AV babies follow-up

Lookit all dem babbes >v<

Excluding 'Jolly Mel' and
Mac's Walkabout Uluru', all AVs have taken good root, and almost every cultivar has produced a baby or three. I also have some additional cultivars here. Let's count them.

Top tray: plug plant size babies.

Middle tray: decently established babies.

Bottom tray: emerging babies.

Entire top row: 'Blue Tail Fly'. Mama leaf and four babies. This cultivar is the absolute top babymaker, she was the first to breed and there were perhaps six or seven babies in total when I split them. A few were much smaller than the primaries and there were buds that looked like even more babies. I saved the original cutting for the family portrait but have now discarded it. Had I kept it my room would in all likelihood have been flooding with BTFs by New Year's.

Bottom row, two pots from left: 'Shiawassee Trail'. Fairly early to procreate, focusing on two large babies and not budding endlessly like the BTF. The mama leaf is in the right pot¹, you can see it's much wilder in shape compared to the classic girl-type baby leaves. It'll be exciting to see how the leaf shape matures.

Bottom row, three pots from right: 'Peridot's Sky Titan'. One of the earliest and most prolific cultivars, with two separated young plants and three babies with the mama leaf (middle pot).

Top left: my sister's light pink NOID semi-mini. It was accidentally overwatered by its caretaker and had to be topped. It rooted quickly in a little tea light holder and is now recuperating with my own Usambara darlings, seeing how they enjoy, ahem... much more focused care ².

Top row, middle pots: 'Senk's Azalea Trail'. Two leaves, each with one well-developed baby. The one on left has a curious deviant stem structure, I'll cover that in a future post. These ones weren't too early to spring up, but their development has been speedy ever since.

Top right: 'Humako Oriental'. The mother plant breaks leaves off easily, and I wanted a clone in any case, to give a friend. This cultivar is a mall purchase.

Middle row: 'Ozornye Volki'. It took a while to get going, and pushed out four or five almost equally sized babies at once.

Bottom left, two pots: 'The Madam'. One of the slower cultivars. Even the biggest baby only has four leaves.

Bottom row, middle two pots: 'Dancin' Trail'. Two mama leaves, each with baby. The itty bitty rosettes are simply adorable, and the left one has the most beautiful emerald green leaves. This was an extra cultivar sent as a gift with AV leaf batch 1 from Fialki.de.

Bottom right: 'Wild Irish Rose'. One ponderous leaf! This itty bitty baby emerged only a month ago, when its batchmate BTF had already produced a plantlet close to bloomable size.

Top left: 'LE Ajsedora'. Not in any hurry, the very last leaf to remain without even a hint of babies. It has a great root system but since it arrived in the first AV batch, other batches have arrived, taken root, and made babies.

Top middle: 'Senk's Say What?'. This was like many others rooted in a little plastic baggie, but reacted unlike any other: after developing roots, it began to grow tiny rosettes from its leaf edges, and seemingly none from the petiole. It remains uncertain whether this one will make it.

Top right: 'Edee's Rosebud Trail'. In a little plastic baggie, its little rosette nearly succumbed to rot, but seems to have recuperated.

Bottom left: 'Rob's Pewter Bells'. I can't remember how I got this cutting, but to my happy surprise, I found the little white rosette two weeks ago, hidden beneath the mama leaf's blade.

Bottom middle and right: 'Ness' Crinkle Blue'. Obtained two leaves in a trade, one leaf perished but left a truly itty baby of just one leaf but good roots ³, and the other leaf has two babies.

Losses remain at 'Mac's Walkabout Uluru' (my only clackamas variety) and 'Jolly Mel', both of which were lost very early into the propagation.

1. It's the green ruffly mess at the bottom. ^↩
2. Note to self: draft a post on my houseplant upbringing. ^↩
3. Look for a dull green perlite grain sized speck a bit to the right from the exact middle of the pot.^↩

AV babies are here II & AV baby losses

  ~Now featuring: antique post draft, relic from mid-June 2016.~  

Batch II of AV babies has arrived! They come from the excellent Polish site http://africanviolets.pl and arrived in a flash, packed extremely gently in a 30 x 30 x 30 cm styrofoam box, padded with airbags. My only complaint is that both 'Uluru' leaves arrived with translucent (pre-rotting/lightly crushed) spots at the base of the blade, and neither stood a chance to root in my hands. Perhaps they could have been saved with more experienced care.

ATTN: Following descriptions are not official and include my additions and alterations.

1. 'Mac's Walkabout Uluru'  — Single-semidouble pink pansy. Crown variegated medium green, white, and pink, clackamas. Miniature. (G. MacDonald, #10515)
2. 'Senk's Say What'  — Single purple superwasp. Variegated medium green, deeply scalloped diva foliage. Semiminiature trailer. (D. Follett/R. Senk, #9866)
3. 'Jolly Mel'  — Single-semidouble dark purple pansy. Crown variegated medium green and gold. Semiminiature. (H. Pittman, #9866)

NOID AVs dethroned; Mystery NOID revealed; baby AV culling

  ~Now featuring: antique post draft, relic from mid-June 2016.~  

More Lips NOID Pink
<sup>Pink reached a respectable bloom and I decided to deflower her entirely. Blooms had all emerged flawless and none had tell-tale pollen sprinkles, and I had no evidence of activity on or under leaves, but the tap test was consistently positive with very tiny young thrips larvae.

With each stalk I removed, at least one or two fat larvae came exposed and scuttling for cover. They were yellow and about as large as a dash symbol on a newspaper--the baby larvae had been colourless and one third the length, one quarter the width. Very very tiny indeed.

I counted Pink's bloom: no faded blooms, 25 open or opening blooms, 19 buds, 6 stalks of which the weakest had two buds only and the best had 9. Three more stalks were just emerging from the crown. I may have to rename her Pinksplosion.</sup>

<sup>NOID Edged White
White w/Violet Edge has been debudded and will be so for the entirety of the thrips war. She is a mature plant, but even at purchase had had multiple leaves broken off by rough handling--she required grooming the first thing. Her older petioles had suspected bend damage, rusty brownish orange marks on the pale green petiole's underside right at base, which has contributed to a few more lost leaves over the months. Result: plug-sized rosette. She's also one of the pots confirmed for direct contamination so I decided to take her out, remove all of the soil, keep her in pesticide-laced water culture for a little while, and then downpot her in moler for her second chance.

I don't think I'm keeping her in long term, but since her leaves are so beautiful--easily my favourite out of my current bloomable stock--I'm willing to give her a bit of special treatment to get her clean, get her fill in, and gift her. There's exquisite harmony between her white and violet blooms and her crown variegation -like foliage with new leaf green at top and deep cucumber green down.</sup>

Note: after writing this I managed to drop her, and sadly, she was too mangled to be worth growing back to blooming size. Her memory will live on with those of my named cultivars that I selected for their beautiful leaves.

Alas, sweet prince; only dreams now.

^{Mystery NOID
The Mystery NOID, the one I bought in early spring and totally, completely forgot about. (Raises questions on the amount of meds I was on when I bought her.) She rebloomed, and turns out she's a bog common single dark violet pansy with flounced edges. She's been clean the entire time, so I sprayed her for safety's sake, made her a little cord hanger and an introduction card and hung her in a semi-public place for takesies.}

She does have very lovely velvety indigo to her flowers and a good green . Still, a definite "what was I thinking?" purchase.

<sup>AV Baby Culling
In anticipation of tons of named babies, I have culled my AV babies as follows:

* all untagged babies</sup>
* all Mystery NOID babies
^{* all smaller duplicates of tagged babies}

totalling 7 removals in total. In addition, I have had to discard both leaves of Mac's Walkabout Uluru (AV baby batch 2) due to beginning rot at the base of the leaf. This was evident from the day they arrived, but I didn't recognise the issue back then.

NOIDs, mystery NOIDs, and mystery NOID babies

First, breaking news: pink More Lips NOID has aborted her seedpod. Apparent mistreatment saw the base of the peduncle rotten and nothing could be done. Experts suspect that confinement in poorly ventilated solitary quarantine cell is to blame. The pod is plump, but only a couple of months into development, and authorities strictly warn against hope for seed viability.

She's in full bloom though, and beautiful.

Her sparkling raspberry pink is gorgeous.

She's also now confirmed as infected--I'd have lifted her out of the solitary confinement cell for the photo, but then I saw the thrips larvae scooting on the bottom of the cell. Despite regular peeping, I haven't spied activity on flowers, buds, or new baby leaves. She'll get sprayed, of course, and will spend additional weeks in confinement (a large white drainless pot with DYI skylight lid). Luckily she seems to like it there just fine.

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Most of my AVs right now are good ole NOIDs¹. Here's something of a list:

- More Lips cultivar with plain single pink pansies that open a soft baby pink and mature into a deep raspberry. Currently breaking in full bloom.
- Ylitalo cultivar with frilled single white pansies with violet edges. Currently de-budded due to war against a straggling cell of guerilla thrips.
- Ylitalo cultivar with attractive full rosette. Total mystery. I don't think I've saved any photo of the thing in bloom and have no memory of her. She may be single white pansy with pink/lilac thumbprints but only time or archaeological findings will tell. Currently making tiny little buds.
- 3 babies of an Ylitalo single white star/pansy with heavy bloom, robust habit, and slightly lighter green leaves with white backs.

- 3 young plants of a local traditional single plain darkish violet pansy with plain leaves
- 2 nearly established suckers of the edged Ylitalo
- 1-2 babies of multiple different Absolute Mystery NOIDs

Most of those mystery babies come from leaves I had rooting this spring, and every single leaf has  produced profuse numbers of babies.² I just separated and potted three pots into six, and had to discard at least six more babies. Later dates will see me culling more.

Of course these leaves weren't mystery NOIDs originally -- I even had an archival system, of sorts, to identify leaf per parent plant. Well brain stuff happened and I've lost much of that archive. Coming up: baby AV batch 2.

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1. To be less than exact, I have 1 named adult, 3 NOID adults, 3 NOID youngsters, 11 NOID babies/leaves with babies, and 12 named cuttings rooting.  ^↩
2. I guess discarding tertiary babies is a fair toll for getting some experience and confidence in leaf propagation before my inevitable collapse³ into full-out AV fancy. ^↩
3. Inevitable, but not necessarily occurring in the near future. I've noticed that my taste is pretty different from what's in vogue in the AV world. Story of my life, eh. ^↩

Guerilla thrips

I've been having a little thrips situation going on (ok a thrips situation is never 'little' but it's not like bugs are easy to find here). I was right in the middle of attempting to self 'Humako Oriental' on her last remaining buds from purchase date, when I noticed that she had pollen sprinkled... and yes, I saw a thrips larva, right there at the top of the stigma, shamelessly munching on the pollen I had so painstakingly swabbed there. Luckily (?) HumOri is a dropper, so I could just pluck the bells off causing minimal stress, and spray the heck out of her without necessarily having to sacrifice the seedpod prospects.¹

I promptly quarantined HumOri to the bathroom, but new larvae kept appearing one by one so I dug deeper, and found their sanctuary... a new baby leaf, the size of a 5-cent coin, that was just beginning to crack open... a larva clubhouse! They had been hanging around in there during the spray and probably hadn't even left their fuzzy little spray raid shelter yet. Grrr. I plucked that leaf, and the next one I sprayed, holding it open with a pair of tweezers. And of course, a repeat spray all over the plant.

Then I debudded and sprayed the rest of my AVs and now they're quarantined in the bathroom save for two cases: the new babies, who have been planted in sprayed soil and sprayed themselves, but reside under cover in the kitchen, and my pink More Lips NOID who had JUST been breaking her first bud of what is going to be a most magnificent bloom! ² It's a big deal for me, because this is my first own AV and also the first time I managed to have a rebloom on anything. ³

Anyways, I'm on my way to continue spraying and quarantining the remaining plants in my living room. Thank goodness most of them have been living in the balcony for a good while! I'll also need to sterilize my moler and my softened coir and and my bag of houseplant soil which all have been the best places to ambush adult thrips. They probably haven't laid eggs there due to significant local lack of yummy AV pollen, but I want to be sure.

Pros:
- HumOri is the only plant to have shown a single thrips
- with multiple rooms, a few coverable trays, and now an all-new plant light rig, I have it pretty good for a proper quarantine
- I'm so dang nearsighted

Cons:
- pink More Lips NOID remains a high-value target for thrips and needs to stay under cover
- this isn't over yet

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1.  One of those proved failed yesterday and I have little hope for the other one--it looks a bit pale and skinny, but I'll let it hang around until I'm sure.^↩
2.  I.e. 5+ stalks, all with 3 buds at least, some with 6 or even 8. ^↩
3.  And my mother's indoor gardening habits certainly didn't give me any expectations of ever seeing more than one or two blossoms on an AV, if even that.^↩

AV babies are here!

Now that I see them together in person, I'm surprised that there are so many (semi) minis. Seems like standard fashion isn't much to my taste. I don't like huge blooms, and I have very limited preferences for doubles.

Here they are! My all-seven-sorts! These little guys come from http://www.fialki.de/shop, a German-Russian webshop based in Germany. They were here within a week after I pressed the button to order them, and were safely and carefully packaged in tiny ziploc bags and good labels. All leaves were in good condition, one or two with rather minor faults. As you can see, number 5 was sent with a back-up leaf and that I also received two leaves of a bonus sort (8)! Great communication from fialki.de, I can recommend them whole-heartedly.

ATTN: Following descriptions are not official and include my additions and alterations.

1. 'LE Aisedora'  — Semidouble white-pink-fuchsia with thumbprints and fantasy.  (Lebetskaya)

2. 'Wild Irish Rose'  — Semidouble pink pansy with wide green edge. Dark green pointed serrated leaves with white-tan-pink TL variegation and red back. #8568 (S. Sorano 1996)

3. 'Ozornye Volki' — Semidouble violet-blue wavy stars/streaked violet fantasy. Dark green, pointed. (Arkhipov)

4. 'Blue Tail Fly' — Semiminiature with single dark violet-blue folded wasps. Long petioles. Medium green bustle-back lollipop foliage.  (J. Dates)

5. 'Senk's Azalea Trail' — Miniature trailer with single to semidouble fuchsia wasps. Leaves dark green pointed longifolia with white and pink TL variegation and red back. #9845 (R. Follett/D. Senk 2008)

6. 'Shiawasee Trail'  — Trailer with double white and pale blue variable star with blue eye. Medium green diva foliage. #9023 (S. Sanders/R. Brenton 2001)

7. 'The Madam' — Trailer with single to semidouble pale pink bells with raspberry-rose tips. Leaves medium to dark green, quilted. #8755 (P. Harris 1998)

8. 'Dancin' Trail' —  Semiminiature trailer with double soft fuchsia stars. Leaves dark green and pointed with a red underside. (S. Sorano)

DIVA.

The Dog is fast

I have wanted to do this for quite a while--to find out just how fast my turf bullet is. Preliminary testing has been carried out by means of ground marks, cell phone video, and a makeshift yardstick. The distance was 40,90 m , which is almost exactly The Dog's height (~40 cm) times many.¹

The dog in question. The Dog.

Frame-by-frame analysis confirms that The Dog's body had passed the finish line in the 8th last frame of 00:04, i.e. his time was 00:03,77 plus a bit more due to camera error on my part. More videos will be taken to confirm the data.

It seems that The Dog indeed is fast: 10,85 m/s = 39,06 km/h.²

The Dog could, hypothetically, beat Usain Bolt by 0,41 seconds in a 100 m sprint.

The Dog runs like the wind.  The fresh breeze, to be exact.

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1. distance: 44.73 yards — dog height: 15 ¾^↩
2. 35.60 yd/s = 24.27 mil/h^↩

Introducing: the ugliest mallsai

Today, I have done the unthinkable. I have bought a Ficus microcarpa mallsai. The ugliest mallsai which, even at its very best, features shapeless, bulging rootstock and grafted little twigs in a chaotic bush unless it's a taperless thick spiral with sorry little grafted tufts for branches. Yet, I found an exceptionally ugly specimen.

Did you think I'd just splat it onto your poor unprepared retinas?

Two roots forking apart like they hate each other, distorting the totally dry pot; one barely-surviving graft with humble girth and quite a drastic bit of over-bend damage, next to no foliage elsewhere, a smattering of timid tiny buds...

Ugly, and mislabeled! Miniature F. benjamina this ain't.

So, here we have an informed impulse buy—both to see whether I couldn't make it a bit less ugly, and to get familiar with the species before I sooner or later procure a pricier specimen. I've been eyeing F. microcarpa mallsais for a good while, since my conditions should suit one.

This cost me a few coins, not bad for a learning project. It was a general store, but I was able to talk the already slashed price a deal lower since the plant was not only mostly dry and lifeless, but the best branch was, as mentioned, bent to hell.

Just wow.

For now I can do little more than try and promote good health and we'll see where we can get from there.

Short term: resuscitate and establish decent health. Attempt to save the over-bent branch. Keep scissors down.

Medium term: repot with proper medium, investigate possibilities of new grafts.

Long term: investigate possibility of creating a separate item from the thinner root by air-layering.

Serendipity

Hello world! This is Saby. Today I'd like to tell you about something special that I saw on Friday, 1st of April.

It was a lovely, bright spring morning with a blue sky, and early spring bird song: blue tit, chaffinch, and those blackbirds who risked to stay overwinter. I was on my way to my duties, and chance had it that I get off the bus one stop later than normally. Luckily it wasn't much farther than the earlier stop.

As I stepped into the bright pale sunlight I head something peculiar: a light rain was falling. The asphalt was dry, though, and the sky cloudless. I turned to look to my left: the tiny batch of young birches was bleeding diamonds.

It was too bright to get a proper photo and I'm afraid I don't know how to post the short video I filmed at a high enough quality.

Here's an artsy-fartsy photo instead.¹

Even though I've seen birches all my life, I haven't seen anything like this before. I tried to figure out what was causing these maybe two to three dozen trees to rain while others didn't--I looked up and every little shoot seemed to have a glistening drop at its tip, especially in the younger parts of the tree. Maybe some sort of rare insect attack of unusual notoriety?

If you have guesses (educated or not), please feel free to comment below.

Have a lovely April, and welcome to my blog.

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1. Also a pretty accurate depiction of how it feels to step from a dim bus to bright spring sunlight.^↩