far away

Hurray for blossoms!

we both learned

This is my aloe. Aloe is funny; it will spend years quietly outgrowing all of its pots and sprouting up new little plants and then one day you come home from a vacation to find that during your absence it had thrown itself off the table in a shower of dirt.

Plant suicide isn't really something to joke about. The mess was unbelievable - dirt on the table, dirt on the floor, dirt stuck in the crack between the baseboard and the wall. Dirt under the radiator. Some of the arms had broken and were turning black. I decided that rather than trying to stake it, I would just remove the buds and toss the parent.

At one point I think I had six separate tiny aloe plants. I gave most of them away as gifts. This one is still waiting to be adopted.

from you to me

Much like Juno, my mother has occasionally given me cacti as birthday presents. This was one such gift. I no longer have the little tag for it, but I think it's a foxtail. This is actually a bit that broke off and was re-potted. Five years and not a single solitary flower. i really wonder if i just need to fertilize more? In any case, it is green and has a good root system. 

a change

I have two christmas cacti. They were both rescued from the farmer's market a few years ago. i read recently that they'll feel the impetus to bloom when exposed to temperatures around 14 degrees for a few weeks. A good reason to have terrible, drafty windows such as mine. My fingers are crossed that this year they will both blossom at the same time. 

our running feet

A dear friend of mine gave me some dried poppy seeds from her garden a few months ago. I am strictly a container gardener (no yard) so i'm not sure exactly where i'm going to put them when they get bigger. Pink pom poms, according to the label. Poppy seeds are good for guerilla gardeners - they will germinate without being covered. You can scatter them in the garden in late February/early March (on top of the snow, or so I'm told) and in a few months there will be plants without really trying. I am thinking about taking my envelopes full of seeds to the park down the street and doing some secret planting.

the good times

My living room faces south, which is awesome for sunshine. It also means that in the summer time it gets a little bit too warm for human beings. My succulents don't seem to mind.

I should warn you that I am bad at keeping flowering plants alive. The secret of violets, according to my mother (who seems to have applied this philosophy to a great deal of her waking life) is to leave them the heck alone. The fact that this plant still produces flowers ASTOUNDS ME, as I am sure it is tired of being poked and prodded and over watered and under-lit. Or vice versa.

African violets like medium sunlight and damp soil. Commonly found growing wild in tanzania, they are a perennial flower and can live happily in pots for years. They bear only a superficial physical relation to actual violets.