Sadly, we are about to get first frost. I brought my house plants in off the porch
and had no place to put them all. Our
house is not plant-friendly. The windows
are smallish, and the builder placed air vents under nearly every window. This must be standard practice because many
of the houses and apartments I’ve lived in had registers below windows. Why is that?
It seems wasteful given that lots of air flows through windows, even
when they are closed.
The kitchen is the sunniest room in our house, so
for now, all the plants except for one philodendron are in our kitchen. I went and bought a cheapie ($20) utility
shelf which serves fairly well as a plant stand. So in this photo, you can see (or perhaps
only barely make out) on the bottom (left to right), we have an African violet,
a begonia in a rabbit planter, and a Christmas cactus that will most likely
never bloom again. A Christmas cactus
might bloom if it’s kept in a closet for 4-6 weeks….but that would require me
to remember it’s there and to water it at least every two weeks. Won’t happen!
On the middle shelf, there’s an angel-wing begonia
that is blooming and still quite cheerful.
Beside it sits an asparagus fern.
Those make me happy but they get messy if they decide to drop their
little needle leaves. On the top shelf,
there is a jade plant…one of two that Sarah gave me. The other one is still waiting to be
potted. Beside it sits an orchid that got
tired of blooming – a graduation gift from my mother.
The first pot on the floor beside the stand is a
very sickly split-leave philodendron…really, it’s just what’s left of a
formerly beautiful plant. It was a
Mother’s Day gift to me from Someone and my girls. Actually, I strongly hinted to Someone that
it would make the perfect Mother’s Day gift for me….and then I went and bought
it myself. That was about 4 or 5 years
ago. At one time, it covered that entire
post. Gracie sharpened her teeth on the
pot…as if my neglect were not enough abuse.
So, because it’s likely that this one won’t recover in my lifetime, I bought
another one for no special occasion at all (other than it caught my eye at the
grocery store and its price was reasonable).
 |
| Newest split leaf crowds the table, and now I realize it's right over the air vent - a death sentence. |
Now, in that first photo, that plant with all those
spikey leaves is a yucca tree. This is
Sarah’s plant. She bought it and left it
behind when she moved. If it would stand
up straight, it would be six feet tall.
For whatever reason, even though I tried staking it up, it wants to grow
horizontally. I did some research on
this plant. Tomorrow, I will go buy some
more potting soil and perform major surgery on it - amputation just below the
first bend in the trunk. It will be a
sawed off tree trunk for a while, but the experts assure me it will put up
stalks, and soon enough it’ll look fine.
Not only that, I can cut the dismembered part into pieces and stick them
in dirt. They are supposed to root and
grow too. We will see. I might try to grow three of them in
total. We will have a forest of yucca
trees before it’s all over. Perhaps once
Sarah moves again, she will want a yucca tree or two.
In these photos, you
see Miss Emily working on her Latin homework.
Crazy girl. She is in her 5th
year of Latin. It’s a very hard course
taught by a Nazi sort of teacher, but she enjoys the challenge. You can also see we desperately need new
kitchen blinds. It’s on my to-do list, a
very long list. Very, very, very long.
