthurium no. 0813 "Arya Reddy"

Not much to say about Arya (but keep reading anyway, 'cause at the end I'll talk about a different, more interesting seedling). Her seed parent was 0234 Ross Koz (red-purple spathe, yellow spadix). I understand that the pollen parent is contributing genes too, and therefore I shouldn't expect the seedlings of a given plant to all look the same, but it still surprises me to get this

out of this:

0234 Ross Koz.
I wish stuff like that would happen more often with the Schlumbergeras.

This spathe color is similar to 'Orange Hot,' though a bit lighter. Presumably that's where the color comes from; I've seen it in several other seedlings by now. Though I think Arya is unique in having a matching spadix; all the other peachy-orangey-pink spathes have come with yellow or light yellow spadices.

Arya starts out more orange than pink

and finishes more pink than orange.

Also you can see the thrips really like her. The leaves are nice, though: large and mostly unblemished.

And she seems to be suckering okay.

So I'll probably keep Arya a while longer, as long as she doesn't develop new problems on top of the thrips.

The other seedling I want to talk about is 1299 Sinthia D Meanor, which fell apart just before opening a first bloom. Since I'd teased you earlier with talk about Sinthia doing a new bloom color, and since the bud got far enough along to be able to tell what color it was going to be, I figured I should go ahead and reveal it even if I don't have an actual full bloom to show. Here's Sinthia:

In person, that's a sort of muddy tan-yellow, a little closer to the second photo than the first. The spathe uncurled enough before dying that I could see a tiny sliver of the spadix; what I could see was light yellow.

So it appears that it's possible to get to a yellow(ish) spathe through breeding alone, presumably a combination of a very light green pigment (which came from the seed parent, the NOID red) with a very light orange pigment from one of the oranges. Averaged out, that would yield the muddy tan-yellow we see here.

Obviously I would rather have an actual open bloom to show you, but since it looks like it's going to be a while before Sinthia tries again, I figured I may as well show you what had happened so far, since it's pretty interesting news either way (if you're the sort of person who finds unattractive but unusual spathe colors interesting).