Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

Not the greatest picture (the camera has trouble with fluorescent lighting, no matter what color setting I use), but it's definitely a flower bud. This plant had flowers on it when it first got here, in May, but I haven't seen any since then, so this is pleasant. The plant's been behaving a bit strangely since May: the leaf color has changed (they started out green with dark gray/brown veins, and

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

I had planned to skip posting today, but then I ran into . . . this. And I, well, didn't quite know what to do with it, actually, but I'm pretty much convinced that it's my new favorite song. It's stuff like this that makes me think humans might be worthwhile after all.Also it makes me want to get a porcupine so I can name him "Zazoom."Possibly mildly NSFW due to toilet humor, language (barely),

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

I got cuttings of A. radicans via trade from a reader in May, some of which I planted as cuttings and some of which I planted as leaves. I posted about the leaves a couple weeks ago, but now the cuttings are doing something too -- they're going to bloom. I wasn't expecting that yet, since I'd started them so recently. The A. longicaulis is also getting ready to bloom, which is less of a surprise

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

Another unruffled Cattleya. Even less ruffled than the last one, in fact. Somewhat scrambling for time again today, so I'll just point you to this page for more information on the species. Officially, the name has been changed to Guarianthe aurantiaca, but if you want to pretend that you didn't read that, I wouldn't blame you.Developing an Orchid Collection with Backbulbs has a page on C.

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

As I write this (Sunday morning), there's a post on Garden Web's House Plants forum titled "Mum, can I prune them back?"I haven't been logged into GW in a very long time, but I have been sorely tempted to do so just to leave the comment, "No, it's 'Mother, may I prune them back?'"The actual question involves the appropriateness of cutting back an indoor Chrysanthemum1 because the center of the

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

I took these photos in April, and by now everybody's already blogged about how they do or don't like them, and quite a few people don't approve of Petunias under any circumstances, so nobody's going to care about this post, but it's late on Saturday night and I don't have a post yet and this was the best I could do, so.I think I have to come down on the side of not liking them. One of the

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

As you might imagine, my week was mostly consumed with the beginnings of the RATJ. Had I known what a crazy huge amount of work it was going to be,1 I would probably have tried to get it all lined up before announcing that it was going to happen, but oh well. The first round, all sixteen days' worth of it, has been written and scheduled, so now it's just a matter of waiting to see the results

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

I found these berries growing in an alley next to somebody's shed or garage or something last year at around this time (1 October) and thought they were sort of neat, so I took pictures, but then I didn't post the pictures because I didn't know what they were. I checked Wikipedia recently, and based on that, I'm pretty sure about the genus (Solanum), but there are quite a few possibilities for

Rules and Stuff1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants,

Another orchid picture that wasn't taken at the orchid show in March; this was for sale at the ex-job. (That happened to be in March also.) I don't know if they didn't have it identified or if I just didn't bother to get the ID, but I like it. It's not that it's a cattleya type, though I do like those, and it's not that it's pink, though that doesn't hurt it either. I think the main thing it's

I bought my E. trigona 'Red' two and a half years ago, a little before leaving the garden center job. It survived fine and was willing to grow for me, but it didn't produce any branches, on any of the five stems in the pot, for the first two years I had it. This seemed especially strange because the green version of the same plant was branching a lot. So this spring, I divided the five stems into

I'd guess I. violacea, but I'm not sure. Wikiposedly there are some 500 Ipomoeas, and I don't have any idea how many of those are common enough that they might have wound up in the cornfield behind the house. I. violacea seems like a reasonable guess, from what I see while googling. The cornfield is also home to a couple Helianthus sp. (possibly H. tuberosus?), though those are a lot harder to

Here are the 128 plants who will be competing in the Rumble Among the Jungle. I regret that I was unable to include everybody's suggestions (really I do), but I included some. (A lot of which ones made it and which didn't had to do with photo availability.) I've already decided the matchups, so at this point all we're waiting for is 1) the creation and posting of the actual polls and 2) some

My two biggest Cereus peruvianus have not been well-treated lately. They're just too big to fit anywhere in the house except the spot right by the plant room door, and even that isn't going to be working much longer:At which point I intend to follow Cactus Blog's directions for cutting back a cactus, and hopefully that will work out for everybody and then I'll have three cacti I can mistreat.But

Okay. Well. That was something. I'll be spending some time in the next few days trying to decide what plants to drop from the competition (if I'm just unable to cut it down to 128, I'll add another round of competition and give most of the contestants byes for that round, until we arrive at 128 -- it's maybe not fair to the plants that have one more match than the others, but if it's the best we

UPDATE: Nominations are now closed. I appreciate everybody's input. The list of contestants will be revealed tomorrow afternoon; I expect voting to begin in the middle of next week but can't promise anything yet. I had an idea a long, long time ago. The idea was that I wanted to pit houseplants against one another in a single-elimination tournament to determine which was the "best," with "best"

I just really like lady-slipper orchids, I guess. Or at least this year I do. If only I could, you know, grow them.Hanne Popow is a cross of Phrag. besseae and Phrag. schlimii, and is apparently a really popular phrag, because Google finds people talking about it all over the place. As frustrating as my experiences with Paphiopedilum have been, it sounds like Phragmipediums are even worse; the

It takes a while, granted, but one can propagate Aeschynanthus from individual leaves. My A. speciosus was originally from individual leaves we propagated long ago at work, and I have at least one A. radicans leaf that's rooted and producing new growth now too, so I'm thinking maybe it's a general characteristic of the genus. This particular leaf didn't even take that long (about 3 1/2 months),

Had a minor Nina-related scare on Monday morning: I'd collected some crickets for Nina while outside with Sheba, because they're all just hanging around out there in the back yard and why not,1 but then when I went to dump them into her terrarium, Nina was nowhere to be found. Which is unusual, early in the day -- she's almost always out in the open, "sunning" herself. So I rattled the plants

My huge green Cordyline fruticosa should have died this summer. I got fed up with it last winter -- no matter how far from all the other plants, no matter how careful I am to wash down the leaves when watering, no matter how cool and moist the environment, it still always gets spider mites, every winter, and I've gotten sick of dealing with them. So this spring, I put it outside. The goal wasn't

Actually somewhat less diva-ish than I would have expected from Madonna. Maybe she's mellowing. (Plus I think she's also turning into Romy, from Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion -- check out the way she pronounces "loathe.")(Via)

So I've had this Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold' for a long time now (since August 2008), and I like it. It's never flowered, but that's okay: I like it well enough as a foliage plant. I mean, I'm a little disappointed, sure, because it had flowers when I bought it, and they lasted about five minutes once I got it home so I never had a chance to get a halfway decent photograph of them and now I've

I don't think I like Epidendrums, when it comes right down to it. I mean, I try, and sometimes I think, oh, that's a nice color combination or whatever, but they just don't do it for me. Give me a few large flowers (Paphiopedilum, Cattleya) instead of a huge cloud of tiny flowers (Oncidium, Epidendrum) any day. Not saying you have to agree. Just personal preference. I'd make an exception for

I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've had an Agave offset for me indoors. One of the A. victoriae-reginaes has lots of offsets, but I think they were all present when I first got the plant, so I don't get credit for them. But this one is definitely new, and definitely all happened while the plant was in the house. It's inconvenient timing: the A. lophanthas are close enough to one another

Found this when I went looking for music in 5/4 time. (Why was I looking for music in 5/4 time, you might ask? I don't remember.) It had somehow never occurred to me that "Fifteen Steps" (the Radiohead contribution) might feel odd and jerky because it was in an unusual time signature, or that "Take Five" might be so named because of its unusual time signature (also 5/4). But then, there are

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week were unusually productive for me. Plants got watered, posts got written, trips were taken, I caught up on e-mail, I sorted pictures, I had time and energy to deal with everything. Since then . . . not so much. Like, I spent several hours yesterday trying to write a post about Sedum kamtschaticum and not being happy with anything I wrote, and then at

It's been a busy week for all of us.

The husband and I went to see the rabbits on Tuesday. Mostly the trip was disappointing -- I really only saw a handful of plants I was at all interested in buying, and couldn't afford the one below, which is the one I wanted the most. I know it doesn't look like much. It's mostly interesting because of who it is, not what it looks like. Can you guess the species? I'll give you one hint: it's

Readers have alerted me to two more errors on PATSP, having to do with one of the profile posts and one misidentified plant. Then I ran into another thing all on my own, where something in one of the profiles needed a bit of clarification. So here we are again. 1. Ficus elastica and isoprene In the Ficus elastica profile, I sort of implied that the people making natural rubber extract isoprene