February: Migration

Nope, not bird migration, but blog migration. Blogger is soon taking away the ftp option for the six of us who still do that, so I will be forced to migrate this whole beast to a Blogger server in the next few days. Comments may get lost, links will surely break, and there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth at the McHouse while we get things fixed. I need to have the blog up and running before I attend and report on the Chicago Flower and Garden Show so the pressure is on!

I shall return. In the meantime, here are some red things to look at.

February: Snow!

I wanted to post about all the repotting of houseplants I did over the weekend, or the googol of cuttings I took for no good reason, but that undertaking is not yet finished because weekends are just too darned short.

Instead, you get pictures of snow! It snowed from Monday night until sometime early Wednesday morning, and the storm was capped off by an earthquake centered between Chicago and Rockford at 4 am (which we did not feel, though others in Chicago did).

This was the sight that greeted me this morning:

The block I live on is beautiful, whether dressed in its winter or summer finery

February: Houseplant Census

February 2. It's Groundhog Day! This is an important day at the McC house. Groundhog Day is our movie, "I Got You Babe" is our song. Every year TMCH and I set the evening aside to watch the movie and say the lines along with the actors. Such as:

"Morons, your bus is leaving!"
"What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't today."
"He might be okay." (truck explodes) "Well, no, probably not now."

If you haven't seen it a hundred times, you are missing out.

o o o

But I digress! According to Mr. McGregor's Daughter, today is Houseplant Census Day! At the McC house, censusing the plants is no small task. Luckily I maintain a list so it just needed to be updated. I had no idea how many plants I own, so I looked forward to learning the total.

This picture of the plant room/breakfast nook was taken a year ago. The room is nowhere near this orderly anymore.

How many houseplants do I have?

86

Highlights:

• Only 86?! Well, that's kind of disappointing. Guess it's time to go shopping! All but a handful are in two rooms, so at least the local density is high. The total does not include various cuttings in water, or the ginger and avocado experiments, or the hibiscus overwintering in the basement. If I include those, I'm right near 100.
• Most common families: Araceae (10) and Gesneriaceae (9); also Ruscaceae (7) and Cactaceae (6).
• Oldest plant: No idea! but probably one of the pothoses or spider plants or the larger of the two Ficus benjaminas. We went through a bottleneck in 2000 during the home remodel and I know the ficus is one of the few plants to survive that tumultuous time.
• Newest plant: Dracaena deremensis 'Lemon-Lime', purchased a couple weeks ago on clearance at Home Depot.
• Favorite plant: Aww, I love all my babies equally! But I love Bowiea volubilis, the climbing onion, especially equally.
• Least favorite plant: The orchids. The flowers are too fussy and overengineered, if they bloom at all. Also not crazy about the Scheffleras, although I do love the new leaves when they emerge, like tiny grasping hands.
• Plant I used to hate but have learned to love: African violets. They were too frilly for my taste, like peonies and roses, but after discovering I'm good at them I decided they are worthwhile after all and now I have five. Runner-up: I have learned that I don't hate all Sansevierias, just the ones with the yellow margins. Those are so ugly. The Hahnii above, now that's a cutiepie.

So there you have it! Thanks to Mr. McGregor's Daughter for suggesting the idea, and for giving me the motivation to update that list!

ETA: It's less than a week later and the count is already up by 8, plus I spent part of the weekend taking cuttings and dividing clumps. I would worry that I'm plant-OCD but there are whole parts of the year (usually late summer) where I don't much care about plants, indoor or outdoor. It's seasonal OCD, and I can live with that.

January: Growing an avocado from seed

The January/February 2010 edition of Chicagoland Gardening Magazine has an article about how to grow an avocado (Persea americana, Lauraceae) from seed. I know a lot of people have done this but I don't think I ever even saw an avocado when I was a kid, and now we don't like avocados so we don't keep them around. However, I have been known to grow things I don't like to eat, including strawberries, hops, and green beans. Sometimes TMCH eats the results, and sometimes I just like the plant. I tried to grow a mango last year, but instead I grew a nice crop of mold. The avocado will go better, I just know it!

The first step: wait for the avocado to ripen. I am using a Hass avocado, and today it was black and soft, definitely ripe. I cut through the rind and the two halves fell apart easily. The avocado fruit is a berry.

I scooped the seed out from the pericarp with a spoon and washed it with water and a sponge to get all the icky off it. The surface of the seed is beautiful, like marled wood. It's about 1 1/2 inches long and slightly egg-shaped.

I then poked three toothpicks into the soft surface of the seed, about 1/3 of the way from the top, the top being very slightly more pointy than the bottom, and suspended the seed over a glass. I filled the glass so the water is 1/3 of the way up the bottom of the seed, and wrote the date on the glass.

I put the glass in a south-facing window. It needs 6 hours of daylight a day. If it doesn't sprout roots in 6 weeks I will have to start over, but hopefully something interesting will happen soon!

January: Events in the indoor garden

The snow melted over the weekend and I went into the garden to peer hopefully at places where bulbs might be. No joy yet, and today it's cold and snowy again. Luckily the indoor garden is purring along nicely. I don't use grow lights so winter growth rates are slow, but I have African violets and crown-of-thorns and two species of Aeschynanthus in bloom.

The Peperomia ferrerae > and Gasteria NOID >>, mostly dormant in summer, are putting on new growth, and the Kalanchoe daigremontiana is growing so fast I have to keep raising the mini-blind to keep above it. I will deal with that one in a later post. There will be a knife involved.  o_O






My pre-Christmas amaryllis is finally starting to sprout. I seriously overwatered it during the Bt fungus gnat treatments so I hope it's okay. It's a Smith + Hawken from Target; I didn't really want another amaryllis, but I could not pass up that cool metallic pot.

Bowie, my so-cool Bowiea volubilis, is once again on its January trek towards the ceiling. The first vine emerged around Christmas Day. Then I...broke it. Oops. Luckily, a second shoot emerged on Jan. 18, and I promise not to touch it. I love this plant and am excited to see that the bulb is finally getting fat and interesting. I will have to repot it this spring into a wider, shallow pot, and give it a support less pathetic than that bit of dogwood stick.

Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa, not doing anything interesting, really; I just wanted to show a picture of it. I am developing a deep affection for the leafy-looking cacti.