You Grow Girl™

Alot has been happening lately but I've been too busy to get around to an update. Firstly, I went to the The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair but I managed to avoid bringing home any new tillandisa so there isn't much to discuss there. The drag was that apparently Martha Stewart had attended on the Friday prior to my visit. If I had known I might have made the effort to check it out then. The only remaining evidence of her visit was a special ribbon on the First Place jam that read "Martha Stewart Special". I'm assuming this means that she judged the competition. The Garlic Man was there again pushing garlic icecream and other oddities on the masses. His booth features a glass display of every type of garlic conceivable organised by size starting from the smallest and ascending to the largest elephant garlic (which by-the-way is supposedly in the leek family and is not actually a garlic).

I am still fighting the war against scale insect and seem to be getting ahead on the little critters. My staghorn fern seems to have levelled off and hasn't sustained any further injury so I'm feeling increasingly optimistic about the outcome. I'm pretty sure that if I stop my daily preening the insects will take the upper hand so it's a bit of a struggle still.

Last weekend I set up another grow light and now have three large shelves with grow lights -- all of which are filled to capacity. The air conditioner that was taking up sumemr residency in one of my office windows was removed and it has done great things for improving the natural light level in here, not to mention the extra windowsill space that has opened up. I've got designs on it but am trying to muster up all of my willpower to just leave it be. The windowsill isn't the best of environments during the winter due to the temperature fluctuations that occur between the push and pull of the cold outside and the baseboard heating inside.

After installing the new grow light I did one of my famous all-day rearranging jobs, moving plants, repotting plants, washing leaves, cutting back dead growth, etc. I'm rather proud of how everything is doing right now. Even the Mexican coriander (culantro) that looked like hell all summer long in the red neck herb pool, is flowering and producing lots of lush new growth. My only concern is the large stevia which is putting out alot of yellow leaves lately. I just can't figure out what its problem is right now. It is nowhere near the heater, slightly away from the window, it gets lots of light, is watered regularly... My newest hypothesis is that since it did so well outside in the heat all summer, and since it is native to South America, that it doesn't like the fact that the pot is a bit cool right now and probably has cold feet. Some plants do not like having cold feet and will suffer for it. I've wrapped an old t-shirt and a towel around the pot and am waiting to see if this does the trick. It's not cold in this room, but some plants need more warmth than others.

I moved the rat tail cactus (aporocactus) down from its summer home on the top of a large shelf because I was concerned it wasn't getting enough light there with the seaonal change. It is now on a table (next to the stevia) right in front of a south facing window. I like it better down at this level where I can monitor its development more closely -- but getting it down from that shelf was a bit of a nightmare. It is a really large plant covered in tiny and extremely painful spines. I usually suit up with work gloves and arm barriers anytime handling is necessary.

And speaking of spines... I have been busy staking out new plants for my desertarium. I recently added two opuntias -- one that is variegated and I have had for a few years now, and another that I just purchased a month or so ago. This new variety -- which I think is called opuntia rufida, is covered in tiny spines that have been getting EVERYWHERE. Everytime I have done any work on the desertarium, I have somehow ended up with millions of them stuck into my hand or arm. Even though I carefully remove each one with tweezers (if you own a cactus you should always have a good set of tweezers) some always manage to go AWOL and have been found in socks, on shirts, in the carpet a few hundred feet away... They have a mind of their own those spines. I'm telling you, even cacti with the largest most foreboding spines are not as dangerous as cacti with zillions of tiny spines. They're the ones to look out for because they seem to just come at you out of nowhere. As my grandmother would say... "Something bit me!"

The other day Davin and I skipped off work at 4:00 pm to make a trip across town to the Allan Gardens Greenhouse. I should have checked the schedule because they were only open until 5:00pm. I ran around the place like a madwoman trying to take in as much as possible for they kicked us out. Unfortunately it was a very grey day and since there were no artificial lights on the environment was less then ideal for photo taking. The arid room was actually quite cool, unlike our last trip during the summer when it was so hot in there my face was bright red and burning up. Despite the short visit I still got alot out of it. I left the building feeling inspired and rejuvinated (probably from the good air quality), both of which I really needed considering my current heafty workload. I'll have to write another entry about this visit because there were a few peculiar plants that were unlabelled that I am desperate to identify. I became transfixed by a large pitcher plant that was kept behind a glass wall. I'm sure it wasn't there on my last visit because with my keen eyes I surely would have spotted it.