More Lips NOID Pink
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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
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| She does have very lovely velvety indigo to her flowers and a good green . Still, a definite "what was I thinking?" purchase. |
AV Baby Culling
In anticipation of tons of named babies, I have culled my AV babies as follows:
* all untagged babies
* 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.
