Silk Jasmine

Sunday! Gardening! Plants! Woo!

Avocado

At the top, you can see the tiny “silk jasmine” (or, miniature orange jasmine, murraya exotica) which I picked up for 105yen at the Daiso the other day because it was cute.  It will apparently bloom and smell strongly, eventually.  Internet says it’s good for bonsai making, but I don’t really think I’m patient or stable enough to be embarking on bonsai silliness.  I’d like to one day though.

Baby Snake Plant

Next up, my avocado is doing well… I think!  Just recently it’s started getting this brown stuff on its stem.  Can I assume it’s “bark” or lack of a better word? Or is it moments away from imploding in a gooey mess of blech?   I’m also not quite sure what this dealie at the top is. It’s not a new group of leaves, or if it is, it doesn’t look like it.  Can’t be a blossom, can it?

Behold! My snake plant had a baby ^_^.  That side of the pot was turned to the wall this week, so it was getting sun from the side, but I couldn’t see anything. Turned it today and was like !!! HELLO TO U!  Maybe I’m not so bad at taking care of plants. Haven’t killed the snake plant yet!

Aloe Aristata

But, on the other hand, maybe I am utter shite.  Here’s my aloe aristata. You’ll remember that my aloe nobilis self-destructed with rot from the inside out a while back.  Now my aristata has brown at the base of her leaves.  YES, the soil is moist there, because I watered her today, but I hadn’t watered her in bleeding weeks, and the soil was utterly utterly dry, so how the hell is it rotting?

Jade Plant

And now back to my propagation attempts.  My christmas cactus cuttings are still rooting in water, and i’ll leave them there a while longer, until they have a goodish root system.  This is my jade plant cutting, which i think, FINALLY, AT LONG LAST, may be rooting. Those look like tiny roots, don’t they?

Of course, who knows how cold my apartment will get this winter, so who knows if any of these things will survive D:. We’ll see, I guess.

Aloe Aristata

Sunday Sunday Sunday! Houseplants go!

Cycad: New Growth?

I suppose now that it’s getting on autumn and the temps are cooler and the days are shorter, even houseplants are gonna stop growing a bit, etc.  I suppose I shouldn’t expect too much in the way of progress.  Nothing’s dying, so that’s cool!

I don’t know much about cycads / sago palms.  My cycad, which is now completely mealybug free, doesn’t appear to be growing. Or maybe it is, I don’t know!  If a cycad dies, does it very CLEARLY die? Or does it just look healthy until the end of time, even though it’s friggin’ dead? I dunno. At any rate, it still looks fine, and there may or may not be new growth.

A. Nobilis Cuttings

The avocado is still growing well, too!  Lots of new leaves!

My aloe nobilis cuttings are kickin’ around and not really changing, but I think that’s okay. They tend to take forever, so it should be okay.  My jade leaf is doing the same dealio, but I dunno, it may be fine.

Spider Plant

Finally, I’ve gotten around to transplanting my spider plant out of it’s little water bath into hydroculture.  Got a little foofy and added some coloured beads for fun, but whatever.  Also have it in a cute little jar from the Daiso, with leaves and ladybugs on it. ^_^  I hope it does well~

How about you? How are your houseplants doing?  What plants do you keep? What do you want to try keeping?

2009-10-11 Spider Plant

After last week’s mother-of-all TL;DR posts, this week’s Gardening Sunday is pretty low-key, with not a lot to talk about.

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2009-10-04 Spider Plant

I live in a small apartment.  It’s not a big place by any means, but it’s big enough for me. The problem is, it’s a wee bit sterile. I can’t hang anything, because I can’t put any holes in the wall, and the horrible textured wallpaper that Japan loves so much makes BluTak a reckless proposition.  So what could I do to bring some life and character into the apartment?

Houseplants.

I decided that I’d also try to chronicle my houseplant experience here, so that what I learn can be a resource for other people hoping to keep plants in their tiny apartment. Also, while there are a lot of apartment gardening resources for America in English, and they have useful, universally applicable information, for some expats, an English resource for gardening in Japan would be helpful.  “What’s this plant called?” “I need this, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it’s called, or a brand name to reference, in Japan! HELP!”

So yeah, welcome to Gardening Sunday. This week: Meet the Plants.

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