Saturday, February 5, 2011

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture




Friday, February 4, 2011

Pretty picture: Anthurium 'Gemini' flower





Thursday, February 3, 2011

Book Review: Soil Mates, by Sara Alway















1 (Sorry, rest of the world.)
4 E.g.:
7 Which is to say most of them.
8 Perhaps in the sequel? Sara Alway: call me.
  • "moc.loa@evitcnujbusrm" backwards,
  • "zefhowhapgvir@nby.pbz" in Rot13,

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Storm Review: 2011 Blizzard

+5 points if you can find Sheba in this picture.

Technically, I think we've been under an official blizzard warning here four times since we moved: twice last winter and twice this winter. I wrote about one of the ones last year, and mentioned the other (though I didn't really write about it), but so far the winter weather this year had been really dull. Even the previous "blizzard" didn't amount to much, especially not by comparison to the winter New England has had.

But this -- even if the snow totals weren't up to New England standards -- was respectable. Or at least it's as good as we're likely to get.

SNOW AMOUNT: GOOD. About 15 inches (38 cm). It's hard to tell with all the drifting, but the National Weather Service kept moving its predicted totals up as the day progressed, and it looked like it was converging on something like 14-19 inches for the storm overall (36-48 cm).

Back: plant room door. Left: garage. Right: house (kitchen).

SPEED OF SNOW ACCUMULATION: EXCELLENT. Snow began 11:30 AM on Feb. 1 and was over by 9 AM on Feb. 2, with most of the snowfall happening, I think, between 4 PM and 2 AM.

WIND: GOOD. 20 mph (32 kph) sustained, gusts to 45 mph (72 kph).

Tuesday afternoon, after the snow first became heavy but before it had begun to accumulate significantly.

UNUSUAL FEATURES: FAIR. I'm pretty sure I saw one flash of lightning and subsequent echo of thunder, though only one. Some interesting snow drifts, including one on the plant room door that's six feet tall.

More or less the same shot as the one above, plus Sheba and a bunch of snow.

FEAR LEVEL: FAIR to GOOD. One of my office windows was making all kinds of horrible noises, because the screen had started to come off. One screen actually did get blown off the house but was recovered.

PERSONAL INCONVENIENCE: EXCELLENT. Power stayed on. The wind blew a drift up against the plant room door to the point where it's unusable, but one can still use the front door. The drifts formed around the car in such a way that we could use it easily enough if we had to (though we'd have to shovel a small drift out of the way first). Sheba has experienced minor inconvenience in locating places to pee and poop, as her usual spots are mostly inaccessible now.

Plant room door, as seen from inside.

INCONVENIENCE TO OTHERS: UNKNOWN. I haven't heard anything about traffic accidents, though presumably there had to have been some. Also haven't heard about power outages. We had enough advance notice about the storm that I think anything nonessential likely got shut down or canceled well ahead of time, but I really have no idea.

PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES: POOR to FAIR. Most of the best weather happened during the night, when it was too dark to get pictures, and today it's been mostly sunny, so all pictures show is a bunch of white, without the shading cues that would tell you how big and deep it actually is.

Looking out the south kitchen window at the neighbors' house, approximately 9-10 PM Tuesday.

OVERALL RATING: Five out of five stars. Would participate again, would recommend to others.

Random plant event: Sempervivum 'Red Beauty'

Something has happened! (Or, more accurately, something has failed to happen, but it was surprising, so it still counts as news.) Almost two years ago, I bought a Sempervivum 'Red Beauty' from the garden center where I was working, with the intention of planting it at the new house. Grandma Subjunctive had Sempervivums by her front door when I was a kid, and I thought this sounded like a good idea for my house too. I divided them up, to hedge my bets a little (I figured they'd be fine, but I didn't know whether they'd be durable enough to make it through the move or not, and also I thought maybe I'd want them in more than one place, or want lots of them, and plus I just like propagating things so sue me), and then we moved.

But: that summer was chaotic and unpleasant, and I never got around to planting anything, except for some corn that sucked and some peppers that disappeared in the weeds almost immediately, so I kept them indoors over the winter. A couple of them died (presumably because I continued to water them -- even less often was still too much), but the others survived, so I was all like, okay, this summer, I'm totally going to plant them outside somewhere.

But of course I didn't manage to do that either, and a couple more plants died (I didn't let them go out, in the summer of 2010, for reasons that I'm sure made sense at the time), and finally I was down to a six-pack of offsets that I'd potted up back in 2009. It'd been two years. One of the six had died, they were all stretched from lack of light, and the idea of keeping them through another winter, just to not-plant them again, seemed stupid. So I said, hell with this, and gave up. I declared them officially dead, stuck them on the lowest shelf of a cart in the plant room without pulling the plants out first, and forgot they were there for several months. I'm not sure when this happened, but my guess is August.1

Then in January, I was looking for used soil to re-use,2 and checked the cart, and noticed that they were not only still there, but they were still alive. No water at all, no light to speak of, cold when the heater isn't on, hot and dry when it is, and yet there they were, arguably doing better than they were last winter when I was trying to take care of them.

(Granted, they weren't this pale previously.)

So they've earned themselves another year. Will 2011 be the year the Sempervivums get planted outside, at long last? Only time will tell.


1 Based mainly on how long it feels like, and what relatively-new plants are in the spot where the Sempervivums used to be.
2 If the plant's died of rot or bugs or something, I won't reuse soil, but it's okay if the plant's died of ugly. Ugly's not contagious. Usually.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Pretty picture: Tillandsia NOID

Reaching deep into the photo archives again with this one; this picture is from last July. The reasons for this: 1) there still isn't anything much happening here to be written about, and 2) I blew off watering on Saturday and Sunday, then tried to catch up for all three days on Monday, which wound up meaning I carried plants around for five and a half solid hours. So I am very tired, and in no shape to be clever or interesting. I'll try harder tomorrow.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Music Video: DJ Earworm "No More Gas" (multi-artist mashup)

I don't think I'll do this again, at least not to this degree: even if the "extra" posts aren't huge, and don't take that long to write, any time I spend working on extra stuff is time I'm not spending on the bigger, more complicated posts like the plant profiles. Which is the excuse I'm going to use for why I didn't get the Persea americana profile done this month. (UPDATE: It's done.) I'm not saying we're completely done with mashups, just that I think it was maybe a bad idea to try to write about so many of them in so short of a time. It was fun, but I'm glad I don't have to do any for a while.

Having said all that, "No More Gas" is a personal favorite, and we may as well go out with a bang. The songs which were put together to make it:

"4 Minutes" (Madonna, Justin Timberlake, & Timbaland)
"American Boy" (Estelle & Kanye West)
"Bleeding Love" (Leona Lewis)
"Closer" (Ne-Yo)
"Damaged" (Danity Kane)
"Dangerous" (Kardinal Offishal & Akon)
"Disturbia" (Rihanna)
"Gimme More" (Britney Spears)
"Low" (Flo Rida & T-Pain)
"Superstar" (Lupe Fiasco & Matthew Santos)
"When I Grow Up" (Pussycat Dolls)

Pretty picture: Beallara Tropic Lily 'Ice Palace'

Sorry about this. I know it's not my best photo. There's nothing new going on in the house, though, and the last few times we've gone out looking for interesting garden center photos, either the garden center in question was closed when we got there, or it was open but they didn't have anything interesting going on either. So with this picture I'm reaching way back to last August, and it's not even a particularly good or interesting photo, though I still like Beallaras in general.

On the up side, we're supposed to get a little snowstorm today (Monday) and then a big snowstorm Tuesday and Wednesday, which between the two of them are supposed to drop 8-12 inches (20-30 cm) on us. It's not East Coast kind of snow (seriously, guys -- so jealous), but it'd be the biggest snowfall of our winter to date if it happens like they're saying it will, so I'm pretty stoked. Alas, it's also going to involve 25-30 mph (40-48 kph) winds and wind chills down to -21F (-29C), but you know: every rose, thorn, yada yada.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Random plant event: Justicia scheidweileri reflowering?

I've been a little worried about the Justicia I got from a reader last August. It dries out faster than the 12-to-14-day watering schedule permits, so I only catch it when it's wilted from lack of water, and although it always perks back up again, it usually loses a couple leaves in the process. (Zach, at The Variegated Thumb, has experienced this also.) And I figured I probably didn't have enough light to get it to rebloom inside: it's in an east window, with a number of other plants between the window and itself. (I have lots of plants. They sometimes wind up in non-ideal locations.) But it looks like it's going to rebloom anyway, which is interesting.

Justicia and I are still pretty much strangers to one another,1 but this is an encouraging development. I think it may also have thrown a seed into a neighboring plant, as they are rumored to do; the seedling didn't wind up surviving, but there was something I couldn't identify coming up in one of the Dieffenbachias a few months ago. I don't know exactly what happened to it, but it looked like it could have been a Justicia. They're also supposed to propagate fairly easily from cuttings.2 So all the early signs are looking good, except for that whole watering issue. And I'm fairly sure repotting would fix that.


1 Indeed, it may be something of a stranger to itself: Justicia scheidweileri is, as far as I can determine, the correct name for the plant, but they're still sold as Porphyrocoma pohliana, and some websites only acknowledge the Porphyrocoma name.
2 Not surprising for a plant in the same family as Hypoestes phyllostachya or Hemigraphis exotica, though the Acanthaceae is also home to Strobilanthes dyerianus, which I've found harder to start from cuttings, and often not worth it even when the effort succeeds.