Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

It is with a little sadness that I announce the passing of Nina, everybody's favorite brown anole.

Nina. 2009? - 2013. (Photo from 8 Dec 2010.)
I say "a little" sadness, as opposed to great sadness, or unbearable sadness, because it's not like I have a ton of happy memories of running through flower-filled meadows with her or anything. (Though we did have that one moment in the bathtub.) You only get so much affection from an anole, and I don't think she ever got comfortable with seeing me, so our emotional connection was always a little fraught.

Also it wasn't like I didn't see this coming, a long time ago. In the wild, allegedly, Anolis sagrei has a lifespan of about 1.5 years, and Nina was at least 4.3 years old when she died. I mean, her death is still a change and everything, but it's hard to see it as being particularly tragic if she was like 200 years old in anole years. Hopefully the time she spent here was better (if, perhaps, a bit less free) than she would have gotten had she stayed in Florida with Felipe. It was certainly better than it would have been had she stayed in the ex-job's greenhouse and been poisoned to death by pesticides, or if she'd escaped the greenhouse and then froze to death seven months later.

Probably not going to get a replacement. (See above re: you only get so much affection.) I mean, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with keeping another anole, but it wasn't like I had a burning desire to have one when I got Nina; she just kind of happened. So if the ex-job calls me up and asks me if I want another one, sure, but that's not something that's likely to happen.

Random plant event: Schlumbergera seedling #49

I have just over 100 Schlumbergera seedlings growing right now, and for the most part, they look just like their parents, except smaller. Also, most of those are seedlings from 'Caribbean Dancer,' which isn't really surprising, since 'Caribbean Dancer' is the most prolific bloomer.

There is also a set of 16 seedlings from a NOID with salmon/peach blooms. A few of those are also normal-looking, but the majority are very slow-growing, and appear stunted somehow. A couple seedlings have a normal number of segments, but the segments are all tiny (1/4 the size of normal ones), or they're ridiculously overbranched (like, one segment with fifteen segments growing off of it), or there are only three segments and they're all long and thin. Stuff like that.

#49,¹ though, is the oddest of the odd.

It seems to be growing, if very slowly, but the segments are long and narrow and sort of . . . I want to say "crimped," (?) along the edges. It seems weak, and I doubt that it's going to survive to blooming size, but I'm very curious about whether this is something it's going to grow out of at some point, or whether the flowers are going to be similarly malformed, or what.

As a side note, if any U.S. readers are interested in starting their own small army of Schlumbergeras or Columnea orientandinas from seed, I have several ripe fruits of both² that I need to do something with relatively soon, so send me an e-mail and I can probably mail you your very own seeds to germinate and be overwhelmed by.

-

¹ (I'm not naming the Schlumbergeras like I have been with the Anthuriums; I probably ought to be, I suppose, but I'm not as emotionally invested in the Schlumbergeras.
² (The Schlumbergeras would be fruit from 'Caribbean Dancer,' since I have plenty of those seedlings already.)

Pretty pictures: Tolumnia Passionata Red

If this looks like an Oncidium, that's because it used to be: the genus Tolumnia was apparently separated from Oncidium about 25 years ago. They're native to the Caribbean.

Tolumnia hybrids are a relatively new thing (last 50 years or so), according to the American Orchid Society, which also has lots of advice about how to grow them.


Tolumnia Passionata Red is Tolumnia Florence Little x Tolumnia Breezy.

Materials and Techniques: Propagating Cyperus alternifolius

I mentioned a while ago that I'd been seeing Cyperus for sale here and there, and had been tempted to get one. A number of commenters encouraged me to do so, and then a reader offered me cuttings of hers. I hadn't even known that growing them from cuttings was possible.

Also, fortunately, it turned out that the reader who offered the cuttings had already written a blog post about how to proceed, so I didn't even have to search the net to get instructions.

I goofed here: I should have taken a picture of the cuttings outside of the water, cut the stems, then taken a second picture of the cuttings in the water. Forgive me; I was excited. The cuttings are upside down, relative to the direction they were originally growing.

The above picture was taken on 3 June. The jar then sat to the side of the kitchen window, where the cuttings got mostly bright indirect light with a little weak late afternoon sun.

By 19 June, two of the three cuttings had produced new sprouts and roots from between the leaves. I then pulled them out of the water, cut off most of the leaves (I left about 3/8 inch / 1 cm on; it was impossible to cut very precisely without catching the new shoots and roots as well, and I figured it probably wouldn't matter if part of the leaves was still attached.), and planted them in potting mix. Molly planted hers right side up, the direction they were growing to begin with, and I left mine upside down: it turns out not to make a difference.

Growth has felt slower than I'd expected, especially considering how quickly the cuttings started to produce roots and growing tips. The whole process has actually moved pretty quickly, considering that I went from cuttings to plants in a month: I'm just impatient.

This is what they looked like yesterday. Surprisingly easy so far; I've kept them in a saucer of water by the kitchen sink, so I remember to check to see if they need water. I expect that will become more challenging once their root systems expand a bit, but everything's worked fine with these two for the first month.

The third cutting has still not produced new shoots or roots or anything; the only notable difference between it and the other two is that it had been flowering when cut off. That may or may not be the reason why it hasn't done anything. In some ways, I don't really care whether or not it roots, since I already have two plants and I didn't, technically, have room for them, but I've kept it anyway just to satisfy my curiosity about whether it ever will. (Thank you again, Molly.)

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

This picture is from last Sunday (30 June). We were coming back from a trip to Fairfield, and stopped just north of Brighton, in a public area for people to launch their boats into the Skunk River. There's a former bar (now apparently a house) along the road to the launch site, and a dog who lives there saw Sheba go by in the car and followed so she could introduce herself.

Pretty picture: Jackfowlieara Lindiwe

Jackfowlieara Lindiwe is Cattleya Sierra Doll x Jackfowlieara Appleblossom.

Pretty picture: Echinacea NOID

Things have been really busy for the last few days, Sunday in particular, so there isn't much to blog about, and what there is isn't anywhere close to being ready to post.

I'm not thrilled about the situation, but things are what they are. Meanwhile, the Echinaceas are blooming. Not our Echinaceas: we don't have any. But everybody else's. You know what I mean.

Flies in (and out of) Drag

Because of the recent and ongoing ruckus about honeybees and colony collapse disorder, I've been watching carefully for honeybees on the various flowering plants we've got outside this year. So far, not a one, though that might just mean we're not growing anything they find appealing.

There are plenty of other insects to look at, though. A few are even bees. They're just not honeybees.

Is there any plant that looks more like fireworks than dill does?
We sowed some dill seeds this year, because I was hoping to get swallowtail caterpillars and/or butterflies (also I just really like dill pickles, so now I can smell them all the time). Nothing so far, but I don't have much of a grasp of when swallowtail butterflies are supposed to be in Iowa in the first place.

What's appreciating the dill instead are mostly green bottle flies (Lucilia sericata). Which I suppose I don't mind, since nobody else was using it, and bottle flies do have their positive qualities, but this was hardly the original plan.

I should probably also note that we've used the dill once, in cooking. Turns out that there is in fact such a thing as too much dill.

The cilantro (Coriandrum sativum) that came with the house keeps popping up here and there; it's gotten moved at least two times so far, but every year, enough seeds manage to survive to keep the population going. We haven't done any cooking with it, despite having had it around for four years: I'm not particularly a fan (though I can understand why people could be), and really my main interest in it is visual: the clouds of little white flowers appeal to me.

"Morning, Ralph."
"Morning, Sam."
They're apparently also appealing to ants. I really like that picture. Something about their posture, or something.

Flies are also really fond of the Coriandrum flowers. I don't know what species this is, but they are everywhere this year. I see them all the time on the marigolds and Portulacas as well. I don't know the ID; I haven't even been able to come up with a general ballpark guess on an ID. They're flies of some kind, and that's as much as I can tell you.

Sometimes, I don't even know that the insects are there, when I take the picture. Like, I didn't see this until I uploaded the pictures to my computer:

Oh, what a nice picture of a flower OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT FUCKING THING GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY.
After some searching on-line, I've tentatively identified this as the larva of Coleomagilla maculata, the spotted lady beetle. This could be better news: C. maculata is allegedly capable of surviving almost entirely on pollen, so it's not necessarily helping me out that much with insect pests. Not that I've seen much in the way of insect pests this year. (A few whiteflies. No pictures of those yet.)

OTHER WAY! GO THE OTHER WAY!
There is at least one actual bee so far this year; I don't know which one it is. (I tried looking it up, but there are so many tiny bees in Iowa that I didn't even know where to start.)

They're not very picky, whatever they are. I think this is the same species, on Tagetes:

And maybe again on a dandelion:

But the insect I started this post to talk about is this last one.

Because it looked enough like a honeybee at first glance, I initially got excited about this, but the longer I looked, the more it seemed . . . not quite right. Once I'd uploaded the pictures to the computer, and had a chance to look around a bit, I concluded that, whatever it might be, it was definitely not a bee -- no pollen baskets on the legs, only one pair of wings, stubby antennae, huge eyes, and it didn't seem nearly fuzzy enough to be a bee.

After some research, I think the genus is probably Eristalis (hoverflies, drone flies). One of the more likely candidates for the species is E. tenax. Which seemed fine, until I read the Wikipedia entry for E. tenax. Now that I have, I'm kind of retroactively grossed out by it: I could have been perfectly happy not knowing that there was such a thing as a "rat-tailed maggot." No wonder it wants to dress up as something else.