Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

I don't post pictures of her that often, mostly out of embarrassment at how water-spotted her walls have gotten, but Nina is still here, and is doing as well as she ever was, as far as I can tell. The Pellionia has more or less taken over the tank, being more drought-tolerant than the Fittonia (though the Fittonia is still in there, which is good, because the cuttings I tried to take have failed,

The Cyclamen has in fact been successfully rebloomed. (It even has more blooms on it than it did when I bought it!) So it can be done. The plant still makes me kind of nervous -- I'm afraid that at any moment it's going to fall to pieces and I won't know why -- but I never expected to get this far with it, so I'm feeling a sort of anxious pride about this. Not that I ever feel any other kind of

A reader e-mailed me to ask about a Dieffenbachia problem, which turned out to be something I hadn't seen before. Neither Google nor my books helped, and the few theories I came up with are mostly not borne out by the facts of the case, so I'm hoping someone out there has experience with this and can at least provide an ID, if not tell the person how to fix whatever it is.The most alarming

This whole week's posts, with the possible exceptions of Friday's and Saturday's, are all being written last Saturday, on 23 July, because I am hopeful that if I have a whole week to work on it without being sidelined by other blog posts, I might actually get the Ficus elastica post done by Friday. (UPDATE: I didn't. But it's up now.) (I still haven't figured out how to juggle the blog,

My Pachypodium lamerei (which I've been thinking was a P. geayi for years, but apparently not) has responded well to the fertilizer this spring. It's retained its leaves longer, and put on more vertical growth, than in previous years. The leaf tips still scorch, which I'm thinking is probably a signal that it's too hot or too dry (?), but aside from that, it looks pretty healthy and happy. I

Two years ago, when we moved into the house, I bought some Tagetes patula 'Durango Bee' plants along, which performed nicely and which I enjoyed. At the end of the season, I went out and collected a bunch of seeds, intending to plant them the next year and see what happened, and then last summer I didn't wind up planting anything anywhere, for what were no doubt noble and logical reasons, so the

I first noticed flower buds coming up on the Cannas last week, which surprised me: I wasn't expecting them so early. Yesterday, I saw the first open flower, too.The reader may recall that I had started a bunch of Cannas from seeds; these are not them. The seedlings never made it out of the basement, because I couldn't come up with a good place to plant them in the yard. It was easy enough, though

The possible primrose (Oenothera sp.) has started to flower, and is confirmed as a primrose. There may be some question about the species still, but O. biennis, the common evening primrose, looks enough like this that to make it the leading candidate as far as I'm concerned.As to why it grew with multiple shoots, instead of the single upright stem that's (I gather) more typical of the species, I

(Why this plant? See the Euphorbia bougheyi variegata profile.)

This week, I remembered that Iowa City has a library. More accurately, I remembered that the library has books. (We'd been using it for DVDs occasionally already.) So I checked the website, gave the husband a list (like I'm going to go out in a car with no air conditioning when the heat index is 114F/46C, get real), and have been happily reading things since. The point in mentioning this is that

It's still way too hot out, but the situation is improving. Maybe not so much for those of you on the East Coast of the U.S. I like this Paphiopedilum a lot. I mean, it's no St. Swithin, but it's pretty nice.

Kind of a hopeful title, above -- I know this'll work for Anthurium, but I'm having to take the word of the internet for the Schlumbergera parts. But it'll probably work, and even if it doesn't, I'll give you an excuse to eat cupcakes, so really you'd be a fool not to try, right? So. First you need to get some fruits, to take the seeds from. With Schlumbergera, that's relatively straightforward

Source: National Weather Service.

The good news is that the Abutilon seedling I wrote about last week, the one with the flower buds, has opened one of the buds, so the question that's been on everyone's lips for the last year -- What color will the seedlings turn out to be? -- can be answered. I was expecting pink, since the only candidates for ancestry were white, pink, or red-flowerers, but instead, I was pleasantly surprised

The intent here was to get a picture of her running, but obviously that didn't exactly happen. I like Abstract Sheba, though, so that's what's up this week. Like it or don't.This week's been kind of rough on me; I couldn't get to sleep on Monday night, so I didn't go to sleep at all, just stayed up all day Tuesday. This was great, in that I got a lot of urgently-needed picture sorting done, but

The more I think about the Crassula ovata problem I mentioned on Wednesday, the more I'm thinking that even if it's possible to save the plant, I don't necessarily want to. It's not as though I don't have plenty of its offspring, and it's never been exceptionally beautiful or anything. I mean, I still want to know what's going on, so I can do something if it begins to happen again, but saving

One of my favorite photos from last year was of this same variety of Vanda. Indeed, since both photos were taken at the Quad Cities Orchid Show on consecutive years, there's a good chance it was even the same individual plant. I don't know that either of these photos are better than the one from 2010 -- part of the pleasure of the 2010 photo was the surprise at how well it had turned out -- but

I am beginning to think that maybe the entire Crassula genus is just not for me. First there was all that business with C. rupestris and C. muscosa, and my C. arborescens is acting weird lately (dropping leaves, not growing), and now the parent C. ovata from which all my other C. ovatas come is being strange. There are two things going on, one I think I understand and one I don't. The one I think

"Pink" is a tougher color to define than most, because it shades into a lot of other colors. Differentiating between "pink" and "lavender," "coral," or "red" can be tough sometimes. And then there are the problems with whether "fuchsia" is pink or purple or its own color entirely, and so on. You get the picture. Didn't have these sorts of problems with the yellow-flowers list or the

The Abutilon seedlings I started almost a year ago are finally big enough to be thinking about blooming. Odds are the flowers are going to be pink, since the only possibilities for parentage flower red, pink, or white, but it's kind of exciting anyway. It's at least been a long time coming.

Nothing particularly interesting here. Sheba's a little freaked-out by fireworks, but we already knew that from last year. Nina got a new cricket delivery (though I have no idea how she's going to find/catch them -- I still haven't cut back the Pellionia). Same as it ever was.Possibly of interest to the readership: I ran into an article at skeptifem this week that I thought was interesting, in

It looks like the whole Cyclamen experiment is going to be at least technically successful -- as you can see, all indications are that I'm going to have a rebloom at some point in the next few weeks. I suspect that the story would be different if I hadn't brought the plant downstairs and put it under the shop lights. In other news, I found a short article in the Iowa City paper about the guy who

Ack. Running late again. Here's a couple orchid pictures.

I tried to come up with something else for this post. The Pilea mollis (?) 'Moon Valley' in my office is blooming, and if you get them wet and then put them back into bright light, the flowers will release little puffs of pollen for about fifteen or twenty minutes afterwards. I vaguely recall reading something attributing this to the change in humidity levels. (Other Pileas do this too. P.

This is not my own plant; it was at the ex-job about three weeks ago. I like A. fasciata just fine as a foliage plant, but I have to admit, the inflorescences are pretty spectacular.

I had three Aglaonema varieties ('Gold Dust,' 'Maria,' 'Silver Queen') all flowering at once a few months ago, so I got out the old paintbrush and tried cross-pollinating. It wasn't that I expected anything terribly useful to come of it, but that was during the period when I was trying to cross everything I had, and there were flowers, so I figured why not try. Most of the flowers have

Yesterday, a man almost died in the street directly in front of our house. Not even exaggerating. The husband and I had just sat down to dinner, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the power/cable/whatever lines to the house jerking around wildly. So I got up and looked out the front window, and saw a telephone pole lying in the street, with an unmoving man. On closer inspection, the

Welcome to Berry-Go-Round #41, to be known in the future as "The Formal Dinner BGR." Everybody look for the place setting with your name on it and be seated. I'll warn the reader immediately that there are a lot of links here, and I doubt that anybody's going to be able to look at them all in one sitting: I'm using an eight-course dinner metaphor very deliberately. So brace yourself. WineI'd like