Friday Flora: Tuber Time

[lebateleur]

I'm a big fan of the "string of" plants: string of pearls, string of turtles, string of frogs, you name it. I have a string of hearts and a string of arrows among the various plants on one of my narrower windowsills.



They generally seemed pretty happy there. However, a series of calamities have befallen my houseplants over the last 11 months. Think scale, powdery mildew, mealybugs, and wildly fluctuating temperatures and humidity levels...sometimes in the course of a single day. So I was not pleased to find that some as-yet-unknown-to-me pest had started nesting in my string of hearts.

For some reason, I kept not doing anything about it. And for some reason, the string of hearts carried on living and growing quite happily in the face of my neglect. I started to wonder...



Turns out, those little globes aren't insect nests at all, but tubers. How cool--and cool looking--are these things? Better yet, I can clip some of them off, pop them in medium, and have a bunch of new baby string of hearts after they take root.

It's a constant battle between houseplants and books in this residence, and for the time being at least, it looks like the houseplants are in the ascendant.


これで以上です。

Comments

[kalloway]

Oh nifty! I have had middling luck with any sort of vine-y plants. Any I get from the grocery store either have infestations that crop up once I get them home or just die immediately from what I assume is some sort of plant culture shock. I do have a couple of survivors that came from cuttings from coworkers, though, and the wandering-dude is doing well enough I'm beginning to start more and contribute those to the work-plant-ecosystem.

(Someday I'll get my spider plant to not look half-dead. It keeps blooming and shooting off babies so I know it's doing okay; it just looks like ass.)

[lebateleur]

Your work-plant-ecosystem is also nifty! I wish we had one of those. For me it's the grocery store succulents that have quickly and repeatedly given up the ghost. They have a greater die-off rate than my grocery store alocasias, which are demonstrably harder to keep alive in this climate. I lost the majority of my many long-lived and thriving spider plants in this year's Great Die Off; the sole spindly, anemic survivor is just outside of the shot in that first picture above.