It's that time again.
To watch daytime TV?
To remember the Alamo?
NO! And it's not even time for today's lesson. It's time for a plant post!
I haven't done one of these for a while, and to post updated pics of all my plants would make this post insanely huge and long, so I'm only going to do a couple.
You may, or may not, know about the man-eating plant. I've talked about it some in the Church but if you're not a Churchgoer or you just weren't around then, you may not have heard about it.
Here it is in January:
Pretty cute, eh?
It's in one of those Ziploc clear plastic storage boxes, with cling wrap over the top (not clinging, it's attached with a rubber band).
Well, it quickly outgrew that little container. I knew it would, so I bought a large Critter Keeper for it, and here it is today:
Again, the top of the container is covered in cling wrap, but since I don't have a rubber band that big, I hold the wrap down with the lid of the Critter Keeper. The wrap has a bunch of holes poked in it for ventilation, and periodically I like to check the moss to make sure it's still moist. Evaporation is slow because of this, but it still happens.
This is some species of Nepenthes. It's unclear what kind, possibly N. ventricosa. If it is N. ventricosa, it will soon become too big for me, heh, unless I somehow manage to dwarf it. Who knows. Maybe someday I will need to give up my man-eating plant. That will make me sad, but for now it makes me very happy.
A top-down view. It's speckled with water because I peeled back the cling wrap to take this pic, and condensation was all over it. In fact, to take the side-on pics I had to wipe condensation off the side of the Critter Keeper. The humidity in there is probably near 100% most of the time.
One of the pitchers. They grow on the ends of tendrils off the tips of the leaves, and fill up with liquid on their own. My Sarracenia pitchers have to be filled with water, or else they take for-fucking-ever to fill up. They are evolved to catch rainwater, I think. The man-eating plant has a lid over its pitchers to keep rainwater out, so that the pitcher is full of delicious digestive juices.
It's growing in Sphagnum moss. The green stuff you can see is partly algae growing on the dead moss, and partly live moss growing on the dead moss. It's kind of a funny story, that ... I bought the moss in a dehydrated, compressed brick that had to be hacked apart with a hatchet because it was too firmly compressed to simply break apart, and when I added water it expanded to about 10x its compressed size. You wouldn't think that anything could live through that, but apparently numerous cells of live moss were lurking deep within that brick, just waiting for water and sunlight to sprout. And boy, have they sprouted.
Another side-view of the whole plant. Cute!
Speaking of cute, have you ever seen anything as cute as this?
This is an aloe pup. Grandpa put them out earlier this spring, and when I went to repot it, I was going to be burying the stem deeper than the pups. So it was either put them underground and hope for the best, or twist them off and pot them separately and hope for the best. There were 5, and all of them were in the 6-inch-tall department, with at least some root system, except for this one.
This one is the runt. It had no roots at all when I broke it off Grandpa, so I wasn't sure it would live. But ... it has. And it's so fucking cute. It kills me, how cute this thing is.
You may recall this pic from a couple of years ago, 3 years ago I think. This is a tiny fig tree. The 'rents gave this to me ... my mom found it in the impulse-buy rack I think, in a miniscule little container, billed as a "bonsai." As you can see, this is no bonsai, this is a tree that has been tortured and is struggling to live. This is NOT the pot it was in when I got it - that one was about the same size as the trunk. SERIOUSLY. It was wedged down in there with almost no soil. This pot it's in here is kind of cruddy-looking but it was what I had on hand at the time.
That's Grandpa back behind it, by the way.
Here it is as of, I dunno, last week I think. I showed off these pics in the Church a little so they may look familiar.
This one's not quite so dark. I shaved that hacked-off stub down so that it looks less like a hacked-off stub and put the plant into a somewhat larger pot to give it room to grow. Pretty nice, I think! This plant caught spider mites during the winter from my citrus trees >:E but it's small enough that I was able to just give it a bath a couple of times to wash the mites off and now they are gone.
Finally, we have Callie!
She comes to us from my sister's father-in-law, who passed away the week before last. He had three cats, and my sister dun want three cats, so we got one.
Holy cow, this cat is a butterball. Yet she is super-friendly. :D I like her!
And I think that's it for today. Maybe soon I will take new pics of my trees to post. They looked awful this spring because of the mites munching on them all winter, but I didn't take any photos because I was too sad. But now they are all recovered and looking good. Next week, maybe.
To remember the Alamo?
NO! And it's not even time for today's lesson. It's time for a plant post!
I haven't done one of these for a while, and to post updated pics of all my plants would make this post insanely huge and long, so I'm only going to do a couple.
You may, or may not, know about the man-eating plant. I've talked about it some in the Church but if you're not a Churchgoer or you just weren't around then, you may not have heard about it.
Here it is in January:
Pretty cute, eh?
It's in one of those Ziploc clear plastic storage boxes, with cling wrap over the top (not clinging, it's attached with a rubber band).
Well, it quickly outgrew that little container. I knew it would, so I bought a large Critter Keeper for it, and here it is today:
Again, the top of the container is covered in cling wrap, but since I don't have a rubber band that big, I hold the wrap down with the lid of the Critter Keeper. The wrap has a bunch of holes poked in it for ventilation, and periodically I like to check the moss to make sure it's still moist. Evaporation is slow because of this, but it still happens.
This is some species of Nepenthes. It's unclear what kind, possibly N. ventricosa. If it is N. ventricosa, it will soon become too big for me, heh, unless I somehow manage to dwarf it. Who knows. Maybe someday I will need to give up my man-eating plant. That will make me sad, but for now it makes me very happy.
A top-down view. It's speckled with water because I peeled back the cling wrap to take this pic, and condensation was all over it. In fact, to take the side-on pics I had to wipe condensation off the side of the Critter Keeper. The humidity in there is probably near 100% most of the time.
One of the pitchers. They grow on the ends of tendrils off the tips of the leaves, and fill up with liquid on their own. My Sarracenia pitchers have to be filled with water, or else they take for-fucking-ever to fill up. They are evolved to catch rainwater, I think. The man-eating plant has a lid over its pitchers to keep rainwater out, so that the pitcher is full of delicious digestive juices.
It's growing in Sphagnum moss. The green stuff you can see is partly algae growing on the dead moss, and partly live moss growing on the dead moss. It's kind of a funny story, that ... I bought the moss in a dehydrated, compressed brick that had to be hacked apart with a hatchet because it was too firmly compressed to simply break apart, and when I added water it expanded to about 10x its compressed size. You wouldn't think that anything could live through that, but apparently numerous cells of live moss were lurking deep within that brick, just waiting for water and sunlight to sprout. And boy, have they sprouted.
Another side-view of the whole plant. Cute!
Speaking of cute, have you ever seen anything as cute as this?
This is an aloe pup. Grandpa put them out earlier this spring, and when I went to repot it, I was going to be burying the stem deeper than the pups. So it was either put them underground and hope for the best, or twist them off and pot them separately and hope for the best. There were 5, and all of them were in the 6-inch-tall department, with at least some root system, except for this one.
This one is the runt. It had no roots at all when I broke it off Grandpa, so I wasn't sure it would live. But ... it has. And it's so fucking cute. It kills me, how cute this thing is.
You may recall this pic from a couple of years ago, 3 years ago I think. This is a tiny fig tree. The 'rents gave this to me ... my mom found it in the impulse-buy rack I think, in a miniscule little container, billed as a "bonsai." As you can see, this is no bonsai, this is a tree that has been tortured and is struggling to live. This is NOT the pot it was in when I got it - that one was about the same size as the trunk. SERIOUSLY. It was wedged down in there with almost no soil. This pot it's in here is kind of cruddy-looking but it was what I had on hand at the time.
That's Grandpa back behind it, by the way.
Here it is as of, I dunno, last week I think. I showed off these pics in the Church a little so they may look familiar.
This one's not quite so dark. I shaved that hacked-off stub down so that it looks less like a hacked-off stub and put the plant into a somewhat larger pot to give it room to grow. Pretty nice, I think! This plant caught spider mites during the winter from my citrus trees >:E but it's small enough that I was able to just give it a bath a couple of times to wash the mites off and now they are gone.
Finally, we have Callie!
She comes to us from my sister's father-in-law, who passed away the week before last. He had three cats, and my sister dun want three cats, so we got one.
Holy cow, this cat is a butterball. Yet she is super-friendly. :D I like her!
And I think that's it for today. Maybe soon I will take new pics of my trees to post. They looked awful this spring because of the mites munching on them all winter, but I didn't take any photos because I was too sad. But now they are all recovered and looking good. Next week, maybe.