The front tree has finally dropped its leaves so this corner is getting some nice fall evening light and ready for some plants to move up here for the winter
In which I make a real ass Youtube video where I rant at the camera for 10 minutes. Do I have too many plants??? How many plants is too many plants??? Is social media as a whole distancing us from our own sense of what we personally enjoy and encouraging us to buy things we don’t really need/want constantly just because they are “popular”? We just don’t know!
This is definitely a good video for bringing up that overlooked elephant in the room with houseplant collections; when is it too many plants, how do you know, and how to manage it.
For myself what was “too many plants” somewhat went full circle; back in my apartment what was “enough plants” became “far too many plants” once I moved back into the farmhouse; the smaller windows, narrow shelves, colder temps, and scattered growing spaces made it far too much to manage and from that many plants died on me or suffered.
However once the farmhouse got the addition built on I was able to move all the surviving houseplants into one room with larger windows and warmer growing space (and also return to a weekly plant watering/check regime), it went back to the plateau of “just enough plants”. When I repotted the long-overdue-to-repot cacti and succulents (mostly to clay to help them breath and avoid rot which is a BIG issue in a colder/moister growing environment) it lead to me having to finally discard a handful of still-suffering houseplants to make room (Kalanchoe,
Echeveria & a Mammillaria to name the main discards); the amount of space taken was the same but the number of overall plants diminished.
At this point I think the only plants that I would possibly WANT to still add to the collection would be certain Sansevieria species/cultivars (probably Moonshine & S. cylindrica), some Schlumbergeras (mainly orange/red flowered varieties as I lost my originals). Certain Hoya species as well as Clivia cultivars/species
I’d consider as well, but as it is now those two genera are growing-space hogs, so I would have to figure out how to still make it manageable if I WERE to add such species to the collection.
Aloe ‘Blizzard’ and Aloe ‘Snowstorm’ because I guess I’m getting into Aloes now
So you like begonias and beer, you’re interested in plant breeding, your escape fantasy is a cottage in the woods, and now you’re getting into aloes… you won’t even have to tell me when you start trying to grow tropicals outdoors and peppers from seed because we’ll be the same person at that point.
I’m plannin on saving some of my ornamental pepper seeds for next year if that counts?
One of the Begonia grandis in my mom’s garden, bloomin some male flowers right now. This plant is hardy to zone 6 and we are borderline 6a, some winters more like 5 which then tend to be followed by really wet springs in clay soil which most plants that like good drainage don’t appreciate… but both clumps have come back two years, albeit slowly. This year I took cuttings and plan to take more before the frost, just in case.
Kihaku-Gato's Garden Blog (tumblr import) 