Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

Weird times. The plant collection is at once thriving in previously unprecedented ways and going completely to hell, which I guess is something that can happen once a collection reaches a certain size. Sort of like how Texas can be a disaster area due to flood and drought simultaneously. On the one hand, I've been finding scale infestations all over the house, including on some very special

With bonus background Midwesterners! Phragmipedium Noirmont = Phragmipedium Memoria Dick Clements x Phragmipedium longifolium

No big Sheba news. No little Sheba news either, as far as that goes. Unrelated: I noticed yesterday morning when I was out with Sheba that we had a volunteer Petunia in one of the beds (the one that never got weeded or watered and was full of whiteflies for the last month and a half of the summer because I am a bad outdoor gardener and because whiteflies like Cannas). I like Petunias quite a

Various recent plant- and fungus-related events: 1. Stapelia gigantea Everybody else has been posting Stapelia pictures for the last month or so, but my plants have lagged behind for some reason: everybody else was posting flowers when I was just beginning to see buds. So far, two flowers have opened, and there are another four or five left to go. As to the smell: I can't detect any just

It kind of bugs me when people name non-red things "cherry" something. Not bothered a lot, but it does seem sort of exceptionally wrong. I can't tell whether these pictures turned out well; I'm still getting used to having an LCD monitor. From some angles they look washed-out, and from other angles they don't. In either case, they do an admirable job of matching the blog's current color scheme,

Hi again. Efforts to bring the outdoor plants back indoors have kind of stalled; out of about 130-140 that were outside at the peak of summer, I've managed to find spaces for all but about 30-40 of those, mostly Agaves that may or may not have scale. So that's kind of both good and bad. And the scale situation inside the house hasn't really improved either; it's still confined to certain spots,

And now for something way less pretty than Thursday's Ananas post. Which is not to say it's ugly, exactly. As Anthurium spadices go, the color is an interesting choice. There are more ornamental Anthurium hybrids with purple spadices -- my NOID purple-blooming plant has them -- but in those cases, the spathe is also purple, and there's an overall purple thing happening. With A. "hookeri,"1 only

September 2013. I've had Ananas 'Mongo'1 since November 2008, when we got some in at the ex-job. This is long enough ago that I don't remember much about the event, but I blogged about it at the time, so you can read that if you're interested. It's grown pretty reliably ever since, and this year I put it outside for the summer. This was at least partly because it had gotten so big, and I wanted

I didn't exactly intend to go for two days without posting, but what's happened is that my brother took advantage of a we're-so-sorry-we-screwed-up-everything-associated-with-the-SimCity5-launch-so-terribly offer from game publisher Electronic Arts (EA), wherein they were selling a bundle of five games very cheaply (I want to say $5 but am too lazy to check on this), and then he gave me the

I had planned on taking a new Sheba picture to post today, but then it rained all morning yesterday, making that difficult. So instead you get a photo from August 2010, not terribly long after we first got her (in March 2010). Sheba's been fine as far as I can tell, though her latest thing is dandruff. Terrible, terrible dandruff, from like her rib cage on back to her tail. (Though I doubt it

It is really happening, y'all. The Anthurium seedlings are actually blooming! And a full 1-3 years ahead of schedule, even! Previously, I reported that seedlings #59 ("Bijoux Tuit"1) and #282 ("Dave Trading") had produced their first blooms; now things are beginning to accelerate a bit. So here's the report. #59 - Bijoux TuitMother:2 'Gemini'Date started: 1 February 2012 Bijoux is taking her3

Second post about this particular species of orchid (the first is here). It's not photographing any better or getting any more interesting, though in this year's picture you can see more of the plant, so I guess that's something. Also, unless there's been some huge change since Sunday morning, it looks like Stromanthe sanguinea is the next profile subject. (I suspect someone voted repeatedly,