Long Time No Post 22 May 2009

I’m sorry it’s been over a month since I updated.  The thing about spring is that you’ve got so much to do in the garden that’s it’s often a choice (at least for me) between updating the garden blog and actually being out in the garden!  I have some partially finished posts saved on my computer and hopefully I will be able to finish those and upload them soon.  I also have a lot of photographs to upload, hopefully also soon.  In the meantime, here is a brief update on things here in the past month-plus:

*The shade/partial-shade garden in back is doing really well.  Spring is really its best season, I think.  There have been bulb blooms, woodland phloxes, epimediums, primroses, and violets, and now the columbines and wild native ginger and the alpine strawberries and the last bulb (Silver Bells)  and the new lowbush blueberries and new mourning widow cranesbill are blooming, and the foxgloves and comfrey are budded. The foxgloves I seeded in last year have survived the winter with pretty good germination and most of them are budded (in addition to the foxgloves that I had last year; all but one of those have come back for another year). The comfrey is doing unbelievably better than its sad start when I first planted it last year (if I hadn’t watered it regularly, I think it would have died) – it is huge and has several bud clusters and looks like it is forming new ones as well.

*More improbable winter survivors: In the back garden, the Salvia patens has survived another winter, and this year not just one calla lily has survived, but five (so far)!  In the front, all the agastaches appear to have survived, even the ones that weren’t supposed to be winter-hardy here.  Additionally, the two hardy begonias finally sprouted over the past day, rewarding my belief in them.  That means that all but two things survived in pots in the back garden – the ones that didn’t make it were one epimedium and one sedge.  Even the other stuff in tiny pots did, like violets and lyre-leafed sage.  My incredible experience with this last year led me to take more risks with it this past year, and I know I’m lucky my risking paid off.

*Self-seeding: There has also been some nice self-seeding.  I always appreciate plasnts that are tough enough to be able to self-seed in my harsh front garden.   The sundial lupine (Lupinus perennis), in particular, has pleased me so.  I’ve counted at least five seedlings, some nearish the parent plant but others farther afield in the garden.  Sunflowers have again self-seeded and/or been seeded in by birds.  It also looks like the tovara (‘Painter’s Palette’) has self-seeded this year (something it is notorious for doing, and how I first got my plants – a friend gave me their self-seeded seedlings), and it looks like there may be at least one baby echinacea as well, which would please me so.  The squill, muscari, and glory of the snow have all developed seedheads, but we’ll see if that results in actual self-seeding (I hope so).

*Overwintered plants: I carried out most of the overwintered plants today, another hot and sunny day here.  The brugmansia (‘Charles Grimaldi,’ now with me for two years), Cestrum (‘Orange Zest’), and lemongrass have done the best over the winter, all growing significantly from their size in autumn.  The sweet violet and fuschia (sharing a pot) and the tweedia and snail vine have also done decently.  The bay seems to still be alive but is continuing not to seem particularly happy, still about the same size it was when I got it several months ago.  I saw that the nursery is offering bay laurels that are larger and look more robust than the one I got from them last year, and am considering trying a second plant to see if it does better than the first one has.

*Blooms in front: We are up to the stage where the heirloom irises are blooming or budded.  ‘Eleanor Roosevelt’ was first (as she is well-known for being even in gardens with dozens of irises), with just one bloom so far. ‘Gracchus’ is blooming now, with several more buds spread over two bloom stalks, and there are many buds on ‘Quaker Lady’ and ‘Mme Chereau,’ which were the two irises to bloom their first year here (last year).  My other three irises have yet to show visible bloom stalks, but I haven’t given up hope yet.  All seven are growing more robustly than last year (when I think the trauma of having their roots stomped on, having heavy things dragged over, etc. by the workmen really damaged them), so I think there is definitely a possibility they will yet develop bud stalks. The wild native columbine is also blooming (I planted that this spring) as well as the Mt. Atlas daisies, and there are buds on the (parent) sundial lupine, the false/Carolina lupine, the peach-leaaved bellflower, the dianthuses ‘Rainbow Loveliness,’ the chives (which have been budded since the last heat wave in late April), and one each of the perennial salvias and the cranesbills.  There are also a lot of blooms on annuals I’ve planted – pansies, violas, bacopas, heliotropes, snapdragons, Swan River daisies, stocks, Felicia heterophyllas (that beyond-gorgeous blue-on-blue daisy that I planted last year, not realizing it was a different Felicia than the species I’d grown the year before until it bloomed), an alpine calendula I’ve not grown before, …  Lots of success with direct-sowing in front, as usual.  There are a ton of clarkias (nearly 100% germination, as last year) as well as smaller numbers of many other things, such as California poppy, annual poppy, corncockle, calendula, and love-in-a-mist.

*Crops: The fava/broad beans have started blooming!  The garden peas are growing like mad now.  Some of the garden peas had poor germination in the first round, so I recently seeded in a second batch of those and they are catching up now (‘New Mexico,’ ‘Tall Telephone (AKA Alderman),’ and ‘Mammoth Melting’ are the ones I can remember off the top of my head).  I don’t know if it was a difference in placement (perhaps different amount of sunlight/different intensity, different texture to the soil, etc.), if perhaps they happened to be more prone to rotting before sprouting than the other cultivars, or what.  The fava/broad beans seem to have had pretty even germination rates amongst them, even though they are planted in a row westish to eastish like the peas are.  The lentils, meanwhile, have had very uneven germination.  (If you forget, this is my first year growing lentils.  See a recent post for more details.)  ‘Spanish Pardina’ germinated first and to date has germinated best (I think it may have had 100% germination).  ‘Black Beluga’ germinated second and has similarly had overall second-best germination.  The other three haven’t done as well, with a handful (‘French Blue,’ ‘Petite Crimson’) to none (‘Urid Dal’) up so far.  I’ve also had no srpouts of the garbanzo ‘Black Kabouli,’ but my beans ‘Yellow Arkiara’ (the earliest garden bean to plant) have sprouted and are growing nicely, and now with the heat and sun, the runner beans and purple-podded beans are coming up as well.  (Purple-podded beans can be planted earlier than other beans because there’s a special chemical in them that both gives them the purple coloring and makes them less prone to rotting in cool, wet soil.)  Aphids turned out to have sheltered over the winter on the fuschias and decimated the majority of my seedlings in just a day.  After they had mostly died out, I started a second batch of seedlings.  I’ve got lots of young plants again now:  26 cherry tomatoes (nearly 100% germination), 20 regular-sized tomatoes, 12 tomatillos, and 2 chiles (the chiles survived the onslaught better than the tomatoes and tomatillos, so I didn’t seed as many new ones in).  I’ve never had aphids on indoor seedlings before, and it’s really a serious pain.  I also got a cherry tomato plant at the living green festival my town held recently.  A non-profit that does gardening work locally was selling them to raise money.  They said it was an heirloom hand-selected by their main grower (and indeed, it appears to be named after him), but the two people staffing the stall couldn’t tell me more about it.  When I tried to ask more detailed questions, they just kept shrugging and saying, “It’s a cherry tomato,” as if that explained everything.  So I figured I’d just grow it and see for myself what the answers to my questions are.  There are also shallots, parsley, cilantro, French sorrel, thyme, and sage growing in front, and the scallions, chives (or as the person that gave me the Chinese leek division two years ago calls them, “American chives”), lavenders, winter savory, and Chinese leek/garlic chives have all survived the winter and are doing excellently.  I also finally planted the bare-rooted highbush blueberries in front since my last post, and after initial shock, they seem to be adjusting well.  In the sifted compost, I found a squash vine, and transplanted it to the main crop area.  I’ve also got melon seeds to sow.  Today’s a ‘fruit day’ in biodynamic parlance, as is tomorrow, so I should do that while the time is right.  Perhaps I should seed in my edamames today too, and give them a chance to get going before the pole beans shade them out (which seems to have been their biggest problem the last two years).

*Compost: Yesterday, in anticipation of yesterday and today’s heat, sun, and wind, I mulched all the back beds and the main crop area in the front bed with compost.  I also top-dressed the front’s plants that I know most like it – the Oriental poppies, peonies, scallions, and chives – plus I added some compost around the blueberries, stocks, and alpine calendula.

*Caterpillars: I found a caterpillar in the crop patch recently, the first I’ve ever seen in the windy, hot, high front garden!  It was so convincing at playing dead I thought it really might actually be dead until I gently poked it with a twig and it freaked out.  I also found a couple caterpillars in the back garden yesterday, one green and hanging out on the sifted-compost holder and the other munching the comfrey.

*New plants: I mentioned some of the new plants above.  I’ve also gotten more new plants from the nursery and mail-order.  I’ve planted some of them and others are awaiting planting. Some of them, particularly much from my Select Seeds mail-order, are meant to go in pots:  a datura, petunias, fuschias, tender (‘zonal’) geraniums.  I’ve also got flowering tobacco, salvias, tender vines,  coleuses, and more from Select Seeds.  I’ve already planted lantanas and some salvias and a double-flowered feverfew and a silver foliage plant from them. I’ve also got some tender “bulbs” to plant – dahlias and gladiolas and a rain lily from Old House Gardens and a few cannas from the local hardware store (Old House Gardens had already sold out of cannas by the time I placed my quite tardy order).

I think that’s plenty for today!  More another day.

Winter comes to the garden / Indoor plant update / The yearly inundation has begun 18 December 2008

[I wrote the majority of this on the 6th, but forgot to post it.  My apologies!]

Winter comes to the garden

We’re supposed to get our first real snowfall overnight and tomorrow.  This morning at dawn it was 21 F in the garden, the coldest morning yet, with frost covering the highest percentage of surfaces yet – not just the leaves fallen, crumpled and dead, into the garden, but also the roof next door, and cars at the curb, and much more.  I’m impressed with how much is still trying to grow.  Just in the front garden, which is frequently buffeted by strong winds and is right by a wide street:

• Many of the autumn-blooming crocuses (some of which are still blooming [!], and others of which have already put out their leaves
• Cover crops!!  (More below.)
• The yellow single hardy mum
• The hardy lavenders
• The silver thyme (very marginal here)
• The lisianthuses (annual here)
• The perennial scabiosa ‘Butterfly Blue’
• The horehounds
• The two euphorbias, both the succulent and non-succulent one
• The bellflower
• More I’m sure I’m forgetting

Today I did more preparation for winter in the garden, pulling up the large number of stakes, scattering the fallen leaves more evenly around the cover crop area*, moving the potted (and now almost or completely dead, depending on the mum) mums away from the front stairs, and disconnecting and moving the hose.  The hose had little bits of ice at the spigot that fell to the asphalt (welcome to the city) like little clear jewels as I struggled to disconnect it, and after I disconnected it, it dripped a little and stopped.  As to the stakes, it was interesting to me that some of the vines collapsed when I pulled them up and others stayed at least somewhat up in the air, self-supporting thick tangles of vine.  I imagine a stiff wind or a heavy snow will knock them to the ground soon enough, though.

*I was so pleased recently to discover a vivid green plant growing in the crop area and, upon bending down to peer at it, realizing it was a sprouted and decently grown cover crop!  Upon moving the fallen leaves around, I discovered numerous other sprouts at various stages of growth.  It had been a comparably warm couple of days, so I guess the soil warmed up enough for them to sprout and start to grow.   I’m quite relieved that my late cover crop sowing was not in vain after all.

Indoor plant update

The indoor plants are doing quite variably.  I’ve been happy to discover that the gotu kola seems surprisingly easy to take care of, despite the fact that I have yet to find a single piece of information on overwintering it inside in cold-winter climates.  It’s the easiest plant to water because it tells me when it needs it as surely as if it could talk.  If it needs water, it collapses as surely as a punctured balloon, and when it’s had enough water, it springs right back up as if the balloon had been reinflated.  Usually I give it enough water, but once so far I haven’t (even though it was as much as I usually give it, I guess it was drier than usual), and upon seeing it still deflated, I gave it a second dosing and, happy, it sprang back to perky life.

Meanwhile, the pineapple sage has a new issue – it’s become infested with aphids.  I didn’t even know it could become infested with them, as they were never an issue outside. I am suspicious that they came in with the tweedia, which is a milkwood family member, as milkweeds are famous for their propensity for aphid infestations (and the tweedia is infested too). I don’t really know what to do besides hope that the tiny spider who runs around the main plant table and the wall beside it kills them, because I don’t like to kill anything, not even aphids, and it’s my biggest issue with overwintering plants:  In summertime, even if there’s an infested houseplant my solution is simply to take it outside till nature sorts out the problem, and so in wintertime, without nature’s help I am stymied.

The lemongrass is doing excellently, even sending up new stalks, but the rosemaries are doing horribly, making me wonder once again why I ever bother trying to overwinter them.  I can’t remember ever successfully overwintering one indoors.  One very mild winter one survived outside, but that’s been my only success with rosemary.  I don’t know if it’s because I always live in homes with forced air (winters in climates like mine tend to be bad to rosemaries) or if I just don’t have the knack for overwintering them.

The many (many, many) scented and zonal geraniums are up and down at whims, as so often seems to be the way with me and geraniums:  They put out new leaves in patterns that are, to me, mysterious, and drop their old ones, or an entire stalk, and then put out new leaves yet again.  The fuschias and tender sweet violet (sharing a pot) seem to be doing well as long as I remember to check the pot regularly for dry soil, and the lantanans and sweet Aztec herb (the latter of which I also haven’t found a peep about overwintering indoors), which also share a pot, have recovered from near death just after I took them inside and are robustly healthy now, sending out new shoots in addition to beautiful shiny new leaves, and the lantana closest to the window, ‘Samantha’ (the variegated-leaf, yellow-flowered one), is even about to bloom!

The datura ‘Charles Grimaldi’ dropped its old leaves but has put out new ones (daturas are prone to aphid infestation, so though I haven’t actually spied an aphid on it, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve moved onto it too), and the snail vine is doing much better indoors than it ever did outside this summer, twining for the sunny window on vigorous new growth.  The cuban oregano (a common houseplant in cold climates, though I planted it in the ground this summer) has, like the datura, dropped its old leaves, but has also put out new growth.  The bay leaf tree, which has been at pretty much the same growth above-ground since I planted it in a large pot late last spring (I think the back yard just isn’t sunny enough for it), seems to be doing about the same indoors so far as it did outside. (I specified ‘above-ground’ because bay leaf trees tend to do their early growth underground, which is why it takes a couple of years for a bay leaf tree even to be salable in nursery markets, often offered in gallon pots with just a few inches of above-ground growth because they have so much root growth per inch of above-ground growth – and I haven’t poked around its roots since I planted it, so I don’t know if its roots have continued to expand even as it hasn’t grown much above-ground.  Unfortunately for nursery owners, this tends to make bay leaf trees poor sellers to people who don’t know much about them.  I noted that they were one of the main things left in the greenhouse at the nursery at the end of the season, just sitting there waiting for somebody who knows about them to realize how well they were doing.  They were even putting out beautiful new above-ground growth in the warm, humid, sunny greenhouse, but the tops still looked tiny.)

The yearly inundation has begun

Every single year, right around 1st December – just like clockwork – the yearly inundation of seed, plant, and spring-planted bulb catalogs begins.  Especially seed catalogs.  I have gotten several catalogs already, even though there are still things growing in the garden!  Still, I know that soon the garden will likely lie dormant, with just the hardiest semi-evergreen and evergreen things still growing – like the lavender, standing tall – and it will be lovely to sit with a mug of herbal tea, alternately staring out at a snowscape and looking through catalogs, daydreaming.  So for now, I’m collecting them in their own little pile, biding my time till the dreaming takes over.

Indoor plant update as I’m finally posting this on 17th Dec.

The aphids have gotten worse on the pineapple sage, though they seem to be primarily attacking one stalk, which seems to be the weakest stalk (yet more credence for the idea that pests tend to gravitate towards plants that are already weakened/damaged/whatever in some way).  There are still some aphids on the tweedia as well.  I got out the paperwhites and amaryllises that I’d oversummered around the time I wrote most of this post, and have been watering them about once a week.  The (seven) paperwhites are resprouting, one at a time, but the three amaryllises have yet to do so.  I also potted up ‘Vera,’ one of the two amaryllises I got this autumn, and she’s got one bud so far, and got an early Christmas present of the amaryllis ‘Ferrari’ – though there was no color specified with the tag, I correctly assumed it was vivid red – which also already has a bud.  I also got a little bulb garden as an early Christmas present, and that has some leaves so far but no buds.  I have one more amaryllis and some more paperwhites (a different kind, that the label calls ‘Chinese sacred lily’), but I’ve yet to pot those up.

Snow and ice (written at time of posting)

After flurrying some earlier in the winter, it finally snowed a little around the time I wrote most of this post, and then – after tremendous heavy rains that lasted three days last week – it snowed, iced, sleeted, and rained yesterday.  The garden now has a light covering of snow, though it’s melting somewhat on this above-freezing day.  My last patch of fall-blooming crocuses is still going, five buds poking out through the snow (that are open when it’s sunny in the garden, it’s just that the front garden gets very little sun in winter compared to summer).  Amazingly, some other things are still growing through the snow as well.

Baby, it’s cold outside 19 October 2008

Wunderground.com says the nearest (unofficial) weather station to me is currently registering a temperature of 47 F with a windchill of 41 F.  Accuweather.com says the nearest official weather station to me is currently registering 49 F but that the sharp, cold gusts mean the air actually feels like it’s 36 F.   I’ve just been outside digging up more plants and I can say it sure does feel that way.  The wind is so cold it numbed my fingers, and the soil feels frigid.  Last night they had changed the forecast to where it was supposed to be in the upper 30s F again tonight (as the last two nights) but I was suspicious of this assertion given the way the weather has been feeling, and wasn’t overly surprised to see that when I got up this morning they had revoked the changed forecast and had issued a Frost Advisory, my town’s first one of the autumn.  There is alreaady no more basil at the farmers’ market, no more cut flowers, no more melons or okra, and only greenhouse-grown tomatoes and eggplants.  (All the farms are farther away from the city than I am, and always get frost before we do.)

Yesterday I dug up the Cuban oregano and the Aztec sweet herb and potted them up in an emergency pot.  Aztec sweet herb turned out to have rooted as it went along, and its extra roots were dangling in the air.  I thought I’d repot it this morning and it would be OK.  By the time I got up, though, it had begun to wilt, starting at the tips of its woody branches and working inwards towards the center of the plant.  I repotted it into a window box where it can wander around to its hearts content today, so hopefully it will recover.  Since it seemed to do pretty well underplanted with taller things this year, I added two lantanas that I dug up today to the window box too.  I dug up ‘Samantha,’ the variegated-leaf, yellow-flowering one I mentioned yesterday, and ‘Red Spread.’  ‘Lavender Trailing’ is still flowering away, but it seems much easier to find locally, so I prioritized the others.  In my experience, lantana can be killed by the first frost or take several frosts before dying, so we’ll see how it does tonight.

I also dug up the pineapple sage, and realized when i did so that it finally, FINALLY has tiny buds (we’ll see if it blooms indoors), and the two Cape mallows, because I read in that book on overwintering that they bloom well indoors (if only I’d known that, and how hard ‘Elegant Lady’ would be to find this season, I would have dug her up and brought her inside last autumn!!!), and the three rosemary plants (‘Arp,’ ‘Irene,’ and ‘Tuscan Blue,’ as I mentioned last entry), and the one heliotrope that didn’t die over the summer.

Only after I was inside, with cold fingers and sore knees, did I realize I’d forgotten to dig up the two other plants whose cold-hardiness I’m least sure of, Salvia discolor and the agapanthus. It was also only when I dug up the by now quite robust ‘Tuscan Blue’ that I realized that the French tarragon and the culander (Mexican coriander) were still alive as small plants at its feet.  I don’t know if the fussy culander is worth digging up and keeping inside for the winter.  I don’t even know if it’s possible; like with the gotu kola I brought in Friday, I’ve yet to read a single thing about overwintering it inside.

The quicksilver, centaurea ‘Colchester White,’ and the agastaches and salvais that aren’t hardy here are all still out there as well, but all but the quicksilver are hardier than the stuff I dug up, and last year taught me that a quicksilver that’s big and healthy and has been growing well all season can sustain some frost damage before actually dying, putting out new leaves to replace the frost-killed ones – though I might dig it up today anyway so that it doesn’t have to endure the damage.  (By the way, quicksilver is in the same genus as Cuban oregano, Plectranthus, and they look similar to one another, with quilted fuzzy leaves, though quicksilver’s leaves are silvery and my Cuban oregano’s are pale greenish.  [I say “my Cuban oregano” because there is apparently also a variegated-leaf Cuban oregano out there, its leaves edged in white.])

The past 24 hours or so have been so windy that many trees that had half or two-thirds of their leaves a day ago are now completely bare or nearly so.

---

Frost Advisory
National Weather Service
Statement as of 11:15 AM EDT on October 19, 2008

A frost advisory remains in effect from 2 am to 8 am EDT Monday.

Temperatures are expected to fall into the low and mid 30s late tonight. Light winds will allow areas of frost to develop.

A frost advisory means that frost is possible. Sensitive outdoor plants may be killed if left uncovered.

The Great Autumn Migration 18 October 2008

The great autumn migration has begun – the moving of tender plants from outdoors to indoors.   At sunrise today it was 38 F, not factoring in the brisk wind.  It’s supposed to reach the mid-30s tonight, and there’s a larger chance of an actual frost tomorrow night.  Yesterday I moved the potted tender plants indoors (except for the petunias, which were already not doing too well, and the potted purple basil, which was already flowering anyway), and the number of plants in my apartment has dramatically increased:

Before the First Migration:

• 12 catci
• 3 aloe: 1 Aloe vera, 1 Tiger’s Jaw aloe, 1 miniature aloe I got at the fall plant sale
• 3 other succulents: a Christmas cactus (also from the fall plant sale), a jade plant, and an echeveria
• numerous other houseplants: umbrella plant, variegated ivy, dieffenbachia, 2 sad African violets, 2 philodendrons, pothos, spider plant, tender cyclamen, and an unknown variegated plant

After the First Migration, this is what has been added:

• 7 pots of tender geraniums, 2-4 plants in each pot (mix of ornamental & scented ones)
• 2 pots of tuberose bulbs (1 pot single-flowering, 1 pot double-flowering)
• bay leaf tree
• lemongrass
• brugmansia ‘Charles Grimaldi’ (one of the oldest brugmansia cultivars still available in the US)
• a pot containing 2 fucshias and a tender sweet violet
• tweedia
• gotu kola
• cestrum ‘Orange Zest’
• snail vine

And I still have to pot up some things that are out there in the garden.

[The brugmansia and some of the geraniums have already survived one winter inside.  The rest of the plants are spending their first winter indoors.]

These are the plants I’m most strongly considering adding to the indoor fray:

• My three rosemary plants (‘Arp’, ‘Tuscan Blue’, and ‘Irene’)
• Flowering tobaccos – supposed to be easy to overwinter inside, according to a book I read this month
• Coleus plants & irisene & Persian shield & quicksilver (all foliage plants)
• Salvia discolor, which is difficult to find in the US
• Cuban oregano (a relative of coleus, it looks like a very fuzzy one), which is common as a houseplant so should be easy to overwinter, and is difficult to find in my region
• Lantana ‘Samantha’, the variegated lantana I grew this year
• Salvia ‘Indigo Spires’, which is not hardy in my climate, and is currently blooming away in the garden
• Agapanthus

Exactly where I would fit all these, I am not yet sure!  The table is already nearly full, and that’s with some of the tender plants being elsewhere in the apartment.

On top of that, when I went to the nursery greenhouse today to get a present, I ended up getting two blooming African violets and a begonia.  The begonia was because I’d never seen the cultivar ‘Escargot’ locally and I find it so charming (its leaves intricately curl like a snail’s shell), and the African violets because having sad, diseased ones makes me sad, and now that the A/C is out of the east window, African violets will do so well there (I know because before they became diseased at some point after being moved out of the window to make room for the A/C in May, my older African violets were happy in it), and so I got a couple of blooming ones.  I think I’d best put a moratorium on further plant purchases, though.

(I apologize for the lack of apostrophes in captions; WordPress’s photo software won’t allow them.)

Tender plants, just brought in yesterday: Brugmansia Charles Grimaldi is the huge plant in the foreground.

Newly indoor plants from the other side. My apartment kitchen is very large (by city standards) but makes very poor use of space, with most of it simply empty floor/walls. I take advantage of this in winter by setting up a large card table and putting most of the tender plants on it. One of the two windows faces south and the other faces east, so it gets heaps of sunlight in wintertime.

Brugmansia Charles Grimaldi, newly indoors & with six buds: I felt badly bringing this inside since it seemed to be doing so well outside, but kept reminding myself that a slightly sadder indoor plant was better than a newly dead (frost-killed) outdoor plant. I will be curious to see if its buds open indoors.

Tuberose, blooming indoors: The last tuberose was budded instead of blooming when I brought it in yesterday. Overnight, the first bud opened! This is the double-flowered variety. Tuberoses, popular in Victorian days, have a scent that makes me imagine that this is what Tahiti smells like.

Pothos (foreground), one of the philodendrons, and five of the tender geraniums (4 scented, 1 ornamental).

A closer look at the geraniums from the last photo. The 4 scented ones are some of the scented ones I mentioned here that I got at the end-of-season sale at the nursery. The pink-flowered ornamental one is the one I got at the farmers market this year.

Gotu kola, newly indoors: I have yet to find anything on overwintering gotu kola, a tender medicinal plant, so thus far I am making it up as I go along. I set it on the window seat when the sun lights it, and move it up to a shelf (out of kittypaw reach) the rest of the time. The pot is one I bought from a local potmaker last year.

Cacti in south window: The cacti seem to do well all year round in this south-facing window. If you look closely, you can see the Earth Machine composter in the background, which I now use to store finished compost that hasnt been sieved yet.

Houseplants in eastern window (L-R): Tiger Jaw aloe, 2 African violets, spider plant, another philodendron, jade plant.

Aloe vera: After taking the above photos, I rearranged one of my kitchen shelves to make a space for the Aloe vera, which loves such a direct-sun spot as this and which should be safer away from the newly indoor plants (just in case any have brought along a disease or pest).

The aforementioned present that I got at the greenhouse today, an indoor orchid. I wont be visiting till tomorrow, so for today I have it in the kitchen, sequestered from the other plants to limit chances of disease/pest transfer.