Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

Still waiting to see anything new above ground from the Selenicereus cuttings I started last spring, but the Epiphyllum cutting I received by trade in mid-May is suddenly sprouting all over. (Perhaps the Selenicereus would prefer to have an actual potting mix of some kind, instead of just the vermiculite? I'm pretty sure there are roots in there. Maybe I should do that. . . .) Epiphyllums are

Okay, well. As promised when I posted about my newer plants last Wednesday, these are the plants I didn't buy. As a group, they're probably more interesting than the ones I actually bought, but I have my reasons for not buying them. The first three, two succulents and a cactus which happened to get my attention, were at Lowe's. Euphorbia polygona cv. 'Snowflake.' I would have bought this in a

Nina had a pretty eventful week this week, in that I have finally cleaned up her terarrium. I removed the Stromanthe burle-marxii, which had grown from a single 4-inch (10 cm) tall baby to a monster with eight clumps of leaves that was taking over two-thirds of the tank, divided it, and potted it up into four pots:And then I replanted that part of the terrarium with a Peperomia caperata and some

The pictures that come up for Laeliocattleya Rojo look an awful lot like this (example), and that same page also lists the parentage of Laeliocattleya Rojo as Cattleya aurantiaca x Laelia milleri. So this is supposedly (Cattleya aurantiaca x Laelia milleri) x Cattleya aurantiaca. I get why one might want to recross with one of the parent species, in general, but I'm confused about why one would

This poor little Cereus peruvianus. I don't know what its story was originally; all I know is that it had been cut back at some point before I started working in the garden center (August 2007). I've never seen the plant fully intact; I don't know how it came to be cut back, or how long ago. Still, though, I'd seen advice to cut the tops off of plants as a way to propagate them, or when they get

I guess it's been a while since I did one of these posts. I haven't been doing that much plant-buying lately, I thought, but I seem to have a lot of "new" plants anyway. (Some of these have been around for a month and a half, so they're not exactly "new," but they're still new, in that I have not previously mentioned them on the blog.)Gasteria bicolor var. lilliputiana.The florist in town also

Why orange? I don't know. Why not orange? I like orange, in plants anyway. Not so crazy about it for curtains or appliances and so forth. Van Gogh is said to have called orange "the color of insanity" (and he would know); a few little dots of insanity here and there is good. Large, uninterrupted fields of insanity is more problematic, though. Very few of these plants have flowers which are

Finally, the two Hibiscuses I bought last summer, and overwintered in the basement at considerable emotional cost, have gotten it together to bloom. While I've posted pictures of both of these before, at one time or another, I'm going to do it again, partly because I was beginning to think, after roughly eight bloomless months, that this was never going to happen again. As you can see below, one

I didn't get variety names for either of these, so I don't know what species or cultivar they are. You know how it is. They're still pretty either way.It's occurred to me that most (all?) of the plant books I read as a kid, if they mentioned Passiflora, they would go into the whole thing about how the flower is emblematic of the crucifixion of Jesus. As Wikipedia puts it (in somewhat more detail

Rearrange the letters in the following to spell the names of houseplant genera. Some of the genera in question are more obscure than others, but twelve (or thirteen, depending on how you count one) of them have been the subject of plant profiles before, which narrows things down somewhat. The others have all been mentioned here on multiple occasions.Answers at the end of the post (highlight to

No! I won't clean my room!

Not very different from the other Paphiopedilums I've seen, as far as shape and proportions go. The yellowish color is interesting, though. I like the look of paphs, but my personal experiences with them so far have been disappointing. My Paphiopedilum is still alive, and grows, but it's smaller than it used to be: all but two of the original big, mottled leaves have died, and in their place the

I know. We've done this already. Very recently, in fact. But hey, can I help it that suddenly all the flowers are blue lately? Commelina communis. Very pleased with how this photo turned out. The new camera has a tendency to de-saturate the color; things often look washed-out and dull, especially after they've been uploaded to the blog. I can pump up the color saturation if need be, but that

Nothing super-special about toads. I like seeing them around, I think they're sort of neat, but by this point in my life, few toads or toad-related phenomena surprise me. Adult toad, just passing through the yard. Photo is from a couple months ago.However. Sheba scared the tiny little guy below out of the grass onto the street on a walk earlier this week, and s/he held still while I took a

I've yet to try growing an Anacampseros rufescens; they're not available very often, and so far when I've seen one for sale, there were more interesting plants to be bought, or it had bugs, or the price was bad. It's not an urgent, must-acquire plant for me anyway: it looks like one of those succulents for which no amount of light is going to be enough (like Pachyphytum, or some of the Euphorbias

About 25% of my blog hits have just . . . evaporated since May. This hasn't happened in previous summers. Christmases, yes (last Christmas there was a 30% drop, for about a week), but not summers. And it's not like it was a sudden drop because of the 4th of July holiday, where it'll rebound again quickly: it's been a slow, steady, increasingly alarming decline, spread out over eight months weeks.

Well, it's finally happened: the dark purple Neoregelia I bought in August 2008 (the one with the scale problem) has decided to bloom. This is sort of bittersweet. Though it's nice that the plant's growing up, it also means that we're going to see its long, slow decline and death over the next year or two. Yes, it will produce offsets before it goes, but my track record with rooting Neoregelia

This post might be a little premature, but even if we're not quite at the endpoint yet, enough has happened that I think a post can be built around it. So here we go. I decided a while ago that I wanted to propagate some of my Selenicereus chrysocardium cuttings, both as insurance against a potential Selenicereus disaster and also to have on hand to trade or sell, should the situation arise. I

I was told a couple weeks ago that some of Dad's side of the family (though not Dad himself) had recently rented a local campgrounds for a week-long family get-together. They're more scattered around the country than they used to be, which has made organizing family events more difficult, though they used to do this all the time. Some families in this situation might give up on getting together

I think the one on the right is some kind of caudex-forming succulent, maybe a Pachypodium or Adenium or something. The one on the left looks like nothing I've ever seen. (Via the blog Houseplants.)Bonus video: Olivia teaches Big Bird about the slow growth rate of Peperomia obtusifolia.

What's wrong with this picture?survey software

About a month ago, I took the Cycas revoluta off the shelf to water and it was doing this:My guess is that it's a nutrient deficiency, probably of iron, magnesium, or nitrogen. I did spray it with an iron-containing trace-nutrient spray, and the parts that were still green appeared to have gotten greener. That doesn't necessarily mean that the iron fixed the problem (it's at least as likely that