My Horticultural Epiphany.
With me one little thing always flows into another, and it just keeps going until I am either dead broke or feel burned out (no longer get the same level of enjoyment).
We bought flowers for the party at Patrick’s last month, nothing too special, just some daisies, but and that sort of sparked something within me. The Gerbera daisies looked so ‘neat’ in their own little bud vases, so on my way home I picked up a bunch of ‘regular’ daisies and put them into the various vases I had around because I needed to replace the ones that Patrick had given to me about a month before (they sure do last a long time!).
By then it was around Easter and walmart started selling bunches of Spider Mums for next to nothing. I decided that it was time for me to buy, oh, say… a dozen more vases! I promptly filled those with Spider Mums from walmart without any realization to how much each flower costs when bought at a florist. I now know, of course, that they’re $1.50 at the cheapest… ouch.
That lead me to wanting to grow flowers to fill my vases during the summer… naturally. This is more of my legendary “false economy” at work if you hadn’t gathered. So I started looking up varieties of plants that flower similarly to the Spider Mums and decided that I would grow Dahlias — the cactus types.
I’m happy, and relieved to a certain extent, to report that I have seven of the eight dahlia tubors purchased growing with some having almost two inches of ’sprout’ going. Three are of the white ‘my love’ cultivar, and four are the red ‘bergers record.’ One of the white ones hasn’t sprouted, of course I didn’t fully understand exactly the process so it is possible that I planted it with the eye down accidently, or perhaps it’s just a dud. These were just tubors from Lowes, so not exactly great ones… I’m happy anyway. I’m growing them on the deck, each tubor clump in its own little 10″ pot. They’re supposed to grow to be about three feet tall and I’ve read they require staking. I also read that the staking is supposed to be done at the time of planting, but wouldn’t you know I didn’t have any stakes… oops. I figure that since I know the size of the tubors and they’re in individual pots that it will be fairly safe for me to stake when it becomes a requirement without too much concern for driving a stake through a tubor. Since they are in pots it’ll also be considerably more easy to deal with them during summer storms — I can pick them up and move them indoors! I won’t need to worry about winds breaking the stalks because of that, so yay! This is my great little experiment, because these flowers, if I’m successful, look fairly close to Spider Mums, each tubor will supposedly produce tons of flowers, etc… I can really see myself getting into growing lots of these things during the spring and summer and provided that I’m successful there are several cultivars that I’m very interested in growing. I won’t be purchasing these more expensive ‘designer’ versions until I ‘know’ I can successfully grow them though… can you imagine? I actually practiced a tiny bit of restraint!
The amount of restraint is only tiny because I then decided I wanted a cutting garden too. Over the past week I’ve went out and purchased quite a few packets of flower seed, soil amendments, and tools (since all of ours apparently had been broken somehow last summer… (Cole! I’m blaming you even if you’re not responsible! HA!).
Considering how I’m more of an artsy techie sort, the idea of manual labor and getting dirty really wasn’t all that appealing, but I managed to do it anyway. I dug up a four by eight plot of land, put in about 3 cubic feet of peat moss, 2 ’smallish’ bags of topsoil (the recommended amount on the package) and a bit of granular fertilizer formulated for blooming plants. It did take me two evenings to do this, but then again I’m kinda lazy, not exactly ‘designed’ for back-breaking labor, and I didn’t go and cop out by renting a mantis tiller — I did it all with a shovel and a rake. :) I planted nine rows of various flowers and I’m anxiously awaiting their little sprouts.
That again wasn’t exactly enough, and decided that since I’d tilled the bit of land in front of the deck the year previous I would go ahead and plant sunflowers there.. along with some other seeds I’d picked up for a ridiculously low price at walmart (they were ten and twenty-five cents per packet so if they do nothing it’s not a loss worth thinking about).
I also want to plant some daisies in front of the shed, but the area is still a little messy so I haven’t started in on that yet. Messy in regards to stuff that should be in the shed not being in the shed because it shouldn’t be in the shed either — fucking carpet that the guy never came to dispose of! Oh well, it’s damping out the weeds there at least, haha.
It should also be noted that in my attempt to restrain myself and take on something simple and cheap I again (I did this last year without any real success) bought a little seed starter thing and some ‘ballet’ asters. Within a couple of days three had sprouted, but the other nine peat pellets did nothing. I suppose that’s why I wanted to move onto something a bit more… reliable, the Dahlias. I still have two of the little aster plants alive, but they only have their seed leaves, so I’m not putting much hope in them. It doesn’t matter too much though because I planted them outside in the cutting garden too. I ‘planted’ some of the other seeds in the ‘reluctant’ peat pellets and basically started over. Right now I do have one ‘jade hybrid’ sunflower sprouted, and it looks like some of the other seeds may be starting their sprout process. Getting them to sprout is never really that difficult, but keeping them alive for longer than a week also proves to be impossible… I don’t know if it’s lack of light (probably) or a water situation, but whatever the cause it’s always disappointing and puts another shade of death on my green thumb (I’d guage it to be a rather sickly yellow with brown spots at this point).
All this plant attention outside spurred on my desire to do something about my cornplant (dracaena fragrans). I’d bought it last winter, somewhere around February 2003, and I have managed to keep ’some’ of it alive thus far. It suffered greatly this winter though, I lost an entire (the smaller) stalk and the smaller crown of the large stalk. I seem to have over-neglected the plant that was meant to be neglected, shock. This is quite contrary to my experience with… SIX, yes, six, dracaena marginata (I think that’s what they’re called, but anyway, commonly referred to as magentas probably because of the difficulty in spelling the proper name). I didn’t neglect those magentas enough and watered them to death… TWICE (two sets of three). It has also come to my attention more soundly that these plants are extremely sensitive to chemicals in tap water, flouride and chlorine especially. I always just gave them tap water and they seemed fine until one day they just sort of went limp and yellow (over-watering with ‘bad’ water… d’oh!). They were beyond hope at that point… bastard things.
I never put it together that perhaps I wasn’t over-watering my cornplant, but that the yellowing/limpness of the leaves happened to be the toxic reaction to flouride and or chlorine. Now our water is ‘processed’ spring water, it isn’t hard nor soft, it has nuetral PH (I tested it), and it doesn’t smell of chemicals — whereas when taking a shower at Patrick’s I smell like a swimming pool (the super big reason that I bought him a Brita pitcher — I definitely wasn’t going to be drinking tap water after that shower, lol). I still think that is part of the problem though. I also discovered that I seriously fucked up by planting the cornplant directly into a ‘decorative’ pot instead of ‘double potting’ it… there are no drainage holes, so I can’t ‘properly’ water the plant by allowing the water to drain out the bottom. I definitely need to fix that situation though by repotting it into a cheap plastic pot. I can also correct it’s ‘leaning tower of Pisa’ issue then too, haha.
So, right, fixing the cornplant…. partially: I went to Lowes again hoping to find a ‘little’ stalk so that I could basically make it look like it did when I bought it, since now, if you’ve been following along, the pot only had one stalk instead of two. The plants they had were roughly the same size as when I bought mine so I’d have to buy both of them, again leading to a situation with only one stalk in a pot (unless I put all three together, but that didn’t seem like a good idea either visually or botanically). I decided to buy a ‘dragon tree’ — a rather largish one in comparison to the six ‘magentas’ I had previously, and wouldn’t you know… they’re the same [type of] plant! I put two of the three stalks in with the cornplant and it looks quite nice now and fills the pot in so that the cornplant isn’t massively over-potted anymore. Now, visually, a pair of plants is usually a bad thing, and it does look a tiny bit weird, but because I have that huge cornplant in there I think it’s okay. This did leave me with that weird third one, so I bought a slightly smaller pot to place it in. It looks just fine all by itself, btw.
At this point I had fallen straight into addiction. I liked the way my office looked so much with having four plants in two pots that I absolutely needed more. I had my eyes set on a ’star of india’ Draecana, but they just didn’t look all that great at Lowes and for the price they seemed smallish… basically meaning that they were more expensive for a smaller plant, which didn’t work for me. I still want that plant, but I think I’ll wait. Since that was out, and I still wanted “just one more plant” I ended up buying a very ‘pretty’ violet African Violet. I don’t really know why, but they always looked so neat on their little racks under the purplish grow light. Considering each plant was slightly less than three dollars it seemed ideal, plus I would have a flowering plant in my office, yay! Combined with the new, same sized (because they like to be root bound and every single plant I have ever purchased was rootbound at Lowes) clay (to help prevent overwatering) pot, blah blah, it was about five bucks. I stopped at walmart right after and I picked up a ‘nonstop’ begonia, as I read they tend to grow well indoors with limited exposure to daylight. It’s a very nice orange colour and I put it into this cool pot called ‘oslo’ I also bought at walmart, it’s white.
So, yay, a plant and a nice pot for five bucks, right? (not counting the begonia) HAHA… Off to Lowes I went as soon as they opened the next day to get another… I said to myself “just one more plant” again, but I left with two more African Violets; they certainly are addictive. This time around I bought each a purple and a white A/V. I still kinda want more of them, but I want to make sure I don’t kill these three first.
I liked that white oslo pot so much that I wanted a blue one too. Can you tell I’ve grown used to spoiling myself and buying whatever it is that I want… even if I have no need for it? At least I tend to buy things that have practical purpose and are of tangible value. Into this blue pot I placed an Impatien called “Super Sonic Cherry Cream” …I loved it just for the name, but it also has beautiful orchid-like white flowers with a tinge of cherry red/pink at the center. This is also supposedly to grow well under my conditions of rather ‘indirect’ light.
I guess it’s a lot about experimenting and discovering which types of plants will actually grow in my office conditions. I have a southern-ish expsoure window, but because of the shrub that gew too fucking large it’s mostly shaded. I don’t really have any place where I could put a plant to receive direct sunlight from that window anyway, so it’s definitely a low to medium light plant area. Because of a concern over lacking light I did buy a flourescent light bulb to go in a fixture we had ’spare’ around the house. I put that up on the wall over my little bookcase and put my Impatien, my rectangle planter (more on this later) and two of the African Violets. I don’t have this light on a timer as of yet, but I tend to be sleeping days this week so it’s easy to turn it on and off when the sun sets and rises. I also brought up my old pharmacy lamp from downstairs and put a 15w (I think) compact flourescent light in there and aimed it at my cornplant & dragon trees. Even if this extra light is not needed it certainly won’t hurt as the intensity is still fairly low.
Right, remember me mentioning the rectangular planter and the six dead magentas? The magentas were in that planter, and it has since been rather dormant. I needed something to go in that because I did pay, err, a lot for it… rather ornate concrete esque sort of thing that it is. A little backstory as to what I was about to do with it… My brother david, a while back, had grown grass (the kind you walk on) in this metal downspoutish sort of thing. I don’t know if it was a gift, or what, but it was just so neat! I always meant to plant grass in that planter of mine, but the idea of buying an entire bag of grass seed seemed absolutely ridiculous, nor did I want to dig up a chunk of our yard’s grass for reasons I’ll get to. Last summer we bought a bag of grass seed to fix a couple of bare spots, but of course it was seed meant for normal daylight, not any sort of shade, but either full sun or at least mostly sunny — just like all the grass in our lawn. Planting that grass seed or digging up part of the lawn just made absolutely no sense to me because I knew that the grass would die off due to the lack of light in here. Bingo, we decide to reseed the very bare side yard known as the orchard (we used to peach trees there which have long since died and also we have this pathetic hybrid apple tree that has never produced usuable fruit). That is a fairly shady area by virtue of being a western exposure, so it gets none of the morning light, nor does it really get any afternoon light because of the neighbor’s home. Midday light is filtered out by the trees so it never reaches the ground, yadda yadda, we needed ’shade’ grass seed, so yay, I finally have the right seed and I didn’t have to pay for it! Now, you’re thinking I’m being cheap, but really I’m not, I could have easily bought a bag of this shade seed, but it was the wastefulness of the endeavor that stopped me, I only needed a pinch of seed, not however many pounds you have to buy in even the smallest bag.
I looked at the planter of grass seed today and had a moment of silent rejoicing. My grass has started to grow! Yesterday morning I went outside for a quick look around to see if anything I’d planted from seed had grown, including the side lawn where I’d seeded the rest of the bag. I didn’t realize that grass didn’t have seed leaves like a regular plant. Now that I realize that it grows up like, well, grass (duh!) I know what I’m looking for, lol.
Lastnight I went with Andrew to get, shock, more plants. I needed some perlite to help lighten up my soil (I’ve been doing tons and tons of research and think I definitely need better draining soil considering how I’m definitely an over-waterer), and, well, I just had to get three more little starter plants for the living room because I sort of felt a little glutonous for having so many in here and NONE in the rest of the house. I bought a little golden pothos, something called a fittonia or whatever, I need to check again, and also another difficult to spell/pronounce Dracaena plant unlike the others I have. I think it’s a baby star of india plant, but I’m not sure. I bought these cute little glazed ceramic pots at Walmart to plant them in, and, well, I think they’ll look quite nice out on the little table by the window. It’s a northern exposure window so it should provide the right amount of light for these ‘low light’ type of plants… I hope, lol.
So there, that’s basically my whole week or two… where I’ve not been around much, nor talked to many people. I’ve just been busy spending collosal amounts of money (when added all up) on plants indoors and out, along with doing potting, preparing soil, etc. I’m rather proud of myself, and here we are and it’s been several days and the dragon trees aren’t dead yet, it’s been two days since I bought the first African Violet and it shows no signs of death (haha), and, well, I’m just a happy little boy surrounded by plants.