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Planting things! And watching them grow!
Posts
I have 2 cuttings from my first sundew, they still haven't sprouted anything, they're soaking in water still. Maybe in a week or 2.
My outside plants are dead, I think.
I seriously, seriously misread how cold it was going to be outside. I have had 2 pots, a terracotta pot and a ceramic pot, shatter from the temperature. My first Venus Flytrap still has green on it however, so I believe it has survived (it is not in a pot that has shattered). The Purple Pitcher Plants seem ok, as well, but they grow all the way up into Canada, so I was never too worried about them.
I do not know if I should give up and bring the VFT in or just leave it out for the rest of the winter.
I have 4 new plants as of a few days ago:
Drosera adelae - Crows like leaves of grass, with sticky bits on top to catch bugs. Killed 2 of these before, third time's the charm??
Drosera filiformis tracyii - Grows very long wheat-like thread leaves straight up. 3 feet tall when fully grown.
Drosera binata t form - Grows like a Cape Sundew, but instead of 1 sticky leaf on the end of a stem it splits into 2, Y shaped leaves. Very easy to grow.
Drosera binata dichotoma 'Giant Form' - A variant of the Binata, instead of growing two small leaves at the end of every stem it grows a foot long leaf that splits dozens of times, making a big cobweb style thing.
The tracyii is sitting there doing nothing, it's dormant. The T-Form looks dead, but it's probably dormant too. The dichotama giant is um... already growing, which is bad, I fear I broke it's dormancy about 2 months early.
I also bought some Cobra Lily seeds, they are a form of American Pitcher Plant that grows in Oregon and California that looks just like a Cobra ready to strike. It looks awesome. The bugs go in the "cobra"'s mouth and then get lost in a bunch of fake windows until they fall down and die.
Never tried growing one of these from seed and apparently a Cobra Lily takes 10 years to flower from seed, but... well, we'll see.
Or just a good site with a decent starter kit for sale.
http://www.absbonsai.org/ might be a good place to start. Bonsaisite.com is a good one too.
This is the kind of Bonsai I want (weeping willow / cherry tree / wisteria):
I had a nice little pine seedling started but it croaked before the move. I was given a Bonsai kit by my ex-roommates for christmas 2 years ago, never did anything with the seed, assuming it's bad by now.
http://kita.ath.cx/plants/02.22.09/NewRack.jpg
New plant rack, just got it set up.
Nom Nom Nom!
Pygmy. It's about the size of a quarter all around.
More Pygmys. These are about the size of a nickel each.
My other plants. Tomatoes on the bottom.
Help!
Rack as of today. New additions are in the upper right (D. multifida extrema), on the windowsill (Darlingtonia), and next to the grey pot (U. sandersonii "blue").
Blue Sandersonii Bladderworts. These make flowers that look like pissed off bunnies:
Darlingtonia Californica, aka the cobra lily. It eats bugs. The top part of it is mostly see through in bright light, which confuses the bugs inside it, then they get trapped in and die.
Drosera Multifida Extrema. It's a form of Sundew, but the leaves split over and over and over again.
A Butterwort, aka a Ping. Specifically, "Pinguicula moranensis". These eat bugs because the leaves are just like flypaper. Things land and die. The dust on it is food -- mostly crushed dried bloodworms. It grew 5 leaves over the witner, but after I repotted it and moved it closer to the window, it has grown... 16 new ones in a week.
Really like how this one's taking off. I repotted it and have it closer to the windowsill, and have been feeding it bloodworms. Over the winter it grew a grand total of like 5 leaves. I count 16 new ones
I am not sure, but I'd look at some Citrus fruit or berries. Say, an Orange or Lemon tree and a bunch of Blackberries or Currants.
You could also consider growing some Carnivorous plants, I have quite a few tropical Sundews that make beautiful flowers and leaves that I grow inside, you could grow them outside.
Depends on the strawberry. Alpine aka Woodland strawberries -- those are the original strawberries that were first domesticated -- work great in containers. I grow a type called "Yellow Wonder" and have seeds for "Red Wonder" -- they are little itty bitty strawberries that are extremely flavorful. The Yellow ones taste like Pineapple.
Bigger ones can live in a strawberry pot, so I would presume they'd be fine. The average Garden Strawberry makes runners which you can snip off and make new plants with, or you can just trim that back to keep the plant going. The average Strawberry pot has several holes in the side so you can plant these runners in for extra fruit.
From what I understand once a strawberry plant hits 3 years old it stops producing good fruit, so what people usually do is take a runner in the 2nd year to replace the main plant with in the 3rd.
I also got rid of the little bug things that were in my live sphagnum moss container -- I flooded the pot, the bugs (and eggs) floated, poured that off, repeated about 5 times until the pot was empty. One time I did it I poured into my tracyi pot, which was probably not wise, but the tracyi is going outside the second it stays above freezing at night, so... yeah...
Basically it was just choked out with weeds and moss. So much moss. So I got this granule stuff which is a combination weed killer, moss killer and lawn feed, spread it over the whole lawn. Did a pretty good job of killing off most of the moss and weeds but now my lawn is really patchy. The grass which is growing seems really healthy but it's spread pretty thin, with visible earth under it and some areas of big dead patches and the bottom end of the lawn is basically just earth where it used to be covered in moss (it's the shadier end, I guess). So I got some lawn seed and spread it out last Sunday. I think I did it right - forked the lawn to loosen it up a bit, spread it out over the whole lawn, with more on the dead patches and now I'm waiting to see results. It claimed results within 7 days but so far there's basically no sign of the seeds germinating at all. My instinct is telling me it's because they are just strewn over the ground and not actually buried but that seemed to be what the instructions implied - it didn't say anything about burying them or sowing them at a certain depth or anything, just spread them out, stamp on them and water them. So they are getting plenty of sun and regular watering and I guess I'm expecting them to magically germinate this Sunday.
Any tips on how to revive this lawn would be awesome.
Also, my sister gave us a tomato plant. It seems to be growing quite healthily, I repotted it in a larger pot and it seems happy in the conservatory but I don't really know what to do with it yet. I hear tell that tomato plants need feeding and pinching to really grow good tomatoes but don't really know how to go about doing either of those things. It's maybe about a foot or so tall now.
Mainly because I have three good sized, but empty window boxes that I'm not sure what to do with. If it helps I live in the west of England - temperate climate, plenty of sun and plenty of rain.
(Figured it was better than making a new one.)
So I got a happy surprise today -- my Venus Flytrap pot has some of what appear to be Drosera filiformis seedlings. Since the only seeds I have used of filiformis are "Florida All-Red", well, woot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBcskrdGXMo
(Of course, there is the slight complication that *all* Drosera seedlings look the same the first few months... It could just be a Cape Sundew seed, since I have a very large number of Cape Sundews, and one of them flowered a few months back... But I'm sitll hoping for a Florida All-Red.)
Unfortunately, the Venus Flytraps are under the grow lights, and averaging a goodly 70ish temps... which means they're probably getting any form of hibernation. I had them in the windowsill in my room, but that wasn't enough sun -- the Pitcher Plant pot in there is surviving, however.
There's no real new growth with the VFTs, so hopefully the 16 hr grow light cycle aren't waking them up and the slightly lower temperatures is enough to keep them asleep until March. I have a Dente and a B52 that have survived the year of hell, barely, and one more (a typical, I think) that passed away in the windowsill.
My Pygmy Sundews passed on, but I discovered gemmae on their corpses. Gemmae are like seeds, except they're little clones of the mother plant -- and there's usually a few dozen on each plant, each year. I reseeded the original pot (which is taking off like mad) and another, much bigger pot.
My Giant Butterwort (Pinguicula Gigantea) has spread a bit, I now have a total of 6 plants, with 2 more coming in. Since they grow to the size of cabbages, I need to get rid of the spares soon. My Pinguicula 'Yucca Do 1713' is equally spreading, I think I have 5 of them now.
I decided to crack open my sealed box of Peat Moss this afternoon -- I had a Drosera dichotoma 'Giant' (grows to absurd -- 3'+ -- sizes) in there, and the peat at his roots reactivated, spreading throughout the entire pot and growing on top of itself until it had literally filled up the 6" tall plastic terrarium. I cut it down to about 1/2" and put the rest on the topsoil of my other pots. The peat moss (which is what almost all Carnivorous Plants grow in) will act as a sponge to keep the pots damp between waterings.
In non carnivorous plant news, I'm trying to figure to if I want to try and grow Bhut Jolokia (Ghost Peppers). A friend locally wanted to grow them and asked me to try and look into it for him.
ThinkGeek has a kit but I don't know if growing them from seed is viable. If it's a cultivar, then no (cultivars are clones of a single, special plant), if it's a species, then seed works just fine.
I'm not sure how hard growing them is. I could also buy a pre-started plant from Hirts for $7. Apparently they do require a very warm (80-90 F+) environment, which I can't provide.
So, am I the only plant geek around right now?
And keep it on my desk at work.
I still haven't gotten the space for any carnivorous plants ... my one pitcher plant bit-the-big-one already. I need room to set up a terrarium, which won't happen until I get another plant shelf. On that note, this is my sickness personified:
And if it was some other time besides winter-death, I'd have these in bloom:
The hibiscus is actually inside on the plant rack, with one more not pictured. I love them. I want to collect them all when me and my wife were in San Diego. That, and every succulent I can get my hands on.
That's awesome, are you going to use a guide? What plants are inside that one?
i'm moving to new zealand next month and i would love to do some container vegetable garden. But I'm not sure just what to grown and when.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
I used a guide to clean out the bulb already, and I think I'm just going to grow some clovers in mine. Maybe try to find some moss I can snatch up once it stops being winter outside.
Didn't feed the pitchers, I don't need the Monkey Cup getting any bigger (it's main stem is 4 feet long), and the Sarracenia are in dormancy. Can't feed Venus Flytraps, either -- if the food doesn't squirm, the trap disengages.
So I ripped them out and reused the pot.
I tried to get some seedlings to germinate, but didn't have much luck with it.
So them I just threw some seeds into the bonsai pot and kept watering it (cause the clovers were growing, mainly) but then just the other day I looked and saw this!
So, I have some type of tree growing in my bonsai pot and I'm more hopeful that I will take care of this guy.
This is definitely one of the seeds I collected off a tree on my way to work one day.