You Grow Girl™

I think I'm going to just call the Nepenthes, Scylla. There were some great suggestions, but in the end Scylla works. So far this morning the sun has been too intense for the plant and I have had to move it temporarily to a new location. It should have been fine where it was, at least for the winter, but lately we've been getting actual full sunlight! Great for me, bad for the nepenthes. The leaves looked a bit droopy as a result which scared the hell out of me! All of the traps are pretty dried up now and so far there are no signs of new traps developing. I ordered The Savage Garden and eagerly anticipate its arrival. I need to learn alot more about this plant before I'l be comfortable. I'm a bit freaked and find myself attending to it several times a day. But then I worry that I am over-fusing and I'm going to kill it that way.

The staghorn fern is doing well. The scale insect is being kept at bay and two new fronds are developing. In the forums we have been discussing soil and how epiphytes are often sold as though they are terrestrial plants but they should be grown as epiphytes. This is because it provides more circulation around the roots which is what they would naturally get if they grow in trees as staghorn ferns do. My fern came in a plastic hanging basket with a peat-like soil. It was fine during the summer and I left it, but I'm starting to wonder if lack of root circulation is contributing to the bad environment that is promoting the scale insect. Light, humidity, water and temperature are all fine so soil seems to be the next logical place to look.

So I'm considering new options for the plant. My plant is quite large and I don't have a space that would accomodate it growing on a wood plank. I do have some small tillandisa growing on bits of wood and hanging from the ceiling, but they're small. I'm afraid that with a large staghorn I would end up with water dripping all over the place everytime I water. Great in a greenhouse, not great in my living space.

I'm trying to come up with a name for the staghorn. I find myself thinking about my plants in the feminine (flowering or not) and today, on a mailing list I am on, I noticed that men were often referring to their plants in the masculine. Curious.