The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

To Cut or Not to Cut?

My girlfriend gave me two different orchids so I could make them re-bloom. One orchid she had cut off at the base. The other orchid had the old spike still attached.

Two weeks after I received the one with the still-intact old spike, it produced two more spikes at two of its nodes.

The other orchid has no spike in sight.

I don’t cut my orchids spikes off for just this reason. Orchids also produce baby orchids, or keikis, that also develop from nodes on old spikes. When I was in Hawaii, I remember that the locals called children keikis. I wonder if they were they referring to baby orchids—or are all Hawaiian babies called keikis? Another important piece of trivia to pursue.

There are two schools of thought about cutting off spent orchid spikes. Some orchids spike again from a node on an old spike. But the flowers produced are usually smaller, and on lankier stems. So, orchid growers usually cut the spikes off at the bottom in order to promote big, fat, compact blooms.

I’m all for instant gratification. So therefore I leave the spikes on my orchids until they turn brown.

I once had an orchid that bloomed for five years straight. I still have it. Of course it’s dead, but I’ve had it for ten years so I keep thinking that it will, all of a sudden, come back. It has one still-attached bent leaf that resembles dehydrated greenish leather. Maybe I’ll throw it out when that last bit of green has turned to brown.

Who knows?

I thought this was interesting. Here is a keiki that I cut off one of my orchids, one whos old spike I had left on. It is spiking.

This is the mother plant. It is also spiking at the exact same time. Like mother like son or daughter or keiki or baby orchid thingy.

Stumble It!

Green Thumb Sunday-Bird of Paradise at the Happiest Place on Earth

At Disneyland you can find Bird of Paradise blooming in December.

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Beware Cocoa Mulch.

I just lost my beloved dog Boomer. Dogs like Boomer aren’t just pets—they become part of the family. When they die it’s heartbreaking.

Because our pets are important to us I decided to share an email I received today.

Here is some very important information for gardeners and pet owners:

Tell every dog or cat owner you know.

Yesterday one of our dog agility friends experienced a tragedy and wanted me to pass a special message along to all of my dog loving friends and family.

Over the weekend the doting owner of two young lab mixes purchased Cocoa Mulch from Target to use in her garden. She loved the way it smelled and it was advertised to keep cats away from their garden. Their dog Calypso decided that the mulch smelled good enough to eat and devoured a large helping. She vomited a few times which was typical when she eats something new but wasn’t acting lethargic in any way.

The next day, Mom woke up and took Calypso out for her morning walk. Half way through the walk, she had a seizure and died instantly.

Although the mulch had NO warnings printed on the label, upon further investigation on the company’s website, this product is HIGHLY toxic to dogs and cats.

Cocoa Mulch is manufactured by Hershey’s, and they claim that ‘It is true that studies have shown that 50% of the dogs that eat Cocoa Mulch can suffer physical harm to a variety of degrees (depending on each individual dog). However, 98% of all dogs won’t eat it.’

This Snopes site gives the following information:
http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/cocoamulch.asp
Cocoa Mulch, which is sold by Home Depot, Foreman’s Garden Supply and other Garden supply stores, contains a lethal ingredient called ‘theobromine’. It is lethal to dogs and cats. It smells like chocolate and it really attracts dogs. They will ingest this stuff and die. Several deaths already occurred in the last 2-3 weeks. Just a word of caution, check what you are using in your gardens and be aware of what your gardeners are using in your gardens.

Theobromine is in all chocolate, especially dark or bakers’ chocolate which is toxic to dogs. Cocoa-bean shells contain potentially toxic quantities of theobromine, a xanthine compound similar in effects to caffeine and theophylline. A dog that ingested a lethal quantity of garden mulch made from cacao bean shells developed severe convulsions and died 17 hours later. Analysis of the stomach contents and the ingested cacao bean shells revealed the presence of lethal amounts of theobromine.

PLEASE GIVE THIS THE WIDEST DISTRIBUTION. You would think no one would want to use this stuff for fear of killing his or her pet, or a neighbor’s.

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Pink and Warty

Earlier this fall I was introduced to a pink warty pumpkin, well not formally, but I did catch a glimpse, and it was love at first sight. I used to love Cinderella pumpkins but that all changed when I laid eyes on the warty. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But it was not in the budget to spend $25 on a pumpkin.

Besides, just one pumpkin does not a cute porch make.

I remember I came home and looked up ‘pink warty’ on the Internet. It turns out that the pumpkin is French or at least it has a French name–Brodie’ Galeux d’Eysines.

Brodie’ Galeux d’Eysines is a  French Heirloom pumpkin. The name means embroidered with warts from Eysines, which is a city in the southwest of France.

O.K. I’m just going to take it on faith that that’s really what the name means because I can think of several better materials to embroider with. Good God, those French can make anything sound pretty. The Latin name is Cucurbita maxima.

I found seeds for this wart-embroidered pumpkin at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds for $3.00.

But alas pumpkin season was over and I never did order the seeds.

It’s Sago not Seco, Stupid.

For my fiftieth birthday, my friend Jenny gave me a Sago palm.

I have never had a Sago palm, so I didn’t know much about them. This became painfully apparent when I tried to look them up on the Internet to see how to best care for them. I kept spelling Sago Seco. Hey, the tag wasn’t on the plant and I am far and away the worst speller on the planet.

I’m monolingual, and yet I have no command over the English language. Every time I write something, my deceased father, (an English teacher) rolls over in his grave. I rarely don’t spell something wrong. Luckily my husband edits almost everything I post on the Internet. You can tell the posts that he doesn’t edit. They are the ones with all the misspellings.

A sago palm is not a palm at all: It’s a cycad, cycas revolute to be exact. Yes that’s right, I finally got the name right and then looked it up on the Internet. Cycads aren’t related to palms at all. They are ancient plants that date back to before the Jurassic period.