Cucumber culprits

My cucumber plant was thriving, but then (cue the ominous pipe organ) after returning from a long weekend camping trip I discovered that most of its leaves were brown, brittle and what was left of anything green had been chewed to bits. The little culprits blended in so well with the green stems that I didn't spot them right away. Green caterpillars, those jerks! Once I discovered the first onme I was able to quickly spot 2 more, lounging on their green couch, being all fat and happy. Their vicious little bite marks were visible on the only small fruit that had started growing.

In researching cucumber culprits, I've narrowed it down to cabbage loopers - green inchworm style caterpillars. I found varying sources on what the adult species is, either nocturnal brown moth or cabbage white butterfly

All sources said that the cabbage looper is "very destructive" to plants due to its "voracious consumption" of leaves. Watch out plants!

Solutions: One suggestion is to attract beneficial insects by planting flowers, such as marigolds, calendula, sunflower, daisy, alyssum or dill nearby. These plants attract insects that attack and kill cabbage loopers and cabbage butterflies.
http://www.bhg.com/gardening/pests/insects-diseases-weeds/stop-cabbage-loopers/

Another solution is to cover the plant with netting to keep the insects out.

Photos above by J. Zacarias

Spring growth

Schefflera has baby leaves sprouting everywhere

Avocado plant leaves are growing and unfolding...exciting to see

Asiatic lily is getting ready to bloom again

Mint Juleps & Mojitos, coming up!

I was happy to stumble upon this large patch of mint growing in my neighborhood. It smelled so sweetly fragrant that I could not resist pinching a leaf off for some scratch and sniff action; the fuzzy leaves released a wonderful fragrance when rubbed between two fingers.

I returned the next day with a sharp pair of scissors to take cut some clippings in order to try propagating them at home. I am currently trying 3 methods of growing new mint plants from the cuttings. I started with clippings from the same mint shrub on 3/28/11, and I am excited to see which method works the best over the next few weeks.

1. I cut a stem with 4-5 sections and plant directly in soil. I covered each node with about 1/2" of dirt in this pot, making sure that the leaves at each node stayed exposed above the dirt. I am watering daily, and making sure it gets a few hours of sunlight each day and if I've got it right, roots will grow from each node, and I will have more chances of the mint plant thriving than with a single root system. I think I should have used a longer narrow planter to give the cutting more room to root and grow, but we shall see!

2. I placed cuttings upright directly into soil, am watering daily and rotating between a sunny outside perch and indirect sunlight indoors.
3. I placed 2 cuttings in water, which are sitting on an indoor shelf with daily indirect sunlight. After several weeks I expect to see roots begin to grow from the stem, and at that point I will transfer to dirt.

New geranium growth

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine--
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--
And that was scary--
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

Theodore Roethke

Cyclamen's cycle of life

This cyclamen is another plant that came back from the dead. You can see in the top 2 photos that the leaves grow out from a round tuber. At one point all that was remaining of this plant was the tuber and roots into the soil. Recently this spring it has come back with the sun and good watering, and has sprouted a full array of new leaves. The flowers are white, and I hope it will blossom again.

Symbolism
I read according to folklore a woman in labor can wear a cyclamen flower to speed up her delivery, but she should never come in contact with the flower early in her pregnancy because it creates the risk that she will abort. The flowers also contain a toxin, and are thought to counteract poison from certain snake bites.

According to some sources on Wiccan beliefs, the flower is thought to represent farewell, death and resignation because it is the only flower still blooming in the winter months when other flowers are gone for the cold spell.

I found 2 poems that relate the cyclamen to the deaths of children:

The gentle cyclamen with dewy eye
Breathes o'er her lifeless babe the parting sigh:
and bending low to earth, with pious hands
inhumes her dear departed in the sandss
"Sweet nursling! withering in thy tender hour.
Oh, sleep, " she cries, "and rise a fairer flower!"

-Erasmus Darwin (1731 - 1802)

Illusions are children
who went out to find cyclamens in the field
and never came back

-Yehuda Amichai

Fern babies

Baby ferns curled up, awaiting birth into the afternoon sun. Fuzzy spiral hugging itself, no womb to protect it, only a new world to open into and begin to explore. It awakens slowly, becoming a part of the frond community it shares a home with.

Baby ferns are a traditional dish of northern New England, especially Maine, called fiddleheads. Though New England is my homeland, born in New Hampshire, raised in Vermont until 8 years old and then Maine through high school, I've only dined on fiddleheads once. They were delicious, but also dowsed in so much butter that any green would've tasted delicious. They reminded me of small sauteed softened brussel sprouts.




The fern frond seen below is what the white fuzzy baby fern above unfurled into. The baby spider found a new playground on the fern's freshly watered greenth, swinging from a thread, climbing and falling in repetitive game.

Picasso and I, working on a vineyard

This philodendron plant makes me think of working in fields of grape vines...it helps this fantasy that it hangs out in our kitchen next to the wine rack and glasses. It creates a nice curtain to the corner of the kitchen, and reminds me to eat bright greens and add fresh herbs to our food.

This may actually be a pothos plant, but doesn't seem to have the mottled white or yellow striations that pothos are known to have, so I'll stick with philodendron for now.

This plant does well with filtered sunlight that comes in through the sliding glass doors across the room. It takes plenty of water, and after freshly watering I will see small droplets appear on the tips of the leaves at the very bottom vines, so it's clear that the plant is doing its job of distributing water to every stem.

Symbolism & history

To pagans, the philodendron plant has long been considered a symbol of health, to others, it is thought to be an emblem for abundance and wealth. As a gift, these plants are frequently given in pots or hanging baskets to welcome neighborhood newcomers; to those who have just purchased their first home; or to wish the recipient well as they move on to a new path.

The philodendron plant is absolutely one of the most popular houseplants today, but the history of its collection can be dated as far back as 1644, when the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave began acquiring them from the wild. Many other explorers sought to find out more about this extensive genus; the first such exploration was done by Charles Plumier, who managed to gather and classify at least six new species.

In the United States, the philodendron did not really take off until the mid-1930s when a nurseryman by the name of John Masek noticed the potential of this plant. Considering that they were easy to grow, not to mention low maintenance, he began propagating and selling them to florist shops.

Pablo Picasso frequently used these plants to shape unusual scenes – such as his 1929 work, “Woman in the Garden,” where the nymph Daphne was transformed into a large brush of vines.


symbolism and history source: http://flowerinfo.org/philodendron-plants

Baby avocado tree is a survivor

This avocado tree was started for me by a former house-mate, who grew it from an avocado pit. He suspended the pit over a glass of water by poking toothpicks into 4 quadrants, and balanced the pit on the glass so that about 3/4 of it was submerged in water. After a few weeks of sitting on the windowsill like this, the pit had split almost fully in half due to growth of the beginnings of roots below and a sprout reaching to burst out from the top of the pit. At this point, he planted the pit in potted dirt, left it in a partially sunny area on our front porch, watered and tended to it. In a few months the shoot had grown several inches tall, and soon was sprouting its first leaves.

The baby avocado plant, not even a year old yet, was moved to an outdoor balcony when I moved and was subjected t
o the horrible air quality during a particularly bad fire season in the San Fernando Valley.

This plant had a sister plant that did not survive; its leaves were fully singed by the ashes in the air from forest fires, in combination with the incredible desert heat in August in "the valley" in Los Angeles county. The remaining plant stood strong, though it lost many of its leaves. The leaves you see now are mostly all new growth over the past year. In the close-up photos you get a closer look at the small sprouts of new growth that are getting ready to unfold into new leaves.

It might not look like much now, but to finally see this new growth emerging more than a year after being exposed to the harmful fire air, it really is an amazing comeback for this little plant.


Symbolism
This is a fun one - the Aztecs believed that the avocado fruit contained aphrodisiac properties, and named it Ahacatl which means 'green testicle'. This makes sense when you examine the shape of the fruit, something I definitely never noticed until researching for this blog.

Avocados are also believed to represent love, and are thought to be a good gift between lovers. Obviously we've just learned one reason why, wink, wink.

We see avocado as an ingredient in many skin care products, as it is high in vitamin E and the oils are very soothing.

Geraniums and war

Geranium

I rescued this potted pink geranium from an outdoor staircase at my work where it had been neglected. The plant had grown such long roots, that they were spilling out of the water drainage hole at the bottom of its ceramic pot. The flower has come back to life during the past month perched on my balcony ledge where it gets good afternoon sun. It's dried up stalks are renewed with new leaves, and blossoms that just appeared this week.

Symbolism
I haven't found much on the symbolism of pink geraniums in particular, but pink flowers generally symbolize a sweet kindness, and often nostalgia to childhood. However, perhaps you've had a glimpse of a supposed darker side of flower-gifting (see my post on florigraphy.)

Instead of playful childhood happiness, pink is also rumored to symbolize doubt. For example, I'm sending you pink flowers because "I don't get you. Why are you acting this way?" or "I'm not sure this is working, but I'm not ready to send the yellow flowers yet". (yellow being rumored to symbolize that the sender actually loves someone else - see my florigraphy post for amusing notes on this subject).

Back to geraniums. Like I mentioned, I couldn't find much about pink geraniums in particular but did get interested in red geraniums, which I read somewhere might not even be in the geranium family proper, as true geraniums are usually blue, but the red ones have become the most iconic 'geranium' there is.

I found the red geranium has ties to 2 post-war times - the War of 1812 and post-World War II. In regards to the War of 1812, there is a battlefield, Lundy's Lane Battlefield, in Niagra Falls that was thought to be the bloodiest one of this war. Years later, a teacher named Ruth Redmond saw the town of Niagra Falls coming up as a tourist destination so she started buying parts of the battlefield land to save it from urban development. Before she died she gave the land to the city in agreement that they would turn it into a historical park to commemorate the men who lost their lives there. Sources vary, but apparently Ms. Redmond loved the red geranium and had planted it all over the Lundy Lane land. After her death a campaign was led to make the flower the official symbol of the War of 1812; it's not clear whether this is official, but residents of the town still plant red geraniums in the park in honor of the lives lost.

The red geranium also has a place in the post-war WWII era in the 1950's idealized American home. The flower was affordable by the middle class, and its bright color seemed to represent a positive new outlook. Many people who grew up in this time relate red geraniums to a fond memory of home because they were so prevalent in and outside residences.

You can see the potted geraniums on the windowsill in this 1950's ad for a new sink (the yellow sink will complement the red flower), linking the plant to the idealized housewife who gazes out the window at her beautiful family and lifts a heeled foot in merry playful contentment at her perfect life. The flower seem the cherry-on-top to the depiction of the 'perfect' home of this era. The red geranium carried symbolism of change, stability, idealism and happiness that people of this time were seeking.

Red geraniums also appear in a literary favorite of mine, Harper Lee's "How to Kill a Mockingbird", as a symbol that all humankind have good somewhere in them, even the most corrupt. The beautiful flowers are tended to outside a decrepit home by Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a corrupt man who wrongly accuses a black man of raping her. Atticus Finch is the single dad lawyer, with a strong heart and moral value, who defends Tom Robinson in court, and tries to teach his 2 children the lessons of the red geranium - good exists in even the most corrupt of situations and people.

Now, if only the solution to finding my 'perfect' life was as easy as tying on an apron and getting started on growing some red geraniums!

Lily love comes back to life

This asiatic lily is a perennial, which means it's a flower that seems to die, but is actually hibernating for a period and then emerges each spring renewed with new growth and blossoms. I bought this lily last summer when it was brilliantly blossoming without realizing it was a perennial, so after all the flowers fell off and the stems browned and died, I thought I had destroyed it. Luckily I didn't trash it, but just set it out of sight on my patio. I was sad and embarrassed to have murdered the sweet little plant! This was last July, and just recently in February I happened to noticed something green behind a table on the patio and was ecstatic to discover this little gem had come back to life with new stalks and full bright leaves. At that point I realized I had a bulb perennial and paraded it around the apartment trying to get my boyfriend to understand the treasure I had just discovered. I am excited to see what color the blossoms are; I remember them as yellow, but cannot quite remember so it will be a nice surprise this spring.

April update: it's looking like a shade of purple.

Symbolism
I have found a lot of meaning related to the Christian religion - the lily representing purity, chastity and innocence. The Virgin Mary is often seen with white lilies, and the ones that have 3 petals are thought to represent the holy trinity. In other sources I've seen the flower related to sexuality and fertility, mainly because of the phallic pistil that protrudes from the center of the flower.


















4/27/11: Aha! it has blossomed, the color mystery is solved.